To me, the scariest part was:

U.S. solicitor general, which represents the federal government, filed a brief in support of i4i, saying that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office should not be second-guessed by a jury.

The Patent and Trademark Office absolutely should be second-guessed by a jury. Judges and juries are the only sanity-check the whole system has at this point!

I've worked on problems that are famously profound (cancer research!) and problems that people think are stupid, trivial, and ephemeral. I've also worked for big, famous institutions, and I've worked for tiny companies.

And I caution everyone not to fall into the mental trap of overvaluing mass at the expense of momentum. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, it looked kind of silly. And, actually, it has looked kind of silly ever since. But make no mistake: The invention of the web is probably a more important human advance than anything else that has happened in the last twenty years. It has probably already saved more years of human life than the last twenty years of cancer research, for example.

A lot of the problems that people think are important and profound are intractable. Intractable problems don't go away, because they don't get solved. They are around for the long haul. There's time to build institutions around them, to build popular awareness of them, to get really good at marketing them. When someone claims to be working on a Very Important Intractable Problem everyone knows they are Smart.

Whereas many world-changing practical inventions are never profound. They are always either silly or boring. They start off silly. When you first invent the mobile radio people laugh at you, because you are a ham radio geek and you carry around some big ugly boxes in a van. Then mobile radios become frivolous things carried only by the CEOs in the movie Wall Street. Then they become frivolous things carried only by hipsters. Then they become frivolous things carried only by salarymen. Then they become frivolous things carried by the young. And then... they become ubiquitous, no big deal, boring. In a handful of decades we are going to equip everyone in the world with a goddamn tricorder and society is barely going to consciously notice.

That is a technology with momentum. Yeah, nobody takes mobiles seriously. They're disposable, and they never work as well as you think they should, and they're used for frivolous purposes like having fun and raising children and reading tedious emails from your boss. But that doesn't mean they aren't important.

Hrm. Dan Goodin. I recognize that name. This is the same author who published an article on The Register with the title "Skype bug gives attackers root access to Mac OS X", which was factually incorrect. He corrected the headline after much hoopla, but it strikes me that Mr. Goodin is a professional link-baiter.

The title has it backwards. Isn't WiFi sync a fairly obvious feature that Apple has likely had in the works for quite some time?

Based on what I've read, this sync app was only possible because of some low-level sync frameworks that were already present in iOS. The feature wasn't ready by Apple Standards, but Apple didn't want a poor implementation of what should be a system-level feature in the wild. One could argue that the rejection of his app was an act of protecting the user experience. This is something Apple does regularly. If you don't want the protection, you should head over to another platform.

Acting shocked at any of these facts just shows that you haven't been paying attention.