Honestly, good on them. This mobile patent crap is so ludicrous and out of hand. I'm glad that even though Google has to play by the same stupid rules as everyone else, at least they get the chance to remind everyone "you know this is a big joke right?" on occasion.

Christ, imagine how many jobs all of these patent cold war billions represent. Imagine how much time and energy is going into feeding a machine whose main outcome is stifling creativity and competition.

A lot of the time businesses don't know how to optimize certain things, and frequently prefer to choose big, round numbers. The only difference between them and Google is that regular businesses choose numbers that are simple to express in the decimal system and Google chooses numbers that are low-complexity in other ways, like the the square root of two or 1024.

1023 = 2^10 - 1. It would have taken all the 10 fingers.