Patent law changes

I've been working on some patent claims recently (long story), so this article caught my eye. Seems there's some in Washington who want to reform US patent law to match more closely the world standard of "first to file" rather than "first to invent." While I can see where this would reduce paperwork and to some extent the burden on the US Patent and Trademark Office, I think that the better way to improve the operation of the USPTO is actually just to fund it better, as some cited in the article argue. A lot of the legal problems we face now with regard to patents stem from basically poor, overly-broad patents. Of course, another way to improve things would be to get rid of software patents, but that isn't very likely for now.