Geographic Coverage. The ice-core record of abrupt climate changes is clearest in Greenland. No other record is available that spans the same time interval with equally high time resolution, complicating interpretations. It appears, however, that ice cores from the Canadian arctic islands, high mountains in South America, and Antarctica contain indications of the abrupt changes. Dating is secure for some of the Antarctic cores.
That paper is from 2000. More recent research has further confirmed the evidence of rapid, global change within the recent geologic past.
The terms on those loans aren't kept secret from the students signing up for them. There's no need to rely on hindsight, just a little basic mathematics. As another poster mentioned above, the median cost of a US university education is just under ~$5800 per year. If you're racking up $40K, $50K, $100K or more of debt it's because you're making expensive choices. Go to an inexpensive school, work a part-time job during school, full-time during summers, and live cheaply, and you can graduate with minimal debt -- and learn some valuable lessons about life and responsibility while you're at it.
NSLs cannot compel turning over keys, or even data. The law that authorizes NSLs limits them to metadata (granted that metadata is still important data).
Lavabit was not compelled to turn over its keys by a NSL, but by a court order (not a secret one, either). Whether or not that order was justified is a subject of debate, but the FBI got the order by successfully convincing the judge that Lavabit was being deliberately obstructionist by failing to comply with previous, appropriately narrow orders. Lavabit did appear to act in bad faith with regard to previous orders.
But non-targeted advertising, while less valuable than targeted, still has a non-zero value. Targeting is just a means of maximizing the profits that they will be getting from their advertisers.
Not really. Targeting is harder and more expensive to do well than non-targeting. Advertisers really don't care whether they're buying targeted or untargeted advertising, they just want a good return for their advertising spend... it's the same to them whether their dollar of ad spend that generates two dollars of revenue is doing it by displaying a dozen carefully targeted ads or ten thousand untargeted ads.
All of this means that advertisers and on-line ad services are just as happy to use and deliver, respectively, untargeted ads. So why are targeted ads so popular? Because users prefer them. Specifically, users prefer fewer ads and less visually-intrusive ads. This means site owners prefer fewer ads and less visually-intrusive ads. This means users and site owners prefer targeted ads over non-targeted ads, because achieving the same ad effectiveness without targeting means lots more and bigger ads.
Remember what on-line advertising looked like pre-Google? Blinking banner ads everywhere? For that matter, take a look at the typical "36 weird ways to X" web site, with it's massive number of ads per page and content spread out over 40 pages. That's what untargeted online advertising looks like. There are exceptions, because some sites are so narrowly targeted that advertising on that particular site is all the relevant advertisers need to do. But that only works with narrowly-focused products on narrowly-focused sites. In all other situations, untargeted means massive ad volume.
I don't want to see the web go that direction. If we want an alternative to targeted advertising, it should be paid services. Untargeted advertising sucks for users.
It will be possible to enable NPAPI in Chrome for some time yet. The reason for disabling it by default is to push plugin vendors to port to better approaches that don't leave your system security at the mercy of whatever web page you happen to hit.
This is not "The Earth is Flat" or "The Earth is a round ball", it is neither, but we know exactly what shape it is
No, we don't. We know what approximate shape it is. Our approximation of its shape is limited to the accuracy of our measurement instruments. That accuracy gets better as we learn more, and thus we continue getting a clearer and clearer understanding of its shape.
This is exactly how the whole of science works. It's an asymptotic approximation to the truth. We never achieve perfect knowledge, but bit by bit we weed out errors in our old understanding and obtain a more accurate -- but still erroneous! -- view. At some point in every area of scientific research we achieve a sufficiently precise understanding that we can use it to engineer all sorts of things, and perhaps even get to the point where further improvements in our understanding are of only academic interest, because they make no practical difference in how we live or what we build. But that doesn't mean we've achieved "truth", merely that we've approximated it closely enough for our needs.
And sometimes the level of knowledge that used to be good enough is no longer good enough, and so what was academic actually becomes important and relevant research again. Our knowledge of the shape of Earth in the 19th century was good enough for effective global navigation, but when we later started putting satellites up we needed more precision. The satellites themselves have provided even more precision, and it's not inconceivable that that precision may soon become important to climate modelling, if it hasn't already.
Science is always moving forward (with occasional diversions into dead ends and sometimes a little backtracking), but never arrives.
