Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even then, I could spend the rest of my life on digging holes and refilling them. I might have invested countless hours in such effort, but that does not grant it any inherent value.
Did Ford try to infringe on your patent for hole digging?
The value of a patent is not in whether it is infringed, but whether it is both novel and non-obvious. Many software patents are neither, as evidenced by the recent spate of lawsuits over patents that largely amount to "regular expressions, but on a PHONE!!111."