In almost every dispute, both parties think they're right, and both may even have good and reasonable reasons for believing they're right. So, yeah, a lawyer could argue either side of that, because there may be good reasons on both sides. It may be a question of what the law really is (see the recent Myriad v. AMP patent case as to whether isolated genes are patentable), or may be a dispute over the facts (if a contract term means "A", then party A is correct; if it means "B", then party B is correct; and they both have legitimate reasons why it should be read the way they want), or other such reasonable disagreements. So, since a lawyer could argue either position, suddenly they're immoral or greedy in your eyes?

If every decision was so clear cut between good and evil, or just and unjust, then we wouldn't need lawyers in the first place.

I'll believe that hypothesis the second you find a triangular fan.

It's actually 60% larger than a 120mm fan. Don't forget about that r^2 term. And one larger fan draws more air per minute with lower power and, more importantly, significantly less noise than 4-8 fans.

Obligatory penis-sized jokes aside, a 6" fan is massive compared to the standard 80 or 120 mm fans in other cases.

Now that Apple.com is updated, you can find out why - it's a cylinder because the GPUs and CPU are mounted around a central cooling core made from a single piece of aluminum with a single massive fan on top.

When you say "most of this", are you going by the Slashdot summary, or the claims of the patent application? Because the former is going to be about as accurate a summary of the invention as you'd expect.

35 USC 101: Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

If you come up with a super-efficient battery, the fact that "batteries" have been known for centuries doesn't mean that you can't get a patent - you get a patent on your improvement and it doesn't cover the original, old battery.

It's not... The change from first-to-invent to first-to-file only comes up when two people independent file for a patent application on the exact same invention. Previously, there would be a process called an Interference, kind of like a mini-trial, to determine which one of them truly conceived of the idea first. They tended to be around $100k in costs, per side, and take signifiant amounts of time, and one person ended up with nothing. With first-to-file, it's now just whichever one of them filed first wins.

This may seem like a huge change, but there were, on average, 20 interference proceedings per year. 20. Out of more than half a million patent applications.

Well, if you're a progressive, collectivist, or any other brand of statist, you surely do.

What astonishes me the most about statists is the amount of lip service they pay to democracy while at the same time having such dismal views of the poor schmucks they "guide". Everything they do is under the base assumption that people are too damn dumb and ignorant to run their own lives, yet they profess belief in these same dumb dimwitted schmucks voting to elect their elite betters.

If you are one of those elites, or at least think you are, I wonder how much history you actually know, how many times the elites have stomped all over private initiatives as intruding on the government's prerogative, and then used the lack of private initiative as an excuse for a vastly more muddled government reduplication which stifles all individual choice in the matter, and locks in the poor choice made without any hope of flexibility as conditions change.

How any rational person can know of these things and think it all just fine, like a cat with a dung covered bottom, is beyond me.

Benefit? By whose definition, yours?

I have a better idea. Leave people alone, and they will (a) figure out what other people want, and (b) make it, and (c) make money.

The funny thing is, (c) wouldn't be a problem with the elite nearly so much if it weren't for the fact that (a) was done without the elites' guidance.

You mean companies are hiring smart people to design what other people want to buy?

Oh, the humanity! The humanity!

The old "they aren't doing want I want and so they are stupid" argument.

Why even have business taxes? They are merely passed on to consumers, inefficiently of course. You could save a lot of paperwork and move a lot of jobs from unproductive overhead to inventing and building gadgets if you got rid of business taxes. But then government would lose the chance to play favorites, creating tax breaks for their favorite donors.

Guns in the US are used far far more often to prevent crime than to kill. Estimates are around 1.5M a year reported, and far more not reported. Almost all of these involve nothing more than showing the gun. Even when guns are actually fired, the police error rate, ie unjustified killings, is several times the non-police error rate.

To imply that printing guns is the same as hating peace is a sign of wilful blindness to reality.

You repeatedly argued that humans required hardware - namely, a pen and paper - to perform calculations, including "add[ing] two numbers, or calculat[ing] sums of angles". The quotes are there in black and white, and they're not strawmen, they're your words. Frankly, I think they're as idiotic as you now apparently admit they were.