Disclaimer: I used to work in journalism as a reference librarian and researcher.

There are MANY legitimate reasons for many public records to be public. It's in the public's interest to know if one person or company is buying all the land/homes/businesses in an area (and who's lending them the money to do it). It's in our interest to know who owns businesses. It's in the government's interest to know where people live and how to contact them, and it's in the public's interest to know what the government knows about us.

When records are public, people are going to collect them, analyze them, and put them together in more useful ways (and often provide them for sale). It's certainly not a perfect system, and it makes people feel funny when someone knows things about them. But I'm not sure catering to your funny feeling (even if you think it's somehow a threat to democracy) is worth the tradeoff of not having this information be publicly accessible.

So don't buy a house, get a mortgage, register to vote, start a business, have a phone number, or any of the other hundreds of things we do that get our information scraped?

People complain about FB because it's an easy target. Most would freak out if they knew what Lexis-Nexis and dozens of similar companies have on them, collected mainly from public records. Your life is already in the public domain.

Yes, I did this from about 2000 until 2010 or so. But in that time, a lot of people didn't write regularly, because they felt like short updates weren't worth a post. And a lot more just weren't interested in maintaining a website at all.

Facebook and Twitter are popular, in part, because it's easy to share short updates (or longer ones, if you want). That combined with the critical mass of users makes them useful in ways blogs/RSS feeds just can't.

My distant family, college friends and other people I like keeping up with aren't available by going outside. I can contact them individually, but I love being able to keep up with them, see what they're doing/sharing, and letting them do the same with me. I don't want to talk to these people every day, but I don't want our relationship to turn into just Christmas letters and an occasional phone call.

Your comment isn't helpful at all in a thread like this, asking for alternatives.

The idea of keeping wages secret exists mainly because employers don't want everyone knowing what others make. If they did, they might all want to be "more equal" (deservedly or otherwise). For the most, the secrecy is still a tool employers use to maintain low wages.

Transparency puts the onus on employers to explain wage inequality.

So you're taking your kids to morgues and showing them Faces of Death? Most kids can cope just fine, but young ones especially don't need any extra violence or gore in their lives. There's nothing wrong with limiting everyone's exposure to violence.

I used Pandora and Spotify until I got my iPhone 6, which was my first that had Siri. Being able to use voice control for my music in the car made Apple Music the obvious choice.

Since the catalog is pretty much the same for on-demand specific music between the major services, the one that is integrated into my phone just makes sense. If Amazon or Spotify stood out in some other way, I would consider them, but they don't.

Alexa can already differentiate between different voices:

https://www.theverge.com/circu...

There could very well be some upcoming feature that limits certain commands to certain voices (and is user-defined). There have been a lot of features added in the last year.

Generally, though, there aren't many people in my house that aren't my family and friends, so I'm not too worried.

This is the most insightful troll post I've ever read on Slashdot.

Actually, I bet there is something preventing someone from doing this - the law. Even if there's not, your license plate will still be part of the group - I'm not sure the software cares which is the 10 is you if they're trying to track you or any specific plate.

We already spend billions to let astronauts do experiments in space. If there was a plan for a colony that grabbed the public's attention, I don't think it's a stretch. I also think a private group could do the same.

I think my main point is that on earth, it's possible to send people to a remote land with nothing more than a boat full of supplies (if that), and they could survive, even if no one else is there, and there's no infrastructure. For a Mars colony, someone would have to set up everything far in advance of any fringe religious groups, criminals, or other undesirables heading out.

What? It's easy to ship people away on a boat when there are thousands of boats and the destination may be wild but still has the basic conditions for life. It's a much different situation when you're spending multiple billions of dollars and the people going will literally be a representative of your government/organization.

I'm sure there are many, many options/features on cars that include licensing, and you already pay a premium for advanced infotainment systems. Those tend not to have recurring charges outside your purchase or lease price. At best, that's just an excuse from BMW.

Were you aware that multiple stations are available by turning the dial? And that there's no problem with making this adjustment while driving?

This isn't Apple - they don't charge for CarPlay. I don't pay anything extra for it in my Kia.