We are currently warming the planet between 100 and 1000 times faster than would occur naturally
Greenland ice core records show that within the last 100,000 years the planet saw a temperature change of up to 10C in as little as 40 years. That's 2.5C per decade, not 0.15C per decade. And while that's the most extreme event in the history we can see, it's not at all isolated. There are many such extreme, rapid changes, and they don't correlate with CO2 level changes, or any other obvious cause we can find.
So... don't assume that if we can only stop from altering the climate ourselves that we'll be safe from rapid climate change. We won't. We need to learn how to deal with it, either by adapting to changing climate or (far, far better, IMO) by learning to engineer the climate, to stabilize it and prevent rapid changes, whether anthropogenic or not.
Keep in mind that "natural" climate change can also happen with great rapidity, including at least an order of magnitude faster than what we're seeing. Greenland ice core records show that in the past 100K years we've seen a shift of as much as 7C in as little as 30-50 years, possibly less. That's ~0.15 C per year, rather than per decade. And the ice of the period shows no great increases in particulates or CO2, or any other obvious cause. As far as anyone can tell, it just happened.
Note that I'm not arguing against anthropogenesis with respect to the current warming trends. I'm sure at least some if not all is human-caused. But at the end of the day it really doesn't matter why it's happening as much as what we're going to do about it. And anyone who thinks we're going to halt it just by reducing CO2 emissions is living a dream. There's no way we're going to be able to cut emissions enough, fast enough, even if it is the only cause. We need to start thinking hard about how to actually cool the planet.
And the chances of Earth remaining in a human-friendly, temperate zone indefinitely are zero.
Unless we learn to engineer the climate to keep it the way we want it. I think we've probably already learned something about how to raise global temperatures. We also need to learn how to cool the planet, and we need to refine both until we can engineer the stability we want.
Also, I have to point out that the planet's current climate isn't actually especially "human-friendly". It varies dramatically from place to place, and we live basically everywhere on it that isn't covered in water (including some places that would be covered in water without our intervention). The zones where humans could live comfortably without significant knowledge of how to alter the local environment (e.g. with clothing, methods of extracting non-obvious foodstuffs, etc.) are narrow to nonexistent. Our species probably emerged from the Nile river valley, but if you took a random group of people and dropped them next to the prehistoric Nile, there's a very good chance they'd die, because nowhere on this planet is particularly amenable to human life without the application of important local knowledge and skills.
Given that we have proven able to live in just about every climactic condition of this planet, excepting -- maybe! -- Snowball Earth, why do we need to learn to engineer the climate for stability? Because adapting to changing climactic conditions will be an expensive distraction, and we're within shouting distance of the knowledge we need to be able to avoid having to bother with it. Or, more simply, because it's going to be cheaper to engineer stability than to live with change.
Actually corporate taxes result in higher wages as they are a write off for the company and reducing the corporate tax to zero would mean less incentive to pay high wages as those wages can be profits instead.
This is a rather silly argument. Money out is money out, whether it's paid in taxes or in salaries, or in capital expenditures. Companies are always going to seek to minimize their expenses to the degree possible, and the fact that increasing an employee's salary by $1 comes at a marginal cost of only 80 cents doesn't make the company any more anxious to spend that 80 cents, and more than it makes the company want to spend more on raw materials, or real estate, or property taxes, or paper clips.
With lower wages and higher taxes on consumers the company is going to lose revenue as people won't have money to spend
There's no reason to expect wages to decline without corporate taxes. Most likely the new equilibrium point will be that wages will be slightly higher in the exact amount needed to cover the additional taxes paid by the employees.
But now the employee will know the tax they're paying.
remember that taxes on consumers is always paid by employers in one way or another.
You have that exactly backwards. Taxes are all ultimately paid by people, because only people actually produce or consume.
Of course on the plus side, we can all incorporate and reduce our tax burden.
Wouldn't work. Any money you take out of the corporation to live on, or any money the corporation spends on you (housing, vehicle, food, etc.) is personal income, and would be taxed as such. About the only thing you could achieve this way is to defer taxes on savings. But they'd still get taxed eventually.
Burglars have been telling us this for decades. Nothing new has been learned simply by using a video game scenario. In this the psychologists are half a century behind law enforcement. But it probably makes for a good grant write up.
