Sometimes you have to do a little configuration work to get off the shelf NPM packages settled nicely with Fibers; but its not a huge deal and almost every day someone else will turn npm-somePackage into meteor-somePackage.
I dueled law-math in grad school. It made me weird; but I also gained a perspective very few have. You might find your self as being the only person who notices something cool; but its pointless to tell anyone because they won't be able to see it. Which can be frustrating. On the other hand; being that journalism is about communication; maybe you will be able to communicate interesting computer science type things to people who would otherwise not be able to get it.
Krugman's error is to label the the bitcoin open network 'antisocial' in comparison to the federal reserve closed network. If antisocial means 'not wanting the company of others' : I think that means a closed network not an open network; the exact opposite of what he postulates.
I've worked as a patent prosecutor for a top ranked patent prosecution firm; and I know first hand that most patents are 'pencil patents' worthless subtle distinctions that are allowed because 'obvious' arguments do not stand up.
However, some innovations, maybe 1 in 1000, are really worthy. And if the inventor did not have some way to protect their research - google or microsoft or anyone else could usurp the idea from the average joe who spent a lot of research and effort to resolve the invention. just my 2 cents.
Unless the idea is novel and non-obvious and sufficiently detailed for a person of ordinary skill in the art to make and use it; or you have signed some sort of agreement. You can do what you want.
Is it not a rule that a novel application will break the paradigm that other applications follow and hence leak out of the abstractions that allow the traditional application to be written quickly?
Copying is dramatically faster than doing something new.
I'm working on a project with ideas expressed at YSenate.org
We are trying to tackle exactly this type of problem in an open source way.
The big problem with open politics is the entropy of 'too many people talking at the same time.' To reduce the entropy the approach is to break the group into pieces and then put them back together. The fundamental postulate of YSenate.org is derived from Huffman Coding with the additional criterion that each individual is given equal weight. This results in a binary tree political organization.
We are also looking to integrate Git for legislative drafting and primary color votes to address the "Curse of Dimensionality."