betterunix

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."

Who expects that? Judges failed to stem the growth of militarized police forces for decades.

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.

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.

(What, we can't turn the propaganda around?)

There is also this part:

"I am Elliot Rodger...Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent, Divine! I am the closest thing there is to a living god."

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).