Similarly, there was no point in Galileo and Newton studying the way stuff falls because everyone has been watching stuff fall forever.
You don't seem to get science. Finding a way to systematically study a subject in a controlled environment is the first step to dramatically increasing knowledge in that subject, at a pace that non-systematic, anecdotal experience -- however broad and deep -- cannot touch. In the case of the psychology of crime this has been problematic for the reasons mentioned in the study. The discovery here is that simulation may offer mechanisms that enable previously impossible areas of study, not the lessons about how burglars search homes. It's no surprise that the findings of the initial tests didn't contradict law enforcement experience... in fact if they had contradicted that experience it would have been a bad thing, since odds are that the new methodology would have been at fault, not the old experience.
If they can manage to establish a solid research methodology, though, and outline clearly its strengths and weaknesses, then they can start using it to systematically explore the subject. Odds are that many initial findings will merely corroborate anecdotal evidence. That's fine, and contrary to common non-scientific wisdom, it does not mean that such confirmatory studies are a waste of time and money. It's worth effort to establish that what you believe to be true really is (or, more precisely, to increase your confidence that it really is; absolute "truth" isn't reachable). But it's also a near certainty that, given a good experimental methodology, researchers will quickly be able to learn things that traditional wisdom does not know.
But none of that can happen if the subject can't be effectively studied and, particularly in psychology, it's often the case that the real breakthrough is in devising a way to test and measure. After that, the rest is just grunt work.
Will this method really enable significantly better research into the psychology of crime? I don't know. But it seems promising, and noteworthy.
I actually like the idea of abolishing corporate taxes to extend this benefit to all businesses
I like this as well, and for another reason that you didn't mention. I think government should be accountable to its people, including in the money it takes and spends on their behalf. This implies a need for transparency in taxation: People should know what taxes they're paying. The problem with corporate taxes is that although they are inevitably paid by the people -- in the form of higher prices to consumers, lower wages to employees and reduced return for investors -- washing them through the corporations effectively hides the taxes from the taxpayers. There's also a good argument (which I won't detail here) that corporate taxes are rather regressive, falling most heavily on the lower and lower middle classes.
Far and equitable taxation requires being open to taxpayers about what they're paying. Corporate taxes fail that test.
Google is declaring that Google Photos lets you backup and store "unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free."
Thats until they're NOT.... Google has a VERY nasty habit of cranking up these spiffy services, running them for a while, getting everybody onboard
with them, then turning them off.... Stay away!! STAY FAR AWAY!!
Meh.
Google shut down a raft of lightly-used and virtually unused services when Larry Page took over as CEO. Google has never shut down a widely-used service (no, Reader wasn't widely-used), and also has a habit of providing plenty of notice and options for getting your data out of every service, especially those that are being shut down.
So what's the worst case? You get a nice service for a few years and then have to download your photos and move them elsewhere. On the other hand, if this really does end up doing to on-line photo storage and sharing what Gmail did for e-mail, it will go the way of Gmail -- become a core product that is not ever going away.
And SMS is the most reliable because it involves the voice signaling channel and telephone companies are more or less required to reliably deliver them.
Not with newer phones; Verizon's new model phones all deliver SMS via the data network.
But your smartphone calendar can notify you even when you don't have service. That's a level of reliability SMS can't touch.
"It's a bit creepy to see all the photos that Google still has on tap, including many that I've since deleted on my phone."
If you think that's creepy, wait until someone breaks into your account and begins blackmailing you; threatening to publish your photos of that long forgotten 'incident' which seemed like harmless fun at the time.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
The Greenland ice cores show what happened in Greenland. You'd need a bit more evidence to show that change was reflected across the entire planet...
How about additional ice core evidence from Antarctica, the Canada arctic and South American mountains?
From here:
Geographic Coverage. The ice-core record of abrupt climate changes is clearest in Greenland. No other record is available that spans the same time interval with equally high time resolution, complicating interpretations. It appears, however, that ice cores from the Canadian arctic islands, high mountains in South America, and Antarctica contain indications of the abrupt changes. Dating is secure for some of the Antarctic cores.
That paper is from 2000. More recent research has further confirmed the evidence of rapid, global change within the recent geologic past.
In short, fuck every tech company who cooperated with the NSA. You haven't even begun to get what you deserve.
