"Power laces! Alright!"

[DGoddessChardonnay]

I hope those comes in a men's size 13 . . . my brother has always had trouble with tying shoelaces and still does at 36.

He'd love these . . . so would Mom and I, as we're both having trouble at times bending down to tie his shoes whenever we're out with him.

[wolfie]

It's not surprising that they'd use BTTF as a model. After all, it's already in the pop-culture awareness. My question is can this be considered prior art, and invalidate the patent . (I also don't see the point. Why not just use the elastic curly laces?)

Wouldn't surprise me. After all (can't remember where I saw it), a Donald Duck comic book was cited as prior art when a patent on a method of refloating sunken wrecks was invalidated. The patent called for filling the wreck with small balls filled with air - and the comic book had used ping-pong balls to re-float a wreck.

[CaptainJaneway]

They tried that on mythbusters. It actually worked. I forgot how many ping pong balls they used but it was a lot.

[lordlundar]

It was in the range of 27,000 to raise it, which was just over half of the 50,000 they expected to need. The operation would have been perfect if a federally protected otter didn't get a hold of one and start playing with it.