It will be interesting to see how and when exactly these technologies and Microsoft's "Surface" system come into conflict ( either in or out of court ). I think the 1998 $150,000,000 deal between M$ and Apple has expired by now.

The MS deal was for five years. At the time, MS acquired 5% stake in Apple, which it also sold long ago (and must be kicking itself by now).

As for the 'big-a** table' (a.k.a. Surface), it will be very interesting to observe Apple's legal actions regarding this device.

Now can you get Dell to come up with anything like this? Truthfully, they used to do about 5 years ago.

Now the most highly paid upper and middle management is trolling the web sites of china looking for promising idea's to jump at them - literally.
Well now they no longer have engineers and techs to come up with neat inventions.

Now it is like " Asus, please help us? Give us few neat idea's of yours."

Or it is like "Quanta, do you have anything neat we can use. We will pay you a premium for exclusive use of it for three months - Hopefully that highly paid good for nothing middle management can come up with a pricing scheme that will make money for Dell. Or may be the stock will tank below a dime.

Oh Dell you are so lost. What a mess you made of a good Company by hiring the left overs middle managers of IBM and everyone else.

Didn't Nokia do this 2 weeks ago?
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/11/21/nokia.gesture.phone.patent/

Anyone else reminded of the radio in Hitchhiker's Guide? "...now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme."

From the article:
Apple has developed technology that would let an iPhone or similar device be controlled by hovering fingers nearby rather than just touches alone, a new US patent filing shows.

Amazing. I didn't realize that filing a patent meant that they actually have developed the technology. I think it should have read "designed a technology"

As for Surface, I'm not sure what the lawyers for either side could argue. The whole touch-screen isn't owned by Apple or MS, just what you do with it. And at that point you get into that murky concept of "software patents".

And then it all depends on who developed (excuse me, designed) what first...

I haven't fully read the actual patent text, but this technology was thought (I understand patented as well) by Analog Devices in a joint venture with a company called Ethertouch back a few years ago, and its application to mobile devices, game consoles and such. If fact capacitive sensing devices were designed. The invention does not require actual touch indeed.