Unfortunately, the tech companies that didn't cooperate with the NSA are getting it, too.
Well sure. Hindsight is always 20/20.
The terms on those loans aren't kept secret from the students signing up for them. There's no need to rely on hindsight, just a little basic mathematics. As another poster mentioned above, the median cost of a US university education is just under ~$5800 per year. If you're racking up $40K, $50K, $100K or more of debt it's because you're making expensive choices. Go to an inexpensive school, work a part-time job during school, full-time during summers, and live cheaply, and you can graduate with minimal debt -- and learn some valuable lessons about life and responsibility while you're at it.
FYI, you're conflating several things.
NSLs cannot compel turning over keys, or even data. The law that authorizes NSLs limits them to metadata (granted that metadata is still important data).
Lavabit was not compelled to turn over its keys by a NSL, but by a court order (not a secret one, either). Whether or not that order was justified is a subject of debate, but the FBI got the order by successfully convincing the judge that Lavabit was being deliberately obstructionist by failing to comply with previous, appropriately narrow orders. Lavabit did appear to act in bad faith with regard to previous orders.
I'd pay money for a Facebook or GMail that didn't sell/give my info to others.
Google (including GMail) doesn't sell or give your info to others. So if that's all you want, you don't even have to pay to get it.
But non-targeted advertising, while less valuable than targeted, still has a non-zero value. Targeting is just a means of maximizing the profits that they will be getting from their advertisers.
Not really. Targeting is harder and more expensive to do well than non-targeting. Advertisers really don't care whether they're buying targeted or untargeted advertising, they just want a good return for their advertising spend... it's the same to them whether their dollar of ad spend that generates two dollars of revenue is doing it by displaying a dozen carefully targeted ads or ten thousand untargeted ads.
All of this means that advertisers and on-line ad services are just as happy to use and deliver, respectively, untargeted ads. So why are targeted ads so popular? Because users prefer them. Specifically, users prefer fewer ads and less visually-intrusive ads. This means site owners prefer fewer ads and less visually-intrusive ads. This means users and site owners prefer targeted ads over non-targeted ads, because achieving the same ad effectiveness without targeting means lots more and bigger ads.
Remember what on-line advertising looked like pre-Google? Blinking banner ads everywhere? For that matter, take a look at the typical "36 weird ways to X" web site, with it's massive number of ads per page and content spread out over 40 pages. That's what untargeted online advertising looks like. There are exceptions, because some sites are so narrowly targeted that advertising on that particular site is all the relevant advertisers need to do. But that only works with narrowly-focused products on narrowly-focused sites. In all other situations, untargeted means massive ad volume.
I don't want to see the web go that direction. If we want an alternative to targeted advertising, it should be paid services. Untargeted advertising sucks for users.
Or, tweak Chrome with:
new tab, type "chrome://flags"
find "enable-npapi" and set it to "true"
It will be possible to enable NPAPI in Chrome for some time yet. The reason for disabling it by default is to push plugin vendors to port to better approaches that don't leave your system security at the mercy of whatever web page you happen to hit.
This is not "The Earth is Flat" or "The Earth is a round ball", it is neither, but we know exactly what shape it is
No, we don't. We know what approximate shape it is. Our approximation of its shape is limited to the accuracy of our measurement instruments. That accuracy gets better as we learn more, and thus we continue getting a clearer and clearer understanding of its shape.
This is exactly how the whole of science works. It's an asymptotic approximation to the truth. We never achieve perfect knowledge, but bit by bit we weed out errors in our old understanding and obtain a more accurate -- but still erroneous! -- view. At some point in every area of scientific research we achieve a sufficiently precise understanding that we can use it to engineer all sorts of things, and perhaps even get to the point where further improvements in our understanding are of only academic interest, because they make no practical difference in how we live or what we build. But that doesn't mean we've achieved "truth", merely that we've approximated it closely enough for our needs.
And sometimes the level of knowledge that used to be good enough is no longer good enough, and so what was academic actually becomes important and relevant research again. Our knowledge of the shape of Earth in the 19th century was good enough for effective global navigation, but when we later started putting satellites up we needed more precision. The satellites themselves have provided even more precision, and it's not inconceivable that that precision may soon become important to climate modelling, if it hasn't already.
