offertory

How, precisely, would you have determined that an online donation to a charity usinga web site in 1995 would violate a patent for an electronic offertory box written and granted before the web existed?

If you discovered the clergy or elders in your church wanted a supply of something so badly that they secretly used your tithe or offertory to fund a warlord who then enslaved people to acquire it for them, how would you feel?

As they were found in the vicinity of a temple precinct, and are in an idiopathic script (towards the end of the article they note that small groups of scribes may have had their own local cultivar of script), they’re likely either ritual/offertory, or possibly more mundane - scribes learning to write with set pieces they know orally by rote.

(Archimedes was asked by the king of Syracuse to detect whether a goldsmith had been adding baser metals to an offertory gold crown.) And both involve famous scientists bending the rules of evidence and procedure to catch a thief – in Archimedes' case, the modern consensus is that simple water displacement would not be sufficient to distinguish pure gold from a gold/silver alloy.

Basic improvisation is a skill expected of every organist: this morning I needed to “cover the action” when the offertory hymn didn’t last as long as the offertory itself.

I was part of litigation in the 1990s where some guy had a patent on an “electronic offertory box” for use in churches.

There literally was no way for me to have found the patent, reviewed it, and decided "yeah, an electronic offertory box is absolutely the inspiration for accepting a credit card payment online directed to a charity, and I'm going to steal that sucker".

Basic improvisation is a skill expected of every organist: this morning I needed to “cover the action” when the offertory hymn didn’t last as long as the offertory itself.

I was part of litigation in the 1990s where some guy had a patent on an “electronic offertory box” for use in churches.

There literally was no way for me to have found the patent, reviewed it, and decided "yeah, an electronic offertory box is absolutely the inspiration for accepting a credit card payment online directed to a charity, and I'm going to steal that sucker".