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

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.

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.

Climate change also affects rotational speed, because it would move water in the form of ice on mountaintops down to sea level.

And strangely enough, it has 6*6*6 customer reviews right now ..

They are there every day, either the catfish are not as dangerous as the video makes them out to be, or I don't know.

You don't give toys to soldiers just to make them win their battles, but also to raise their morale and make them move into dangerous areas.

What I really wonder about is the reason that the pigeons don't move elsewhere.

Is hygiene so important for them?
Have they become oblivious to dangers by constantly exposing themselves to them (just look how close they come to humans in the city)?

Or do pigeons who became smart by escaping (there is one such in the video) lead the other unknowing pigeons there for sport?

Is it a mating ritual where the brave get all the girls?