Amazon is good about honoring refund requests, which is good twice over for their customers, since it also gives them an incentive to pull defective products.

Presumably, they're trying to make measurements that will confirm (or contradict) that theoretical work.

I'm sure even Kurzweil thinks we won't be simulating the entire universe until 2100, at least.

Having the same name on record had nothing to do with it. Yelp was forwarding the information to a page on Facebook, which used the cookies stored in your browser to see which account was logged in (same as how when you log in to Facebook, go elsewhere online, and then return, it knows which account is logged in and doesn't ask you to log in again).

That aside, you've got it right. The problem with Beacon (in it's original implementation) was that it did unexpected stuff without the user's consent.

Good luck getting twelve jurors who both believe in jury nullification and believe that this particular law is unjust. The jury selection process is used to try to ensure that sort of thing doesn't happen.

Juries in these cases tend to be stocked with technophobic conservatives who make no distinction between "pirates" and "hackers" and thieves.

Since all of the above sounds really great for the vast majority of the population, I don't really care about the "bad for business" whining. Of course, if it's really so bad that businesses leave, that would be bad for the economy, but that would also raise unemployment, so the system is self-correcting.