I thought they were gone for good after the last, oh, I don't know, 4 attempts of selling a shitty static-everything voxel engine as THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY THING EVER? Ask anybody who knows fuck all about computer graphics what they think of these people, and prepare to get laughed out of the room.

Well, Google can certainly choose to just uncritically comply with all requests, for now - which means that they'll deliberately be offering a worse service to save money. As a quasi-monopolist, that's a thing that they can probably keep on doing for quite some time, too. They could also work within the law as interpreted by the courts to work out efficient procedures that everybody can live with, which is a better idea, long term.

If you are a company that offers something, you are responsible for complying with regulations regarding that thing. If you sell meat, you are responsible for ensuring it is not rotten. If you manufacture or sell toys, it is your responsibility to ensure that they do not contain toxic substances nor small parts that are easy to swallow. And if you run a search engine, you have to ensure not to infringe on the privacy rights of your customers. As with any other company, the costs for this are costs you are going to have to calculate with when considering how to do business, and what kinds of business models are viable for you.

I have no idea where technology companies, especially U.S. based ones, get this idea that they should be allowed to infringe upon rights and regulations wherever it gets in the way of doing business simply because what they do is somehow new and cool. That's not how that works. Mercedes-Benz cannot make a car that doesn't follow road safety regulations, even though that may allow for cool things and cheaper cars. And in the same vein, Facebook cannot simply store whatever data they please and sell it to whomever, and Google cannot simply index all things until the end of times, even if all of these things would be very useful for them and possibly allow for neat features - because there are regulations that protect the common interest, which they have to follow.

...because it's time to stop incentivizing poor behavior from Ben Kuchera. No, seriously.

If your company demographics are significantly different from general demographics, you are probably not hiring the best person for the job - probably, your hiring is skewed towards some demographic, for whatever reason (number of canidates, subtle unconcious or even open racism or sexism). If you want to have the best people for the job, you should have a strong interest figuring out if you have such a bias in your hiring and to eliminate it.

Further, diversity is healthy, especially in jobs that require some creativity. Many different people with many different approaches beats a bunch of people who all work roughly the same way.

Clearly! Just go shoot up the Antipiratbyrån offices! That will solve the problem! I mean, that's how people in the US solve their problems all the time, right? That's why the United States are such a model of base democratic decision making: Because everyone has guns!

...most C++ programmers understand C++, yes.

For mathematical fiction, I've found nothing beats macroeconomics textbooks.

The system we used here was actually smart enough to not flag common idioms like this, and also still flag cases where only the variable names and formatting had been changed. Also, our assignments were usually complex enough that there would be enough variation, anyways. Most things about our automated hand-in system sucked, but the plagiarism detector wasn't one of them. If you're curious: https://www.ipd.uni-karlsruhe.de/jplag/

Eh, that makes sense for an online poll with write-in. It discourages 4chan et all coming along and flooding the poll suggesting the node should be named something along the lines of "NIGGER COCKS OLOLOL".