Comment by jaydles

The USPTO explicitly asked us to set up this site to help get the public involved in getting prior art to the examiners. (Press release:http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp.) So, while it's entirely possible that the examiner might have eventually found this without us, which is far from certain, it seems reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site. Which means that even if you assume they would have found it without help - again, questionable, given the number of weak patents out there - at a minimum, we probably saved them a lot of time, which frees up more resources to look for prior art on the next crappy patent. And that reduces the odds that the clock runs out without them finding any, which leads to a lousy issuance.