answerable

StackOverflow is specifically geared towards objectively answerable questions; solving an actual problem that can be solved by code.

Then why does the parliament not have some one looking after it's cyber security and answerable directly to it.

And asking a specific, answerable question is hard when you're not comfortable with the technology yet.

That required me to accept that some existential questions aren't answerable in any satisfactory manner, and to simply stop posing them to myself.

However, I don't think the question is easily answerable because from most of the papers I've read, comparing the benefits and costs of patents is like comparing apples and oranges.

We like being mostly answerable to ourselves (And maybe the Government).

That very basic question, answerable by any second year law student, requires image recognition, cultural understanding, even a sense of humor.

That's true, but it moves that power squarely into the hands of large corporations that are even less answerable to the people who their actions affect.

Without a lot more information your question is un-answerable.

If so, under what circumstances (if that's even answerable)?

They need to be a little answerable to their constituency, they need to exhibit a little leadership in terms of not just blindly following party leadership and lobbyists.

Obviously it's suboptimal to ponder an un-answerable question.

I'd say that it is a trivially answerable question - "no, we cannot recognize arbitrary infinite loops" is the answer.

But of course, the question of why the universe has this particular complexity (it's possible to conceive of life with either simpler or more complex universes) may not be a questions that's "answerable" at all -- there must be some ultimate system in which things to happen (almost by definition), and it must be ultimately arbitrary.

(It also seems eminently answerable, albeit with a lot more work defining and collecting metrics; I think, given that academics generally despise "business" questions, that simply counting patents is about all the work they are willing to do.