Down the Parrot Hole with CLS and Alice

In law school, students are taught to parrot
the words of "AUTHORITATIVE" sources. The blue pill.
Pith hath no zenith higher
than Blue Book perfect citation to precedential and on point squawking.

Parroting the verbiage of a drunkard who
is discovered foaming at the end of a strip mall alley
buys you no bonus points.
But ah, to quote the learned words
of a Judge Learned Hand,
that be a thing of jurisprudential beauty.

For what doth it gaineth
a legal scholar
to have original thought ...

when quotation from authoritative mouth piece
does so much better (for one's career)?

And so it is that we find ourselves
beating back against the waves
of a judicial Idiocracy emerging out of patent law decisions
such as that of CLS versus Alice

Here, each judge parrots
the gibberish of a previous judge,
and the latter repeats from yet another predecessor,
and so on ad infinitim until the nonsense
rises into the form of a living, breathing monster.

Ultimately, corporations become "people".

Machines become mere "abstractions".

Reality becomes just a draftsman's illusion.
And jurisprudential delusion substitutes in for reality.

Where are we ... and how did we get here?

The answer to how we got here is relatively easy.
One parrot excreting more nonsense on the mound built by earlier parrots.

The "Where are we?" part is a little harder to see.
We are buried so deep in it we can't see our way out.

General Purpose Computer: ---There is no such thing. This is an abstraction in the truest sense. And yet reference to the mythical "general purpose" computer appears multiple times in CLS v. Alice for example in the following: "The patent applicant admitted that its claim 'would read on a general purpose computer programmed to carry out the claimed invention.' Id. at 1545. We nonetheless held that the claim was patent-eligible under §101, explaining that “such programming creates a new machine, because a general purpose computer in effect becomes a special purpose computer once it is programmed to perform particular functions pursuant to instructions from program software.” Id. (emphasis added). Judge Lourie’s opinion completely repudiates Judge Rich’s approach in Alappat. The two are not reconcilable."

Every real world "computer" has a power supply with finite power delivery capabilities, has a cooling subsystem with finite heat dissipation capabilities, has a memory subsystem with finite storage capabilities and finite read/write speeds, has a ..., etc. Therefore it cannot be used for every and any "general" application.

"General purpose" is an abstract concept, not a reality.

The software/hardware dividing line: --This too is essentially an abstract concept and not part of reality.
Consider the lowly transistor in a digital circuit when receiving a binary "1" or a binary "0" at its gate electrode. Where does "software" end and "hardware" begin? Or in truth, are they not inseparable?

[This part still under construction]