This is an awesome project. I've signed up and will see what I can do to help shoot down patents!
There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by the example given:
> This patent was, typically, obfuscated, and it used terms like “pixel density” for something that every other programmer in the world would call “resolution,” either accidentally (because Microsoft’s lawyers were not programmers), or, more likely, because the obfuscation makes it that much harder to search.
The patent uses "pixel density" to refer to the physical size of the pixels on a display. This is a fairly common term, with over five million results in a Google search. I've used the same phrase myself for over 10 years with the same meaning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density
"Pixels per centimeter (ppcm), Pixels per inch (PPI) or pixel density is a measurement of the resolution of devices in various contexts: typically computer displays, image scanners, and digital camera image sensors."
Of course here we can see where the terms get a bit confusing: "...pixel density is a measurement of the resolution..."
But display resolution these days usually refers to the number of pixels, not their physical size:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution
"The display resolution of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed."
Advertisements and spec sheets almost always use "resolution" this way, for example the MacBook Pro specs on Apple's site:
"Supported resolutions: 1440 by 900 (native), 1280 by 800, 1152 by 720, ..."
Forgive me if this seems like nitpicking, and I completely agree with Joel's point here: patents often do use unusual terminology to obfuscate what they're talking about.
This just isn't a case of that. The patent is using the correct term, and it even does a very good job of explaining what it means:
> A particular characteristic of display components that may affect presentations rendered thereupon is the pixel density of the display component, such as a pixels-per-centimeter measurement. It may be appreciated that such characteristics may be independent of the size of the display component (e.g., two display components of the same size may present different pixel densities; conversely, two display components of different sizes may present the same pixel density) and/or the pixel dimensions of the display component (e.g., two display components displaying a presentation with a particular pixel dimensions may do so with different physical sizes).