With a new patent issued this week, Facebook is now able to give lenders access to information about who is in your social circle, and when you apply for a loan the lender will look at your Facebook friends’ credit ratings to determine whether or not to give you a loan! That’s right, approval for your loan will be based on your Facebook friends’ credit worthiness.

Taking a cue from cats, who generally always land on their feet, or perhaps from buttered bread always falling buttered side down, Apple has been awarded a patent for making your iPhone, iPod, or iPad always fall glass side up. Or, as Apple’s patent describes it, “a method of protecting a vulnerable area of an electronic device during freefall.”

Facebook has filed a patent for a predictive method of determining (inferring) the income of each of their users, to allow their advertisers to target you. To do this, they are mining your information – the amount of which is staggering (their words right in the patent application!) – incuding what you post in your timeline.

Back in 2000, Thomas L. DiStefano, III, of Boca Raton, Florida, filed a patent for a “Method For Managing Bulk E-Mail Distribution”, in which the ‘invention’ was described as a method in which if not all email in an email run was delivered the first time, the sender would repeatedly send the email to the undelivered addresses, again and again, until all of the email was eventually delivered. In 2007, DiStefano’s company, Perfect Web Technologies, sued InfoUSA, for patent infringement. InfoUSA is the parent company to such email entities as YesMail, who famously sued anti-spam blacklist MAPS for calling them a spammer, and who in 2006 paid a $50,000 fine to the Feds for violations of the CAN-SPAM Federal anti-spam law.