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In 1918, Alexander Inglis said about the true goal of public education "Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole."
1) The adjustive or adaptive function.
2) The integrating function.
3) The diagnostic and directive function.
4) The differentiating function.
5) The selective function.
6) The propaedeutic function.

A new patent, granted to Apple, could prevent academic cheating, cinema interruptions, but also see areas of political protest activity 'ring-fenced' disabling phone and tablet cameras.

American primary and secondary schools fail to educate because that is not their function, Dmitry Orlov writes. "Their function is to institutionalize children at an early age." In due course inmates of the U.S. education enterprise "will go on to other institutions - jails, psychiatric hospitals, the military."

Ryobi was sued by a customer who injured his hand while operating a table saw. The plaintiff contended that, had Ryobi included a competitor's patented "Stop Saw" technology, the injury would've been prevented. Ryobi wanted to include that technology, but the competitor refused to license the technology at a price Ryobi could afford to pay while still selling a competing product. Thanks to patent law, Ryobi gets to pay anyway, and a "citizen" has a permanently damaged hand.

Apple recently registered a patent for a device that would prevent an iPhone's camera from working upon transmission of an infrared beam. Ostensibly this is to prevent unlicensed recordings of live concerts and other events, but it's easy to guess at an even worse application: Police using this technology to prevent "illegal" photography of their activities. The moral is clear: If you want to be able to use your own camera, wherever you want, don't buy an iPhone!

Apple is using a patent from 1996 to get the government to stop android phones from being smart. It's not even a tangible part of the equipment.

At the heart of Apple's security architecture is the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm (AES), a data-scrambling system published in 1998 and adopted as a U.S. government standard in 2001. The algorithm is so strong that no computer imaginable for the foreseeable future—even a quantum computer—would be able to crack a truly random 256-bit AES key. The National Security Agency has approved AES-256 for storing top-secret data. Now if they would provide a way to turn off the tracking function....

“The basic problem with patents is that you’re trying to assign property rights to something that doesn’t deserve property rights. The fact that these property rights end up in the hands of financial owners as opposed to the original inventors just exacerbates the problem. The basic problem is that Chris [Dixon] and a bunch of engineers can be sitting at Hunch designing some amazing new feature and somebody unbeknownst to them has a patent on this feature and never actually implemented it and can now screw them over… It’s just not right, it shouldn’t exist.”

"When you finally grasp the magnitude of Apple’s play in the payments business, it becomes clear that potential competitors will be shunned from the platform. As Daniel Terdiman suggests in CNET, “New Apple features may leave fresh app roadkill in their wake as Apple is likely to undercut several existing third-party applications.” With the introduction of Passbook, Apple has launched mobile payments on iOS and competing virtual payment systems, including bitcoin, must be terminated."