Science is always moving forward (with occasional diversions into dead ends and sometimes a little backtracking), but never arrives.
We are currently warming the planet between 100 and 1000 times faster than would occur naturally
Greenland ice core records show that within the last 100,000 years the planet saw a temperature change of up to 10C in as little as 40 years. That's 2.5C per decade, not 0.15C per decade. And while that's the most extreme event in the history we can see, it's not at all isolated. There are many such extreme, rapid changes, and they don't correlate with CO2 level changes, or any other obvious cause we can find.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/
So... don't assume that if we can only stop from altering the climate ourselves that we'll be safe from rapid climate change. We won't. We need to learn how to deal with it, either by adapting to changing climate or (far, far better, IMO) by learning to engineer the climate, to stabilize it and prevent rapid changes, whether anthropogenic or not.
Keep in mind that "natural" climate change can also happen with great rapidity, including at least an order of magnitude faster than what we're seeing. Greenland ice core records show that in the past 100K years we've seen a shift of as much as 7C in as little as 30-50 years, possibly less. That's ~0.15 C per year, rather than per decade. And the ice of the period shows no great increases in particulates or CO2, or any other obvious cause. As far as anyone can tell, it just happened.
Note that I'm not arguing against anthropogenesis with respect to the current warming trends. I'm sure at least some if not all is human-caused. But at the end of the day it really doesn't matter why it's happening as much as what we're going to do about it. And anyone who thinks we're going to halt it just by reducing CO2 emissions is living a dream. There's no way we're going to be able to cut emissions enough, fast enough, even if it is the only cause. We need to start thinking hard about how to actually cool the planet.
And the chances of Earth remaining in a human-friendly, temperate zone indefinitely are zero.
Unless we learn to engineer the climate to keep it the way we want it. I think we've probably already learned something about how to raise global temperatures. We also need to learn how to cool the planet, and we need to refine both until we can engineer the stability we want.
Also, I have to point out that the planet's current climate isn't actually especially "human-friendly". It varies dramatically from place to place, and we live basically everywhere on it that isn't covered in water (including some places that would be covered in water without our intervention). The zones where humans could live comfortably without significant knowledge of how to alter the local environment (e.g. with clothing, methods of extracting non-obvious foodstuffs, etc.) are narrow to nonexistent. Our species probably emerged from the Nile river valley, but if you took a random group of people and dropped them next to the prehistoric Nile, there's a very good chance they'd die, because nowhere on this planet is particularly amenable to human life without the application of important local knowledge and skills.
Given that we have proven able to live in just about every climactic condition of this planet, excepting -- maybe! -- Snowball Earth, why do we need to learn to engineer the climate for stability? Because adapting to changing climactic conditions will be an expensive distraction, and we're within shouting distance of the knowledge we need to be able to avoid having to bother with it. Or, more simply, because it's going to be cheaper to engineer stability than to live with change.
Not at all. It is keeping those folks employed so they aren't knocking over gas stations.
Ahh, I see the light!
The TSA is protecting us... from its employees.
it is keeping us safe you moron
Really? http://www.theverge.com/2015/6...
I'd reply in detail, but the AC covered it well. You missed the point of creating an environment for controlled experimentation.
Actually corporate taxes result in higher wages as they are a write off for the company and reducing the corporate tax to zero would mean less incentive to pay high wages as those wages can be profits instead.
This is a rather silly argument. Money out is money out, whether it's paid in taxes or in salaries, or in capital expenditures. Companies are always going to seek to minimize their expenses to the degree possible, and the fact that increasing an employee's salary by $1 comes at a marginal cost of only 80 cents doesn't make the company any more anxious to spend that 80 cents, and more than it makes the company want to spend more on raw materials, or real estate, or property taxes, or paper clips.
With lower wages and higher taxes on consumers the company is going to lose revenue as people won't have money to spend
There's no reason to expect wages to decline without corporate taxes. Most likely the new equilibrium point will be that wages will be slightly higher in the exact amount needed to cover the additional taxes paid by the employees.
But now the employee will know the tax they're paying.
remember that taxes on consumers is always paid by employers in one way or another.
You have that exactly backwards. Taxes are all ultimately paid by people, because only people actually produce or consume.
Of course on the plus side, we can all incorporate and reduce our tax burden.
