Idiotic Patent

I thought I had seen some very useless patents before, but this one really takes the cake. Someone applied to patent the linked list in 2002, and it was awarded in 2006. For non-geeks, a linked list is one of the simplest data structures that computer science students learn. A class in data structures is one of the first classes CS students take. Linked lists are the very first thing you learn about. As you can see from the WikiPedia page, they were first developed in the '50s. So why on earth is someone getting a patent for "inventing" a variation of it 50 years later?!? I've read through the text of the patent, and the variation is pretty trivial. This is why we geeks like to scream for patent reform...