The only winner out of this is Nokia who paid for the hotels and flights home of those bloggers. http://twitter.com/clintonjeff/status/242358009249026049

One interesting point is he brought up Einstein's invention of relativity. Notice that in the scientific community, humanity has been building upon previous work for centuries with no copyright or patent protection, and nothing more than honor, citation, and shame against plagiarists.

The fundamental defense made by many is that without patent protection for software, people would not put much effort into innovating.

1) If you look at science, open source, fashion, food, and other areas where humans continually build on culture, you see plenty of continued innovation without insane legal protection.

2) The amount of effort pales in comparison to the monopoly granted. You could make the argument for say, pharmaceuticals, that if it takes 10 years from lab through human trials and hundreds of millions of dollars, that a 2-decade long protection period might be needed. But there is no FDA for software, and Apple actually spends far less on R&D than other companies, and with $100 billion in the bank, you can't claim that haven't gotten an incredibly good return in their investment.

Therefore, it is insane to grant 20 year protection to Apple for stuff like pinch gestures. 2 years maybe. But 20? It's absurd.

Alternatively, you can use a database such as PostgreSQL, which stores metadata about tables in other tables, allowing you to not only add a column without locking the table but do so as part of a transaction with other changes that can all be rolled back atomically on failure.

PostgreSQL also supports concurrent index creation, so if you realize later you need an index on your amazingly large table you can have it built in the background while you are still using the table. (Managing indexes were another locking issue mentioned in the article.)