lets be patent about this(pun intended), apple would patent the sun if they could, they are total idiots and the US patent office is a lackey to overpowered corporate interest, it should not be possible to patent hand movements interacting with screens ? its ridiculous, this is limiting human evolution not enhancing it.

Does the US Patent office grant patents regardless of prior art ? Can anyone post the minority report in 2002 let alone earlier prior art demonstrating things, apple seem to patent freely because of sheer money and legal resource, come up with a patent that just patents all the hand movements shown in said film or does publicly known prior art not count for anything against such patents, lets face it pinch to zoom or rotate, this principle must have been demonstrated many times prior to this patent being applied for by apple in various art forms, yet apple are now claiming they invented something novel enough to warrant patenting it, this is ridiculous, same with the patent for an array of icons in a grid ?!?!?! Apple are beginning to suck harder than a medal winning prostitute. It’s also a further and clear demonstration that legal power and money is what the patent office responds to it is not a system that is open to all.

imagine if a company tried to patent, moving a mouse up and left as a user gesture, and barred all other companies from using it in their product, that effectively is what pinch to zoom and two finger rotate are, their user interactions, you should not be able to patent user interactions like this, what apple are trying to do here is limit the available screen interactions of users on devices other than apple, so that if an android person places their two fingers on a screen it does nothing. yeah that sounds like limiting human evolution to me if ever I heard of it.

likewise any sense would tell you a grid array of icons on a screen should not any longer be patentable.

Screw Apple
Screw the US patent office which are making themselves look farcical, by agreeing to such moronic patents, sooner or later the US patent office is going to cause the whole patent system globally to collapse, whereby everyone will just ignore each others patents completely, embargo’s no doubt ensuing. to be honest I think we should abandon patent and operate on a first to market and popularise principle ? It would work just as well once company’s got used to the idea. As at the moment we are allowing corporations the right to all ideas versus the individual just on the basis of power and money alone.

Screw the system which is quite obviously biased in favour of US corporations who have inordinate amounts of time and money to spend on lawyers and litigation

Lets get back to a system that prizes the pace of human and not corporations.

Yep sounds like Apple, who apparently spend more on patents than R&D ? why dont we copyright scaling Os’s after all nobodys patented that before ? and before you accuse me of being a hater, I’ve been using apple since the Apple II. Bitmap icons at 1024 x 1024 seems highly expensive file size wise, I think I’d prefer vectors at that size, dependant of course on which has the smaller file size, no doubt apple won’t be efficient about it. But Apple dont mind making your hardware unnecessarily redundant, ((take my early intel Quad core Mac pro not running ML) which I can get to boot ML if I hack it with chameleon ?)). We were promised resolution independence two os’s ago, I’ll believe it when I see it. If the menu bar doesn’t scale, and things dont scale harmoniously together it wont cut the mustard for me. Im beginning to lose faith that they can ever fix all the bugs in OS X. Lion and Mountain Lion were both nighmare upgrades for someone who does Tech support for a living & caused me immense grief in collaborative work environments, OS X is turning into the OS where all the fixes are either in the command line, arcane hidden preferences or out of the users control. I think they need to start afresh with a new hardcore GUI based operating system, its feeling too obviously like unix re-skinned.