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Comment Re:intelligent design (Score 1) 164

You can of course water down the "intelligent design" claims until they don't mean that much anymore, but originally the term was used in contrast to natural evolution (including natural selection). "intelligent design" implies that someone had a specific design in mind when he/she/it started designing. Such a property however has not even been postulated in the religious books as far as I can recall. Therefore, what you really want to call such an argument is called "directed evolution", not "ID".

Comment No (Score 2) 164

Epigenetics does in general not change or mutate genes(*).
At least the most common examples for epigenetics are cases where a gene's activity has been increased or decreased, which can be explained by molecules attaching to the DNA. The study is talking about evolution, hence mutation, and not about epigenetics.

(*)Of course, someday someone will find a rare example where epigenetics actually changes the mutation rates of genes.

Comment You got out of bed with the wrong leg today (Score 1) 164

My understanding of the slashdot summary is that what you are saying is exactly the point of the study or at least the point that the author of the slashdot blurb wanted to make. No idea why someone labelled this with "intelligent design" as that means no evolution at all.

Comment patent x but with pc/internet//touchpad (Score 1) 274

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.

Comment Well, I'm not sure about US 7912501 B2 (Score 3, Informative) 274

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.

Comment kindergarten valid (Score 3, Insightful) 274

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:

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.

Comment Sorry, was meant as a reply to (Score 1) 385

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.

Comment Actually, it is just a off-by-one error (Score 1) 385

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.
