[lotharbot]

Just a heads up: it's encouraged to point out when people are wrong, but you've trounced all over the guidelines [0] to do it. Please reread and follow the guidelines in the future.

Of particular note:

- Be civil.

- When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

- Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[enraged_camel]

It's funny you mention the guidelines, because they also list this one:

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

[xenophanes]

You're right but you also allowed them excuses to complain about you (which is very hard to avoid) and I don't see what you hope to accomplish. Someone is wrong on the internet ... so you corrected them and expressed how annoyed you get when someone is wrong on the internet about this? It's not your problem if they are wrong.

I think you rightly recognize anti-Apple non-argued insults as being as uncivil as your own comments. So it's quite unfair you get complained at for being uncivil while people don't acknowledge the stupid, insulting-to-Apple comment as already departing from civilized and productive discussion. But still, you aren't fixing any of this.

If your goal was merely to educated other people who read the comments, I don't think your comment was well written to accomplish that. It'd be more effective for educating third parties if it was 100% impersonal and only talked about the issue in a serious way. I think you were trying to persuade the guy you replied to, not third parties, but I think you already knew that wasn't going to work when writing your comment. So there's a bit of a contradiction there.

[Natsu]

If you've read those, you should know enough to delete the "edit: Yes, go ahead and downvote me for pointing out how stupid you are." part of your comment.

Things like that detract from your message, especially if you are correct. And you were at least half right in that those are only part of the design patents asserted. The problem is that Apple really did argue that rounded rectangles were a protected design element. While you can argue over how big a part of the design patents that was, it was something Apple's own lawyers argued over at trial.

So the facts are that they claimed to own that idea in court and that some people think that was absurd. Everything else is a matter of opinion, especially the matter of how important those claims are to the design patents. So you're free to disagree how important that feature of the design patents was. But other people are also free to say that when they argue it in court, it's fair game for criticism. That's all a matter of opinion, and we're each entitled to our own.