To be fair, Gelernter wrote several books about these ideas, founded a software company based on them, and tried to market several different desktop software packages using the ideas in the mid/late 90s. He's also a professor of computer science at Yale, and invented a bunch of concepts (in the same books) that were inspirations for JavaSpaces and Jini. He's not a wackadoo in some garage in Texas.

My point is, it's terrifically unfair to characterize Gelernter as a patent troll. He's been a prolific contributor to computer science, and (speaking as someone who was a fan of the books that first popularized the ideas in question), a lot of Apple's UI designs today really are fantastically similar to what Gelernter was dreaming up 20+ years ago. The Time Machine UI, in particular, was so much like the lifestreams concept that I originally thought that Apple had hired him to do the design.

There are situations where ideas seem obvious in retrospect, but completely out of left-field at the time of their conception. These ideas weren't even in the ballpark when Gelernter first started publishing them.