Quote:
Originally Posted by
MacBook Pro 
Please link video evidence of Al Gore "saying he invented the Internet."
Considering Apple holds several patents regarding multi-touch user interfaces, an effective argument could be made that Apple did, in fact, invent multi-touch. Furthermore, as Apple purchased FingerWorks led by John Elias and Wayne Westerman. Wayne Westerman wrote his PhD thesis about "Hand Tracking, Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface" in 1999 with John Elias as his advisor. We can thusly conclude that Apple has at least as much claim to inventing the multi-touch user interface as any company and is inarguably the first company to market and distribute successful products that feature multi-touch user interface as a marquee feature.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/06/22/broad_multitouch_patent_granted_to_apple_seen_as_huge_blow_to_rivals.html
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/27/apple_granted_another_key_multitouch_patent.html
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf
Please provide evidence that "Apple have turned into what they wore against in the past." What did Apple swear against? What has Apple done that violates what you suggest they have sworn against.
If you came into my house and stole my work then marketed that effort as your own you bet your @$$ I would "go thermonuclear war" on you. If anyone suggests that they wouldn't then they don't understand the value of ideas.
I will touch base on this when I have more time but FingerWorks did not even invent multi-touch and multi touch was in other projects way before iPhone...
A breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch “Digital Desk”, which supported multi-finger and pinching motions.[7][8]
Various companies expanded upon these inventions in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The company Fingerworks developed various multi-touch technologies between 1999 and 2005, including Touchstream keyboards and the iGesture Pad. Several studies of this technology were published in the early 2000s by Alan Hedge, professor of human factors and ergonomics at Cornell University.[9][10][11]Apple acquired Fingerworks and its multi-touch technology in 2005. Mainstream exposure to multi-touch technology occurred in 2007 when the iPhone gained popularity, with Apple stating they 'invented multi touch' as part of the iPhone announcement,[12] however both the function and the term predate the announcement or patent requests, except for such area of application as capacitive mobile screens, which did not exist before Fingerworks/Apple's technology (Apple filed patents for in 2005-2007 and was awarded with in 2009-2010). Publication and demonstration using the term Multi-touch by Jefferson Y. Han in 2005 predates these,[13] but Apple did give multi-touch wider exposure through its association with their new product and were the first to introduce multi-touch on a mobile device.[14] Microsoft's table-top touch platform Microsoft Surface, which started development in 2001, interacts with both the users touch and their electronic devices. Similarly, in 2001, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) began development of a multi-touch, multi-user system called DiamondTouch, also based on capacitance but able to differentiate between multiple simultaneous users (or rather, the chairs in which each user is seated or the floorpad the user is standing on); the Diamondtouch became a commercial product in 2008.
Small-scale touch devices are rapidly becoming commonplace, with the number of touch screen telephones expected to increase from 200,000 shipped in 2006 to 21 million in 2012.[15]
Some of the first devices to support multi-touch were:
Apple by way of buying Fingerworks was the first company to bring a non stylus multi-touch screen to a mobile device this I give you but that is a FAR stretch from saying that Apple invented Multi-Touch.
I have nothing "against" Apple other than their tactics they are reminiscent of MicroSoft suing Apple at every corner
Companies build on the ideas of others ..... One person invents something then another comes along and improves it that is the way it is "supposed" to work but the definition and spirit behind a patent has changed drastically:
A patent is simply a license to sue. A patent grants its owner the right to stop others from "infringing" the patent by making, selling, or using the claimed invention without permission. Coverage does not rely on the accused infringer having copied or derived a product from what was patented - i.e., someone who thought the same thing up independently can still be an infringer. Conversely, someone who copies the basic idea behind a patented product but who comes up with another way of providing the end user with the same benefit is NOT necessarily an infringer. Patents generally only cover what they claim, and every patent is a challenge to other clever people to figure out a different, non-infringing, way of reaching the same goal.
To me the following is ridiculous
-----------Between January 2008 and May 2010, Apple Inc. filed more than 350 cases with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office (USPTO) alone, most in opposition to or taking exception to others' use of the terms 'apple', 'pod', and 'safari': those cases include sellers of apples (the fruit), as well as many others' less unassuming use of the term 'apple'.
---------Whether the next version of the Apple's best-selling smartphone will be called the iPhone 5 or not, the company apparently covets the domain based on that name.
In a complaint filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Apple is challenging the ownership of the iphone5.comdomain name, which is currently used to host a forum for Apple enthusiasts to speculate about the next iPhone.
According to the directory for domain name ownership, Whois, the owner of the iphone5 domain wishes to keep her or his identity private, but the owner's mailing address is a post office box in Fortitude Valley, Queensland, Australia.
Other iphone5 domains listed with Whois include iphone5.net, .org, .biz, .info and .us. Those domains are either not very active or dead ends. None have been challenged by Apple yet, but that's not unusual. In the past, Apple has mostly reserved its challenges to dot-com domains.
Although Apple has paid for some domain names in the past, it recently has resorted to the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) to latch onto domain names that violate its trademarks. Those names include iphone.com, ipods.com. wwwitunes.com, appleosxlion.com, and applefans.com.
--- I will touch base on anything missed later, and again do not think I am an Apple product hater. Again the goal of a company is to become successful and the road to get there is ugly and hard in most cases. I don't like Apple's tactics and it is my opinion that Apple plays dirty as Microsoft did back in the 80's and 90's .. going back in time this is vaguely reminiscent the "controversial" Apple improving on the XeroxPARC GUI.