Wouldn't work. Any money you take out of the corporation to live on, or any money the corporation spends on you (housing, vehicle, food, etc.) is personal income, and would be taxed as such. About the only thing you could achieve this way is to defer taxes on savings. But they'd still get taxed eventually.
Burglars have been telling us this for decades. Nothing new has been learned simply by using a video game scenario. In this the psychologists are half a century behind law enforcement. But it probably makes for a good grant write up.
Similarly, there was no point in Galileo and Newton studying the way stuff falls because everyone has been watching stuff fall forever.
You don't seem to get science. Finding a way to systematically study a subject in a controlled environment is the first step to dramatically increasing knowledge in that subject, at a pace that non-systematic, anecdotal experience -- however broad and deep -- cannot touch. In the case of the psychology of crime this has been problematic for the reasons mentioned in the study. The discovery here is that simulation may offer mechanisms that enable previously impossible areas of study, not the lessons about how burglars search homes. It's no surprise that the findings of the initial tests didn't contradict law enforcement experience... in fact if they had contradicted that experience it would have been a bad thing, since odds are that the new methodology would have been at fault, not the old experience.
If they can manage to establish a solid research methodology, though, and outline clearly its strengths and weaknesses, then they can start using it to systematically explore the subject. Odds are that many initial findings will merely corroborate anecdotal evidence. That's fine, and contrary to common non-scientific wisdom, it does not mean that such confirmatory studies are a waste of time and money. It's worth effort to establish that what you believe to be true really is (or, more precisely, to increase your confidence that it really is; absolute "truth" isn't reachable). But it's also a near certainty that, given a good experimental methodology, researchers will quickly be able to learn things that traditional wisdom does not know.
But none of that can happen if the subject can't be effectively studied and, particularly in psychology, it's often the case that the real breakthrough is in devising a way to test and measure. After that, the rest is just grunt work.
Will this method really enable significantly better research into the psychology of crime? I don't know. But it seems promising, and noteworthy.
I actually like the idea of abolishing corporate taxes to extend this benefit to all businesses
I like this as well, and for another reason that you didn't mention. I think government should be accountable to its people, including in the money it takes and spends on their behalf. This implies a need for transparency in taxation: People should know what taxes they're paying. The problem with corporate taxes is that although they are inevitably paid by the people -- in the form of higher prices to consumers, lower wages to employees and reduced return for investors -- washing them through the corporations effectively hides the taxes from the taxpayers. There's also a good argument (which I won't detail here) that corporate taxes are rather regressive, falling most heavily on the lower and lower middle classes.
Far and equitable taxation requires being open to taxpayers about what they're paying. Corporate taxes fail that test.
fuck your crack whore mother
A truly brilliant riposte. The wit astounds!
Don't get ahead of yourself there. It does need Internet connection sometimes, at least if you want to have a single calendar on all your devices.
If you find it creepy that they keep your photos around forever, just disable the auto-backup feature in your android settings
Or just delete them when you don't want them kept any more.
Google is declaring that Google Photos lets you backup and store "unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free."
Thats until they're NOT.... Google has a VERY nasty habit of cranking up these spiffy services, running them for a while, getting everybody onboard with them, then turning them off.... Stay away!! STAY FAR AWAY!!
Meh.
Google shut down a raft of lightly-used and virtually unused services when Larry Page took over as CEO. Google has never shut down a widely-used service (no, Reader wasn't widely-used), and also has a habit of providing plenty of notice and options for getting your data out of every service, especially those that are being shut down.
So what's the worst case? You get a nice service for a few years and then have to download your photos and move them elsewhere. On the other hand, if this really does end up doing to on-line photo storage and sharing what Gmail did for e-mail, it will go the way of Gmail -- become a core product that is not ever going away.
And SMS is the most reliable because it involves the voice signaling channel and telephone companies are more or less required to reliably deliver them.
Not with newer phones; Verizon's new model phones all deliver SMS via the data network.
But your smartphone calendar can notify you even when you don't have service. That's a level of reliability SMS can't touch.
Thanks for the clarification. And, nice typo on the last word ;-)
If you think that's creepy, wait until someone breaks into your account and begins blackmailing you; threatening to publish your photos of that long forgotten 'incident' which seemed like harmless fun at the time.
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.
Since when has Google started deleting data?
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.