h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Psychohistory Truism: Every successful invention in history has been a labor saving device.

...Anything else is either a toy or a boondoggle.

The terrible thing about Microsoft. With the introduction of MS Windows 2007, they've gone from being labor saving to being a labor and time squandering boondoggle.

Very true. The patent office specifically excludes toys and games from being patentable. You can go to copyright for that. A patent must be useful.

It may ultimately be a matter of the political power of the inventor. Thomas Edison recieved over a thousand patents largely because he had grown so powerful that the Patent Office would rubber stamp anything that he submitted, whether it was useful or just a whim of his.

No accident that his first invention that actually paid him a little was the stock market ticker....

Was that thing even useful? Before the ticker, investors would research companies to find good prospects, after the ticker, human lemmings would find out instantly what the others were doing so they could all jump of the cliff together.

True enough, the invention did result in an increase in 'momentum' speculation... but actually had the effect of slowing down the action somewhat by means of increasing the size of the investing population and on account of telephone system delays. Safeguards against 'momentum' speculation are not perfect to this day, though the major hazard now is inflation driven by serial credit investment.

Meanwhile, practical concept you're welcome to, and an important one on a global scale: No fail engineering of flush valves in the common commode.

So you've got a commode that doesn't cut off (problem is usually in the main valve that drains the tank into the bowl), in twenty four hours that wastes enough water to fill a common back yard residential swimming pool. In 36 days, that's about a million gallons. There's currently a water shortage in the American southeast requiring importation of water from the Great Lakes and it may be entirely a consequence of faulty plumbing, though aggravated by drought... and this is nothing by comparison with problems affecting many other countries in the world. For examples, there are upgrades in standards of living planned in China against completion of the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam.