Recent college grad and young working professional here. I graduated with ~$25k in student loan debt 2 years ago and am due to pay it all off by April 2014. I struggled with burning question, as well.
The general advice I got was that if the loan interest rate is less than 6%, you're better off investing the majority of your excess cash into something like an index fund since it theoretically will give you >6% gains.
However, I hate the stress, mental overhead, and risk involved in owing somebody money, so I decided to automatically save 10% of each paycheck (set up direct deposit to funnel 10% to a separate savings/investment account) and essentially contribute as much as possible after that to student loans.
I'm happy where I currently am - almost out of debt and with a non-trivial amount saved up. The key for me was automatically moving the first 10% to savings then setting an ambitious goal each month to put toward debt. Good luck!
Good job! After years of putting around with debt, I have kept a promise to myself that I wouldn't get into debt unless it was under dire circumstances. Peace has value, in my opinion. Not having to worry about debts and payments really frees my mind (and my funds) for other things.
I'm not one for biblical citations, but "the borrower is slave to the lender" always gets to me.
Patents are always good for the patent holder. The question is whether or not the patent is good for society, and justifies the patent enterprise in the first place.
To this, the only major point of consideration should be: Without patent protection, would this technology have been developed anyways?
For the vast majority of patented software, the answer is yes. Probably including pagerank and mp3. The patent process brings no value to society and therefore shouldn't be enforced by society.
In the case of drug discovery & development, the answer clearly different. Patents make sense.
If I write a great piece of software, patent it, then run a business selling it, then that patent does me (and my family) a lot of good. I worked hard to create the software, and I should reap the rewards.
If software patents didn't exist, maybe I wouldn't have based my business on that software in the first place because I'd worry that somebody else would notice that it's profitable and use it to run their business. Patents are necessary to encourage people to innovate, though obviously some patents (that probably shouldn't have been given in the first place) have stunted innovation.
The request was for an actual example, not a hypothetical scenario. Also, you seem to grossly misunderstand the function of software patents. You don't patent a piece of software; you have a copyright that provides the full and appropriate protection of law. In contrast, software patents apply to general processes, use cases or algorithms, as opposed to specific implementations.
> If I write a great piece of software, patent it, then run a business selling it, then that patent does me (and my family) a lot of good. I worked hard to create the software, and I should reap the rewards.
Your non-trivial software is already in violation of scores or even hundreds of existing patents. You should get as many software patents as possible to cover your ass.
> Patents are necessary to encourage people to innovate
[looks around] In software, this is not the case.
Software patents are a good idea in theory, but in practice, the baby needs to get thrown out with the bathwater.
The general advice I got was that if the loan interest rate is less than 6%, you're better off investing the majority of your excess cash into something like an index fund since it theoretically will give you >6% gains.
However, I hate the stress, mental overhead, and risk involved in owing somebody money, so I decided to automatically save 10% of each paycheck (set up direct deposit to funnel 10% to a separate savings/investment account) and essentially contribute as much as possible after that to student loans.
I'm happy where I currently am - almost out of debt and with a non-trivial amount saved up. The key for me was automatically moving the first 10% to savings then setting an ambitious goal each month to put toward debt. Good luck!