Now that IS very interesting. I wonder how the IRB approved an experiment that clearly didn't have any participants' consent.

I agree, this was my first thought. They screwed up big time, it would be fun to see the federal government investigate them for unlicensed human research.

I don't know anyone who was affected by the Tuskeegee syphilis study, but that doesn't mean it was right or we shouldn't be outraged.

The issue is clear; if a doctor or psychologist tried this, they would have to get IRB approval. You need informed consent; such laws were passed after psychologists had tried a LOT of experiments on the unwitting public; simluating muggings, imminent death scenarios, etc.

I know people say "it's just manipulating feeds, what's the harm?" There can be plenty of harm if you manipulate the feeds. Where is the line? What if facebook had decided to see what happens if you try showing depressing posts and bad news for a year? Or a feed where you were always ignored? No IRB would allow something like that if it risked permanent mental scarring or created a suicide risk.

Bad move, Facebook. Experiments are definitely cool (I'm a researcher), but we go through proper channels and regulation for a darned good reason.

A holographic doctor is not the same as the tired storyline where there's a holodeck malfunction and the artifical characters threaten the ship. At least with The Doctor they had him grow and develop and mature and be like Data with more personality.

Does nobody remember 2005? Yahoo Video and Google Video competed with YouTube, it was not uncommon to see videos cross-posted on more than one.

Oh great, now the government will overcompensate by making the search logic even fuzzier, generating far more false positives. Is your name one letter off from someone on the No-Fly list? You're not going to be allowed to fly either. It was bad enough when the TSA was grounding flights when 8-month-olds matched the name of a terrorist, now you're going to have way more of that.

Don't believe me? After the Underwear Bomber was caught in 2009, Homeland Security decided to prevent it from happening again, by drastically increasing the No-Fly lists and broadening it to encompass flights to Canada and Mexico.

Yes, we live in a world where everyone has access to google. That's not the point, you have to prove your claims with evidence, not ask the other person to do it for you and then disprove it. You need to show proof that it can be done, because you can't disprove a negative.

Bill, we've been over this before. Snowden tried the legal channels, informing his superiors 10x, and got nowhere. If you bothered to closely follow the story, you'd see your suggestions were tried and failed.

Armchair critics are stupid. "Why couldn't Rosa Parks just ask the bus driver for permission, did she really need to get arrested?"

Compare how the US responded to similar actions in Iran; the president held press conferences and pressed the issue at the UN and got Europe to agree to sanctions. With Bahrain, no action was taken; the implication being that protesters' livesans democracy are worth less than navy parking spaces.

US-made tanks sold to Saudi stormed into Bahrain and crushed the protests. The US government decided that was not enough reason to deny further sales.

Current US foreign policy is not "do nothing." The US government backed the Bahraini dictatorship and looked the other way as their police fired on pro-democracy protestors and refused to sanction the government despite its documented use of torture and human rights abuses. Why? Because the Bahraini king allowed the US Navy to park its ships there. The US government approved the sale of weapons to the Saudi dictatorship that human rights groups warned would be used on protestors and for torture (e.g. selling huge shipments of cattle prods to the Saudi government even though they don't have many cows). It's creating a whole generation of people who dislike America, despite the fact that the US was quite popular up until recently.

Citation needed. Sex outside of marriage is referred to as "Zina" in Saudi Arabia, which is not a capital offense. Adultery is a subset of sex crime law, and is punished by flogging if unmarried, only married people qualify for capital punishment for adultery..

Being raped is not a capital crime in Saudi Arabia. The myth of that got out when a married woman claimed she was raped, and since there wasn't enough evidence to prove it, the prosecutor decided to charge her with adultery. It's screwed up and Muslims around the world protested the case, but they're a US-backed dictatorship and that's that.

What would have been a better way to deal with this? Send in a warning and watch it be ignored?