The worst decision is better than no decision...

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed — not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

As a group, the instructors were a lot more sympathetic than I ever would have guessed; most bent over backwards to help us not only pass, but pass high enough to hold onto our scholarships. Only Skip's calculus teacher was completely unreceptive, and Skip was doing well enough there to skate by without any special help. Years later I realized that for many of the instructors it was a moral issue rather than an academic one: they didn't want to read their ex-students' names in a casualty list and have to wonder if they had been partially responsible; that the difference between a D and a C-minus had also been the difference between a kid who could see and hear and one sitting senseless in a VA hospital somewhere.

It's in the nature of patents that they give a monopoly to whoever holds them for 20 years. James Watt patented various vital aspects of the steam engine. Yet, you look at steam engine development and nothing happened for 20 years during the life of the Watt's patent. When that patent lapsed, there was a great flaring of steam engine innovation and then the industrial evolution. ~ Adrian Bowyer (RapRap)