Quite a few conferences now require that experiments involved human subjects be reviewed by an ethics committee of some kind before being carried out. Universities have such committees and they do oversee themselves pretty effectively.
So no, I do not think that Facebook overseeing its own researchers is so far fetched. The ethical review board would probably consist of a combination of lawyers, PR people, and people with research backgrounds. The lawyers and PR folks would not have seen this experiment as a "great opportunity for research that was previously impossible" so much as "lawsuit bait" and "PR nightmare."
"it seems to me that it's better, or at least more efficient, to assume everything is copyrighted once it has been created rather than requiring everyone to file a form with an associated fee for everything that a person ever decides to create"
More efficient for what, exactly? Because it is much more efficient for me to just assume that nothing is copyright when I creating something new that incorporates the work of others. It is overwhelmingly more efficient to just ignore copyright on the Internet -- our computers are the greatest copying machines ever made, and spending our time trying to figure out if some data is copyrighted is nothing but a retarding force.
"Illegal digital downloads disrupted everything, and cut profits substantially"
Only because a decade beforehand the RIAA decided that instead of working on ways to monetize the Internet, they would work on ways to make computers less useful for music distribution. Basically the recording industry's shortsightedness and failure to embrace the greatest communications revolution since the printing press led to everything else you described.
To put it another way, the RIAA could have pushed for Congress to set up a micropayments system for music downloading, before most people even knew about music downloading. Instead they lobbied for the DMCA and spent their money developing DRM schemes that failed before they were ever deployed. Their "bad karma" is a result of their response to the complete failure of those efforts: abuse of the legal system on a massive scale.
Are people expected to feel sympathy for these companies? Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P? This situation was created by the labels' own actions, their failure to embrace the Internet early on before these kinds services existed.
"Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it."
It did not have to be that way. We could have set things up so that when a song was downloaded, the artist and recording studio that produced it received a small payment automatically. It could have been a truly innovative revenue stream.
I can't help but to be amused by the irony of the NSA systematically weakening computer security and swooping in to help the FBI when American companies become victims of foreign spies that exploit poor security.
It is a mixture of psychopathy and megalomania. He expresses a belief that women exist to provide men with sex, and his anger stems from a belief that women have been given the power to choose who to have sex with yet failed to choose him. He believes that he is better than everyone else and is angry that women are having sex with "inferior" men. He does not think killing other people is a problem; he thinks that his own death is the worst outcome of his plot, made necessary only because the alternative is to live in a jail cell. He also describes killing his roommates as necessary, lest they get in the way of his plot (which included torturing people in his apartment).
In his ideal world, there would be a benevolent dictator -- "benevolent" in this context includes exterminating women by starvation, save for a few that are kept locked up in labs where they exist only for reproduction -- and he suggests himself as this dictator. According to his theory if there are no women there will be no sex, and men can rise to higher levels of achievement (notice how he blames his shortcomings on others). He also believes that there would be no love in such a world, though he seems to have a poorly developed notion of love as an emotion (he speaks of love in terms of sex, and never associates love with any specific person other than himself).
Not all Jews are Zionists and most American Zionists are not Jewish. Stop referring to a "Jewish lobby" when you mean an "Israel lobby" or "Zionist lobby." The term "Jewish lobby" is misleading, easily misunderstood, and mildly antisemitic.
This is not offering you a discount in return for your viewing targeted ads, because nothing here actually requires you to view ads in the first place. This is more like saying, "Pay us more and we won't sell your browsing history to whatever company offers us money."
Actually, I think coroutines are easier to understand in higher-level languages that support call/cc -- Scheme, for example. Yield is just another continuation, no different from return, throw, restart, etc.
"They remove the gatekeeper for financial services"
Hardly. Even if you ran your entire business on Bitcoin, you would still need to find an exchange when the tax man came around demanding fiat currency (unless you are dealing in such tiny amounts that you can rely on people you find online, but then your business is probably not very successful). Exchanges are the gatekeepers of cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin, Litecoin, and every other "coin" would have just been worthless toys if exchanges had not been set up.
There is also the reality of cryptocurrency use that must be considered: almost all businesses (legal and illegal) that "accept Bitcoin" actually "accept $NATIONAL_CURRENCY via a Bitcoin exchange/service." Illegal businesses try to decouple their Bitcoin payments from the exchange i.e. they attempt to launder their money (no surprises there); legal businesses proudly announce which Bitcoin service they are using to "accept Bitcoin." Those services and exchanges are gatekeepers in practice, and are increasingly compliant with money service laws and regulations (just like banks).
"Something that just came up to me: why is making porn movies for money legal, but prostitution is illegal?"
The law is not a strictly logical system (this is usually a good thing, despite the common negative perceptions). Pornography was once illegal; then the interpretation of the law changed so that it would be considered "protected speech," unless it is being displayed in certain contexts. Prostitution is illegal in most of the USA, except for certain forms which are not illegal (e.g. it may not be illegal to have sex with your boss in exchange for a promotion).
I think Comcast, owner of NBC Universal, has little ground to stand on here. Streaming is an inefficient use of the Internet that is popular only because people are too terrified of lawsuits to use better technologies like BitTorrent. Comcast has worked hard to set up the legal environment that created this situation; they will see no sympathy from me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corliss_steam_engine#List_of_o...