An author's copyrights can be assigned or transferred to a third party. This leaves the author with only the same rights as any member of the general public. (There are a few narrow exceptions, but nothing that would prevent the possibility of an author infringing on the copyright of a work he created)

It's also possible for a person who prepares a work to not be considered the author. This is the case for works made for hire.

And of course copyright isn't mandatory, though that just leads to works being in the public domain, so at least there's no danger of infringement there.

However, bear in mind that copyright only applies to original material, not to pre-existing material. A review which includes a quote is copyrightable, but the new copyright for the review only covers the portion original to the reviewer; the material quoted is only covered by the copyright of the work the quotes are drawn from.

17 USC 103(b):

But your smartphone calendar can notify you even when you don't have service. That's a level of reliability SMS can't touch.

FWIW, Google Photos changes this behavior by default. I think there's a way to override it, but in general if you delete a photo in one place now, it gets deleted from all of them. There are some very prominent warnings trying to make people understand that. This doesn't apply if you've shared it, though; the shared copies still exist.

Google has long allowed you to request that your data be deleted. See the Google dashboard. And, yes, it really does get deleted, permanently. I think sometimes it may survive for a while on tape backups, but eventually those get deleted, too.

Because MTP is better. I don't know why the OP was messing around with Android File Transfer. Any modern desktop OS should support MTP, which is plug and play and much cleaner than USB Mass Storage.

So, I specifically said state universities would be free to those who qualify. If someone wanted to go to a private institution they could certainly go into crippling debt in order to attend if they so chose.

And, really, I probably wouldn't care much if more people went to university, even if they weren't really qualified. People spending more time in school isn't a bad thing.

And further, I'm sure "the market" will fend for itself when it comes to filtering out idiots; it's just that people won't have crippling student loan debt that will make them so desperate for work that they'll be willing to let their employers bend them over in order to accept a shitty, low paying job.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I like it - employers would actually have to offer something in order to attract workers because the workers won't be desperate anymore. I've known people who've taken very, very shitty jobs and worked in abusive environments for years out of fear of losing their health insurance or being unable to pay for school loans - that's pretty fucked up.

This is wrong. As is the use of the word "troll" in the summary/article. Trolls and shills are distinct, and the difference isn't whether they get paid. You can be a paid or unpaid troll and a paid or unpaid shill.

Trolls post messages written specifically to generate responses. The term derives from fishing where trolling means to drag something through the water to catch fish. Internet trolls post baiting comments trying to get people to respond to them. Flamebaiting is a subset of trolling, where the aim is to generate angry responses.

Shills post messages to talk up some product, service, etc., trying to make it look good and its competition look bad.

Both categories also assume that the writer likely doesn't fully agree with what he or she is writing. If two people write the same words but one believes them while the other doesn't, the former is not a troll or shill, but the latter may be.

Note that paid trolls are pretty common on the Internet, but they tend to write the articles (or, on /., the summaries) not the comments. "Clickbaiting" is almost the same as trolling in this respect, except that a clickbait article is to collect clicks, while a troll article is intended to generate comments.

But really should be "Don't Read the Summary", since the summaries frequently get edited into incomprehensible trollishness.

Stalin-- uh, I mean Putin -- would be proud of their efforts.

I hope she carries a portable geiger counter. Polonium 241 is nasty stuff.

I say guarantee basic services (phone, basic cable, broadband), basic accommodations (place to live, food), and basic health (medical insurance) for those who need it. Provide life and job skills classes open to anyone who wants to attend. Make state university free of charge for those who qualify (via academic track record and testing), vocational training (plumbing, culinary, whatever) free for those who don't qualify for university.

Spread the housing across a given community, rather than concentrating it in one place, to prevent things like a project mentality and generational poverty mindset.

It would be vastly less expensive than the costs we pay for police, prison and emergency services, safer for everyone else, and overall reduce human suffering.

Most people would be happy to work an actual job and pay taxes in order to have "better than the bare minimum" for all of the above and the ability to do things like have food that isn't just staples, go on vacation, have more living space, etc.

For people who don't want more, or who can't work for more, at least this would keep them off of the streets to some extent, and keep them from getting so desperate they resort to crime just to survive.

I have zero problem with my taxes going to pay for such things because, not being an idiot, I'm aware that the alternative (what we have right now) is VASTLY more expensive by pretty much every metric.

When you're dealing with some obstreperous functionary who is leaning on status and authority rather than knowledge or competence, it will no longer be possible to think to yourself:

this asshole, too, will soon be departed

With the loss of life's great equalizer, about the first thing to happen is that the entire population goes into legacy mode.

It'll be like all those crappy ISA cards with jumper blocks in the back of your ugliest junk drawer that you never get rid of because, technically, they still work perfectly fine.

Only it will be the humans with ugly jumper blocks (slavery, racism, sexism, elitism, ageism, gated-community-ism) that live to be 10,000 years old and never "get with the times" because "the times" themselves have shuffled off their mortal coil.

FWIW, at least at Google it isn't about specialization. Google SWEs are expected to be generalists, able to specialize as needed.

In fact, it's generally recommended that SWEs change teams within the company every few years, and that they intentionally look for a change that requires them to learn new skills. The belief in the company is that this approach serves both engineers and teams, providing fresh perspectives and insights to both, and spreading knowledge across teams (by moving it) and within teams (by reallocating responsibilities).

There are exceptions, of course. Some skills are rare enough that people stay within that field, even as they move between teams. On the other hand, even those exceptions have exceptions. I won't mention his name, but Google employs a famous cryptographer who recently decided that after many years of breaking the world's encryption systems he wanted to work on image compression. So he is. Another engineer I know has a PhD in computational mathematics, with a specialty in image processing. After a few years extracting building details (exterior shape, mostly) from merged aerial and street view photography, he now works on UI frameworks.

The choice of when or if to move to another team, and which, is the engineer's. The destination team also has a say, but most teams are perpetually short-staffed. Unless the team in need of some deep skill (e.g. a PhD in computational mathematics with specialization in image processing), or unless the engineer hasn't been performing well in the previous role, they're unlikely to refuse. This is why apparently-odd moves aren't uncommon; people decide they'd like to do something different, so they do.