> The other day my 5th mini-mouse in a year quit,
> the left-click button went, all of them were cheapies
> with parts from China.

Good luck in finding even an expensive mouse without parts from China :-)

> I'd go look up that project where a guy rigged the
> mouse sensor to work as a camera, (they're sort of
> low resolution at 18x18).

I was thinking the same about using the camera in my Wii remote to actually 
look at stuff (it currently just detects the position of a bank of LEDs 
above the TV).  It must be higher resolution than 18x18 because there are 8 
or 10 LEDs and it can detect position and orientation pretty accurately. 
I'm sure someone has had the idea already...

> So I googled looking to see if anyone had
> actually managed to do that yet, and what pops up?
> The Chineese mouse chip manufacturer has patented
> the idea, how is that even legal? It wasn't their idea,

How do you know it wasn't their idea?  If you have found someone else who 
filed a patent before them, then I'll let you off :-)

> they didn't invent barcodes, it's just a camera, they
> haven't even actually built a working one, and they're
> looking to get over on some mouse maker putting a
> barcode reader in a mouse.

Well to be fair, it seems like they invented a cheap and efficient way of 
detecting position on a surface using a (very) low resolution camera.  If 
they invent a way to adapt that to reading barcodes, then that seems like 
something patentable to me...  It's probably got some advantages over 
traditional bar-code readers.  I'm pretty sure the ones you see in 
supermarkets are/were covered by a load of patents - it seems like quite a 
profitable industry in the eyes of supermarkets etc.

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