If you don't really agree with software patents this measure doesn't work well...

I doubt software patents contribute much to the totals, or would change the rankings if left out. Same for business method patents.

And you might disagree with patents entirely but still see them as correlated with a certain type of intelligent opportunism.

Pretty sure Idaho owes its ranking to a few key corporate research groups in patent-heavy fields -- HP, Micron, ?

I think "cashiers who can make change without a cash register" would be a better measure.

A lot of things would be a better measure.

For those that want to experiment with the KML file you can download it at http://www.sharcmedia.com/kml/PatentsPerMillion2.kml

Regarding a finer grained heat map it would be cool, but I couldn't find any finer grained data (eg. by US Postcode) on the USPTO site.

It'd be much better if they de-aggregated this information over the surface to create a true 'heat map'. If they did this, you'd probably see true hotspots of patent innovation which I'll bet correspond nicely to startup hubs.

This would be a lot better if the colors varied continuously.

Yes, the graphic could use some help from http://www.colorbrewer.org/.

nice, a patent troll ranking for the US