DISQUS

Until you have heard Pink Floyd or The Flaming Lips on a high-end audio system in all their uncompressed 5.1 surround sound glory… well, you just really haven’t heard Pink Floyd or The Flaming Lips as they were meant to be heard...

Um, no. The way these bands were meant to be heard was in the middle aisle, row C, of a concert hall. Everything else is mere duplicity and advertisement.

I don't know much about lawyers, truth to tell, but as a working programmer I can say that Marti's absolutely spot on about innovation being essentially free. To a skilled and experienced programmer, an innovation in his or her developmental domain comes to mind positively daily. Programmers I know make dark jokes about "In my copious spare time, I'd write these programs" and "When the singularity comes, I'll fork off instances of myself to tackle these issues."

Innovation is free. Software patents are not on the innovation itself, but are rewards on the time and capital investments needed to turn the innovation into a working product. What irks free software people (myself included) is that most software really is obvious, we just haven't gotten around to writing it yet. Very little really deserves the award of "innovative" (I think many of Apple's products do, and psychoacoustic modeling requires so many man-hours of non-fun gruntwork to get right that I might give it a pass).

I sometimes suspect that the patent system is flawed because it's so 19th century; no one back then could really have imagined a civilization in which so many people were so highly trained and yet had so much lesiure time that they'd damn near be tripping over each other coming up with cool new ideas.

Miranda: No, it wasn't my honesty. I think every juror goes in with honest intent. I have been on juries before and I have been impressed with the depth of regard those jurors had for their responsibilitiy.

Instead, I don't think that the knowledge with which I went into the courtroom was typical of my fellow jurors. I'm the sort of person who enjoys reading not just the Volokh conspiracy but Volokh's actual papers on constitutional law.

I write speculative fiction as a hobby (and sometimes make money from it) so contentious issues like law and political science and economics make for great launching points for speculative issues. There were other people on the jury who had wrestled with public policy and law and so forth, and like me all of them were tossed from the jury. I may have been a typical person of the jury assembly and the jury pool, but I don't think I make officers of the court comfortable as a juror.

I'm pleased that you thought my recent account of being on a jury "good," but I should point out that I don't believe I was at all typical.

I took notes. Nobody said I couldn't. I don't trust my memory all that much so I always have a notebook and a pen with me at all times. I knew what jury nullification was all about. I was very uncomfortable, perhaps even prejudiced, with the defense right from the beginning because his way of leading the jury seemed so less straightforward than the prosecution, so targeted at reaching a game point rather than finding real justice.

Perhaps I should have been quiet and unremarkable, speaking only when asked. Then I would have watched the case all the way through. But in the end I don't think I could have done the case the justice it was due, and I'm more relieved than unhappy that I was "respectfully" dismissed from the jury.