The idea isn't nearly as absurd as you make it sound. Regulated taxicabs in many cities are not allowed to refuse service - they must pick you up and take you where you want to go.

It's different from A/B testing in that the experiment is explicitly designed to cause harm to half of the participants.

Presumably most A/B testing would be designed to figure out which choice performs better on a set of metrics. But going in, there is little evidence to point to one or the other, and the "harm" caused would simply be in user experience. In this experiment, the researchers had a prior theory about which choice would cause harm, and the harm is emotional and psychological.

All that aside, if this was purely internal research at Facebook, it would still likely be unethical but probably nothing out of the ordinary. The fundamental different is that this is being presented as scientific research. It's published in PNAS. It involve three co-authors from various universities. There are standards, both legal and ethical, that must be followed when engaging in scientific research, and the concern is that such standards were perhaps not followed.

Manipulation and even inducing harm may be widespread throughout the advertising industry, but that's advertising, not science.

It's called the Common Rule, although it generally only applies to federally funded research. There is some evidence that this study was in part federally funded. I think there are serious questions about whether a click-through agreement meets the standards of informed consent.

Although the study was approved by an institutional review board, I'm surprised, and the comment from the Princeton editor makes me wonder how well they understood the research design (or how clearly it was explained to them). This would never have gotten past my IRB.

I'm sure there are stats on this, but I was under the impression that most people working more than 40 hours a week were salaried and overtime exempt, so they don't see any extra income from the extra work.

I would be surprised if it were otherwise - employers loathe time-and-a-half overtime pay, and would consider it unaffordable to pay someone for all those extra hours.

It's not really a new debate, but the assumption that high school students will on average be better served by taking calculus instead of statistics could use some scrutiny.

Practically speaking, basic familiarity with statistics is also a form of civics - teaching kids when to call BS on bogus claims, helping them to understand what statistical significance means and doesn't mean, etc.

Be honest. You just made up this number, didn't you?

OP complained about use of the word "gifted," claiming it was derived from Farmville jargon. This is factually incorrect and demonstrably false. I have never heard "gifted" in the context of Farmville or any other Zynga game until this Slashdot discussion. I have, however, heard it many times in normal English usage, used in ways similar to the examples given by the OED.

Just because OP is not familiar with the English word, which predates Zynga by centuries, does not mean that all modern usage derives from Zynga, which appears to be what you are arguing.

From the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of "gift" as a verb:

I'm not sure when Zynga was founded, but I'm pretty sure it was after 1619.

... is a time-tested Slashdot commenting strategy!

But seriously, I don't always carry my wallet with me, but I almost always carry my phone with me. Last year I found myself in the perfect position to benefit tremendously from a mobile wallet on my phone.

I was on mile 4 of a long bike ride when my rear tire failed. Not the tube (I carry a spare), the actual tire. I had decided not to bring my wallet with me, but I did have my phone. Anyway, I needed a replacement tire, but I had no money on me, and I realized that despite having my credit card number memorized, I didn't actually have any direct way to pay a bicycle shop for a tire, so I walked home.

But it felt silly - that I was carrying around a smartphone that has access to multiple bank accounts and payment services, and that I even knew my credit card number, yet without a little piece of plastic, I couldn't pay for anything.

Since then I don't go on bike rides without my wallet, but that's not really the point. Sometimes I take walks and don't want to bring my wallet. Occasionally I change my mind on the way home and decide it would be a good idea to stop at the grocery store. But no wallet, no way to purchase anything, despite having my phone.

In other words, there do exist situations in which one might reasonably have a phone but not a wallet. You may argue they are edge cases, but I am just one person. Other people mentioned check splitting, which is especially a headache in recent years since no one seems to carry cash anymore.

Problem is, where I live, cabs are regulated, but the service is anything but first class. They're not on time, they're not nice and clean (seems like DC usually gets other cities' worn out cabs). At night, sometimes drivers turn off their meters. They're not allowed to refuse taking you to a destination, but they do anyway. They're not allowed to force passengers to share rides, but they do anyway. They are legally required to take credit cards, but they lie and say their machines are broken (until you say you can't pay because you don't have cash, at which point the machine magically starts working).

Point being, regulation doesn't necessarily mean good service. I've never used UberX, but the few times I've used Uber, while more expensive, it's been a much better experience than the typical cab.

Well, he was going to be prosecuted primarily for violations of the CFAA, not copyright infringement.

Anyway the point I was trying to make is that I'm not convinced that OSVDB has any exclusive right to the information, period. If they don't have any exclusive right to it, then can try and "license" it all they want, but it doesn't matter. You don't get to just throw up a bunch of factual, non-copyrighted (and non-copyrightable) information on a public web page, then claim that anyone who doesn't comply with your "license" is doing something illegal... because they're facts. If you want to play that game, you'd better get your audience to sign a contract. There's no trade secrecy here, either, because the information is public.

Maybe OSVDB has some claim for unfair competition under state misappropriation laws, similar to the "hot news" doctrine. But their case would be much more convincing if they had a copyright claim, which even they don't seem convinced about.

Actually, given the way the CFAA is written (and abused), maybe that would cover the situation.

Of course McAfee is probably being a bad citizen here - I assume the point of the license, whether enforceable or not, is to try to defray the costs of establishing and maintaining the database. But simply being a bad citizen isn't necessarily illegal.

Yeah, I also read something suggesting he wanted to do some text mining on the articles to find bias in corporate funded research. I think it was the prosecution pushing the idea that he wanted to release the articles, based on quotes from the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, etc.