Brillant people are more prone to be independent thinkers, because they have experienced being smarter than others and thus having to think for themselves..

The aftermath of Vista is precisely when he should have resigned. CEOs of other tech companies have resigned for lesser debacles.

The GP included a direct link to the paper, and you blindly state that it's not out!? I know it's fashionable to comment fast and defend the almighty Apple, but you might try more reading comprehension first.

The quote from the paper is on page 566 (remember this paper forms part of a greater work, and therefore the page numbers are a little strange) just above Figure 9. (I do note that the quote above is missing a space between "our" and "app", but that's no excuse for not finding it).

Simple solution: abolish sales taxes. So easy!

It affects the male "valve" for peeing and can be benign although it is getting in the way after some years.

.. of a lower incidence of prostrate cancer in anyone drinking more of anything, including coffee? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23702886

I know the US patent office has given up on this, but they are supposed to not grant obvious patents, and doing anything on pc/internet/touchpad that has been done on paper/pc/touchscreen(yes, they existed before Apple) before most of the time sounds pretty obvious, especially when you consider that patents are usually formulated in legal language designed to stake a claim as broad as possible and as devoid of technical information as legal.

On one hand, if you read claim 1 (the base claim), Apple actually spent effort on designing their own jack, which apparently has a special connector that creates a second circuit that is used for detection. On the other hand, the technical contribution seems to be a bit on the easy side, considering that the actual detecting circuit in figure 3 shows a circuit that is probably obvious to anyone schooled in designing circuits, though not to me.

As you can read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patentability
the US patent office pretends that one of the conditions for granting a US patent is non-obviousness.

Considering that it is very unlikely that someone swiping a finger across a touchscreen achieves a movement that is 100% horizontal and 0% vertical, it is obvious that any solution of the problem would tolerate a certain amount of vertical movement, and this is what that patent claim is about.

US american companies are promoting politicians with a kindergarten understanding of science, so that they can profit from that bullshit:
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/13/07/12/1645228/google-raises-campaign-funds-for-climate-change-denier

Also, the invention of input gestures is not as novel as you seem to believe, because the patent was filed 2008, while for example the video game Black and White had gestures in 2001. Okay, it was mouse gestures, but there is no big difference to a touch screen regarding movement.

.. because you forgot us slashdotters.

The NSA scandal has been so earth-shattering with regards to raising awareness of government surveillance that concerns over civil liberties now outweigh concerns over protecting the country. The shift is across party lines as well. It's no wonder politicians of either party have been decrying a rising trend of libertarianism. Whether or not it's accurate to classify today's anti-government fears as such, the fact that the U.S. has become the kind of country to seek asylum from is staggeringly insane. The "trust us" defense isn't good enough.

If you mean that their disinterest in HD in 2006 didn't hurt them, I agree with regard to the first few years of the Wii's life, but its lack of power eventually caught up with them when cross-platform developers left the Wii. Today, the Wii U isn't selling because it doesn't have much first-party software available to showcase the system. Miyamoto acknowledged that this is the result of underestimating the scale of labor required for HD development and subsequently having to delay their software releases (another area where it's behind is in providing competitive online services). The rest of the industry went through this transition this seven years ago, and Nintendo was able to ignore it at the time because of the money they were making.

Sorry, was meant as a reply to:

"My (48-year old Thai) girlfriend starts work at 6am and gets off at 6pm. She insists that means she works thirteen hours a day. It is amazing how incredibly dumb the average person is. "

Evidently I'm too dumb to follow a thread on slashdot.

Come on, it is just a off-by-one error, which is common even in software written by above-average-smarts-persons.

And it is definitely smarter to write a bill for one hour of work when you worked from 6am to 6am than to go for no compensation.

Nintendo dragged its feet in the move to HD and is paying the price. They underestimated the time and money expense, and now their first-party releases are behind. On top of that, there's barely been any marketing for the Wii U, which has a name that implies it's an accessory for the Wii rather than a new console. The console's tablet controller doesn't offer anything that people's existing smartphones and iPads can't do better. It was likely released in reaction to the iPad (Nintendo stated in 2010 that Apple is their biggest threat). With the lack of hardware power and user base, there's nothing with which to court third-party developers, who are focused instead on the more powerful consoles coming out later this year.

Nintendo's stronghold remains handheld gaming. However, even that is under threat from smartphones. On top of what Android already supports, iOS 7 will ship with native physical controller APIs, and Apple is working with hardware manufacturers to release official attachments and wireless controllers. While the 3DS certainly won't disappear, it will be interesting to watch how well it fares among adult gamers when physical controllers become commonplace in the iPhone accessory aisle.