Recent college grad and young working professional here. I graduated with ~$25k in student loan debt 2 years ago and am due to pay it all off by April 2014. I struggled with burning question, as well.
The general advice I got was that if the loan interest rate is less than 6%, you're better off investing the majority of your excess cash into something like an index fund since it theoretically will give you >6% gains.
However, I hate the stress, mental overhead, and risk involved in owing somebody money, so I decided to automatically save 10% of each paycheck (set up direct deposit to funnel 10% to a separate savings/investment account) and essentially contribute as much as possible after that to student loans.
I'm happy where I currently am - almost out of debt and with a non-trivial amount saved up. The key for me was automatically moving the first 10% to savings then setting an ambitious goal each month to put toward debt. Good luck!
If I write a great piece of software, patent it, then run a business selling it, then that patent does me (and my family) a lot of good. I worked hard to create the software, and I should reap the rewards.
If software patents didn't exist, maybe I wouldn't have based my business on that software in the first place because I'd worry that somebody else would notice that it's profitable and use it to run their business. Patents are necessary to encourage people to innovate, though obviously some patents (that probably shouldn't have been given in the first place) have stunted innovation.