I think that too many "studies" set out to prove a hypothesis instead of test a hypothesis. The drive to prove something puts bias into the study and skews the outcome. No one wants to be proven wrong. This is especially important when the measurements are subjective as in many psychology studies.

But hardly confined to "psychology". Possibly even not confined to "soft" sciences. Since attempts at falsification can easily turn out to be very politically incorrect.

With our Military starved for funds, our schools in shambles, and our infrastructure crumbling, I can think of no better use for Federal tax dollars then to ensure that some corporation makes a profit.

How much tax does said corporation pay anyway?

Their biggest loss will be the revenue lost from all the people that will get to see ahead of time what a turd this will be - BEFORE the Hollywood Bullshit Mega-Hype Machine has a chance to launch the hypnotic media assault that will try to trick the masses into thinking it's a good movie.

With the irony being that tame reviewers and those who nominate for industry awards are often able to see the thing in advance anyway.

Make it 10 times the retail cost of the copyright infringed item plus court costs and call it a day. But the person sueing has to prove that you're the one that infringed copyright. Not just a blind IP address.

Of course for something which isn't released the "retail cost" is zero. With the "plus court costs" bit probably not being applicable with vexatious litigation either.

a) a book downloaded million times even before it's out would also be sold in millions of copies because it is clearly a most wanted book;

That would also be a good thing if you were a new or relativly unknown author. Since for these people the biggest problem can be getting their books published in the first place. Something which "self publishing" can help with.
Though in such a situation you don't know how many of those people would have bought the book. You can't even know if it would have been so popular as a free ebook in the Amazon Kindle store.

Or maybe someone should tell you that if they spend millions of dollars on something it is their right to sit on it as long as they want to.

The question isn't if they have the right to do so. It's if doing so is a sensible way to go about making money from movies. Which is ostensivly what Liongate is doing.Where rights may come into it is that courts in places such as Canada take a very dim view of suing for copyright infringement in relation to products which arn't "on sale" in the first place.

I'll LMAO when the reveal comes that the leaked copy turns out to have little, if anything, to do with the actual movie they release.

Alternativly maybe someone should just tell them that "sitting on" a completed movie might not be the most sensible of business models in the first place.

Auto theft is primarily driven by economics, the demand for parts, rather than a desire to have the vehicle intact.

It's possible for a vehicle to be worth more as parts than as a complete vehicle. As well as being less tracable in that form.
Keeping a vehicle largely intact would probably require it to be given the identity of a scrapped one. So that would also tend to make popular models more likely to be stolen.

Doctors don't call plasma "blood" just because it's a common mislabeling.

On the other hand plenty appear quite happy to call lipoproteins "cholesterol". Which is more or less exactly the same kind of mislabeling.

Why is it that OSS projects always seem to pick names that are, at best, obscure, and at worst, completely nondescriptive, yet have cutesy sounding names? I think it started somewhere around 2000.

Hardly restricted to OSS, since plenty of proprietary software does the same.
Microsoft Office is also a good example, since "Excel", "PowerPoint" and "Outlook" don't really describe the function at all. Ditto for web browsers, regardless of if they are OSS or proprietary.

Why is it bad for efficient suppliers to replace inefficient suppliers? And why bad in the long run but not the short run?

The only thing which tends to make suppliers "efficient" in a "market" is competition.
Or at least the reasonable possibility of competition apearing.

If efficient suppliers replaced inefficient suppliers, but then in the long run inefficient suppliers returned to dominate the market,

It's more the other way around. Without effective competition suppliers who "dominate" a market will tend to become inefficient.
Not only is there the issue of "barrier to entry" there's also that of "ease of switching".
With the related issue of having to use a single supplier for all goods/services of type X. Since in a true "market" the customer is not tied to any supplier in the first place.

If by Middlemen you are referring to Editors (who read the book, find grammatical errors, find plot errors, etc etc), typesetters ,Graphics illustrators then they will still be there. Unless of course you dont want book proof read etc which will lower the quality.

There are also, especially when it comes to self published authors like likes of "beta readers". Something quite interesting is that often different people spot different errors. Traditional publishers and editors are also far from foolproof in catching spelling and gramatical errors. Never mind plot and continuity errors.

The author is NOT the right person to do this. Lawyers have a saying "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client".

The actual reason is that the author know what the text should be. Thus their brain will "error correct".

The other forgotten point in this discussion is that traditional publishing houses "cannabalize" their back catalogs and stop printing older paperbacks when they go out of print in order to promote their newer authors and/or new "bestsellers"

You see similar behaviour with publishers of other media. Another reason is to drive up demand for something which is "out of print".
The most notorious example being the "Disney Vault".
If anything it works the least wel for books because of lending libraries, which are outside of the publishers control.

They drop a book for a while, and then reprint it right when the royalty deals with the author expires, extending the deal and their "ownership" of the copyright. It's pretty shady stuff.

Extending copyright would require changing the work in some way. Which is also possibly easier for the movie and music industries. Where a "director's cut" or "remix" might be easy to create.

Even if the existing system was only a few years old, that's years of testing that the new system doesn't have.

The ICBMs themselves date from 1970.

I think it's also good to distinguish between "cannot afford a computer" and "does not think a computer is worth the cost". What I mean is, if instead of providing a computer or a voucher that can only be used to buy a computer, charities gave people $200 (enough to buy a Chromebook or Chromebox that's sufficient for all school-related uses), would they go out and buy a PC?

An obvious problem with any kind of "voucher" is that the voucher value is likely to become the minimum price for the whatever.
As is a Chromebook/box is rather tied to "the cloud" and having a network connection. Unless you reformat it back into a general purpose PC.