Roger -
I fear you have something here... but I hate to give over to it. It is
sending restless kids to detention where they learn from the rowdy kids
there how to be rowdy, then send the rowdies to juvie where the nasties
teach them... only to have 20% of our population in prison breeding new,
more bad ways of being like antibiotic resistant strains of TB in the
Soviet Prison system (read Paul Farmer), etc. ad nauseum.
I used to use the excuse for not voting of not wanting to "encourage
the bastards" I weighed in thrice to get and keep the neoCons out of
the White House, but I still feel this way. I love my lawyer, he's a
total tech weenie and he loves what we do, but I hate feeding the machine.
Many of my non-science/non-engineering friends consider most of
science/engineering to be a an "ad-hoc full employment act" for
eggheads/geeks and that at least building nuclear weapons and
redesigning the human genome keeps us from doing *more* dangerous stuff.
Those English Majors were *watching* us when we poured various
substances into beakers over flames only to watch (and smell) them erupt
in disgustingly colored, frothy, exothermic and fouls smelling
reactions... even then they knew what we would turn into! Not all of
them find this kind of behaviour sexy (nod to Dede on Owen's behalf?).
Good luck with your invention and I presume subsequent patent... I hope
to be prolific enough to find a way infringe upon it!
- Steve
Steve --
I think we do it not because every patented invention is an exemplar
of the system, but because some patents are so brilliant that they
make up for all the grief that the rest of them put us through. Sort
of like public education?
It's funny that you bring up patents, because I've been writing up an
invention for the past few days. Obviousness is a real sticky point.
If it weren't somewhat obvious, no one would understand it when you
explain it. But if it were really obvious, then why isn't everyone
doing it already?
Consider the possibility that all of the morass of lobbying, patent
trolling, copyright enforcement, tax avoidance, hedge funding,
securities fraud, insider trading, election rigging, and so on that
our society supports might actually be our way of keeping those
devious people from finding even more damaging things to do. Our
society, its legal and political system, is an ad hoc full employment
act for the ethically challenged. We tolerate a population of
unsavory things done by people in order to avoid the even less savory
things they might do if we didn't give them some kind of sandbox to
play in.
-- rec --
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