Apple applies to patent flashing lights....

Yahoo News is now running a story from MacCentral about Apple applying to patent a system for changing the colour of computer cases on the fly, presumably in a different way to the common old PC case mods where users put lights inside fancy cases. (Or perhaps not -- the US Patent Office is famous for its incompetence.) The story was debated at length on Slashdot last year, and various Mac sites. However, the Slashdot dicussion included a delightful piece of Slashdot hypocrisy pseudocode (Score:5, Insightful) from duffbeer703:

if ( $org within ("Microsoft"|"Amazon"|"Intel") && $topic == "patent" ) { post.story("Patents are evil, Linux r0x0rZ!"); } elsif ($org within ("Apple"|"Transmeta"|"VA") && $topic == "patent" ) { post.story("Feature xxx is cool! $org r0x0rZ!"); } else { ignore.story(); }