Although you may wonder what the value to society is, Federal law actually requires universities to license patents, and by implication, to sue infringers if necessary to get a license. Also the inventors get some of the revenue. 30% at MIT, for example.

One shouldn't read too much into the 94% effectiveness. The confidence intervals are huge because the number of patients in the study is small. For example, only a single fully vaccinated patient tested positive (out of 187 positive tests) whereas 18 fully vaccinated patients tested not-positive (out of 230). Roughly speaking, the 18:1 is the 94%. (The 18 and the 1 have to be adjusted for the different sizes of the groups so it's really (18/187)/(1/230) = 22, so you (a 65+-year-old) are about 22 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID if you aren't vaccinated than if you are. That's still not quite what the study did, since they did some regression to try to account for demographic differences between the populations (and as far as I can, I'll never be able to reproduce that regression since they don't actually say how they did it.)

People think the Senate and House are two branches..

You are correct that one serious case isn't enough to draw any real conclusions. For Leonhardt to do so is wrong. The error bars are very large when you have only 1 case, but the data still shows that "if anything" the vaccine is worse at preventing serious illness. It wouldn't be at all surprising if it turns out to actually be better, but you probably shouldn't place a bet on it at even odds.

Author Leonhardt also doesn't understand numbers. He exclaims that only one test subject who was vaccinated got a serious case of COVID, and since that's what we really care about, the scientists are understating the value of the vaccine. But the original study (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577) says that only 8 people who got the placebo got a serious case. If anything, this shows that the vaccine is less effective at preventing serious cases than it is at preventing mild cases. (20:1 reduction in mild cases, 8:1 reduction in serious cases.) The NYT shouldn't leave science writing to people with no science training such as https://www.nytimes.com/by/dav...

It wouldn't devalue the dollar much. The federal debt is $23e12. Romney's proposal would cost $2e10 per month, increasing the debt by 1%, which is probably worth keeping the economy going for. M1 is $4e12, so Romney's proposal could conceivably cause 5% inflation. One problem with the current economy is that there's no inflation, which means that the federal reserve has very little leverage to improve things if things go bad. Furthermore, devaluing the dollar would be a good thing.

TFI says: "The FSF, stewards of the GPL, have stated many times over the past decades that they believe there is no legal distinction between dynamic and static linking of a C program and we agree. Accordingly, the analysis is quite obvious to us: if ZFS were statically linked with Linux and shipped as a single work, few would argue it was not a “work based on the Program” under GPLv2." And that's where it all falls apart. How do we know that it's not a "mere aggregation". See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gp... which argues that determining whether a separate module is a covered work is actually a tricky question requiring some thought and analysis.