Touch !=Multi-touch.

When the Slashdot crowd can't make the distinction, what chance does Joe Consumer?

The difference between a touchscreen and multitouch screen is what make the iPhone's (once-)unique method of implementing its OS features possible.

You may think that "touch is touch is touch, it's all the same" (Not YOU in particular, as I don't know you or what you think, but you the straw-man I'm railing against), but a swipe gesture with a finger is not the same as a swipe gesture with a stylus, no matter what your Slashdot reading self may think.

Because of the iPhone, the method of interacting with the feature-set of one's smartphone has changed on all phones.

Apple's total method has defined the rules of multi-touch Phone UI, and Apple defined having a multi-touch capable screen as what it is to BE a "touch screen phone".

If Joe Consumer hears "touch-screen", it better do what the iPhone's screen does.

Excellent question.

Answer: That one hits too close to home for me to use.

I'm not black, but I grew up in the racist south. It stings. I didn't type it because I didn't want to offend me.

Apparently, I'm either thoughtless or callous enough to not care if I offended others - or worse, I fell victim to the /. mindset that this is an all_U.S._all_white_all_male group.

Mea Culpa. I am an assface.

A) Because of the outsourcing of tech jobs to India, the "cheaper Indian tech worker" is a stereotype - especially in tech circles.

B) Haji is a racial epithet for all people with brown skin or of non-Christian belief. It is a blanket term for "the other" or "them", and is used by US military personnel in Iraq like "gook" was used in Vietnam, "Kraut" in Germany, and the way the "N word" is used in the United States by rednecks: As a way to dehumanize and demoralize.

I will assume you were ignorant of this second fact, but have a hard time believing you didn't know the first.

Manufacturing a fictional cheaper coder named Haji for the sake of discussion may not have been willfully bigoted, but to claim that your fictional Haji was anything other than a person with brown skin insults the intelligence of everyone reading this thread.

Of one thing you are correct: Nationalism and Racism are not (strictly speaking) the same thing. Xenophobia has many shades, but they all divide the world into "us" and "them".

I don't believe there was any malice in your choice of names. If only you said "If Bob next door can write a app and sell it for $1.99 that you want to write and sell for $29.99...", but you didn't. You used a stereotype and an epithet to create a "them" to compare someone to and got called out on it.

Man up and move on. Don't dig any deeper.

Patents are for IMPLEMENTATIONS of ideas, not for ideas themselves.

How Apple's liquid-cool system is unique from other liquid-cool systems is the basis of the patent.

They are not claiming to have invented the idea of using liquid to cool a laptop nor are they somehow claiming "dibs" on liquid cooling.

By filing this patent application, they are attempting to prevent other hardware builders from tearing down a liquid-cooled MacBook Pro, slapping themselves in the forehead, changing their design to mimic Apple's way of doing it, then claiming the design is "obvious" while never explaining why they themselves didn't do it that way in the first place.

The liquid-cooled G5 is a relative rarity. How long was it on the market, anyway? It seems that it was available in that sweet spot between "too many to replace as they fail" and "enough real-world failure data to put us years ahead of anyone else". Was Apple using their customers as a beta test group for liquid cooling?

If something is happening in my computer that causes it to physically come apart as it sits on my lap, a tablespoon of liquid nitrogen will be the LEAST of my worries.