Banning WiFi is easy. You only have a school opposing you that is basically shrugging with a "whatever..." and lets you have your way.

Banning cellphones means you have to take on a telco that fears you being able to ban phones in schools might lead to a precedent.

That is actually quite sensible. I don't mind paying for someone's tuition if he in turn provides the services he learns to me.

I do mind, though, if he just gets a good education on my expense and takes it abroad.

Of course it can and hence it's one more page I have to look at regularly even though I don't really want to.

My name is not John Smith, ya know? I happen to have a fairly unique name.

Because prostitutes provide a valuable service that people actually WANT to get.

"Whatever" is way too long. Any cool abbrev for it existing?

The NSA and other peeping toms. Duh.

I created a Facebook account for exactly one single purpose: To make sure nobody makes one in my name. So there is now an empty FB account with my name on it.

Why oh why did you have to write this as AC? It's the perfect analysis of the problem: Facebook is getting less popular with teens exactly because it gets more popular with older people, i.e. their parent generation.

Not only because of the ancient "It's uncool to do what your old folks are doing". You can't share your ... less "parent-compatible" exploits anymore with your friends using Facebook. Because your parents are listening. Huh? You could make it "friends only" and not friend your parents? Yeah. Sure. You can not friend your parents.

So you could only use Facebook to post about your latest "family friendly" happenings. Which would pretty much double as the killer for your social life as a teen.

So of course teens move away from a service they can't use sensibly anymore.

Marketing is a professional field?

Not only that, but it also serves a very valuable purpose: It allows people to have "unpopular" opinions, only to realize that they may be more popular than they thought.

I don't know if anyone here ever played the RPG "Paranoia". It stopped being fun when it became too close to home for comfort. It was a world under total surveillance where mutants and members of secret societies were hunted. The fun part now was that EVERYONE was a mutant and EVERYONE was member of some secret society. And everyone thought they're a tiny minority and everyone else is out there to hunt them down, because that was the generally accepted dogma and everyone was happy when someone else was being hunted because it means that, at least for now, they're not on the hunt list.

Sounds familiar? It should.

What anonymity allows in the context is that you can find out that you're not alone. That you're not the "odd man out" if you don't think the generally accepted dogma and creed is the all encompassing truth but that basically everyone thinks like that. Only the ones that hold power and media do not.

Of course, this is a threat to those that have power and media outlets in their hands. If you can convince everyone that they are alone in their "resistance" against the official opinion, they will conform. If you can threaten them with indirect or direct repercussions if they disagree, they will fall in line, even if they could in theory voice their opinion. Just lock up everyone who dares to speak out and people will think that that guy and they are the only 2 in the world who thought like that.

If people can voice their concern anonymously, they will soon find out that they're not alone. Not by a long shot. Actually, they will find out that the official opinion is backed by nobody but a tiny minority.

The community is not. People who are concerned about privacy simply avoid commenting on pages that outlaw having a private moment in life.

I stopped commenting on YouTube. I stopped commenting on various news pages. I guess given time they will find out what drives even more people away than vitriolic comments is no comments worth reading at all. Because for some odd reason, when I peruse the various pages I used to frequent before they became part of the 1984 set, the quality of comments in general dropped, it didn't improve. Now you have mostly self-absorbed showoffs that would dance naked in the street if it only meant 5 seconds of YouTube fame.

People who commented because they wanted to give people a piece of their mind, more often than not inspiring or insightful rather than destructive (and the destructive ones were easily blended out, given the omnipresent ability to simply ignore people you don't want to hear from), are moving away from these sites. There is now very little reason to read YouTube comments. Or, given the fact that it has become virtually impossible to watch YouTube videos without stuttering or loading problems anyway, to use that page altogether.

As much as bitcoin is a digital currency and can be stolen digitally, cash is a physical currency and can be stolen physically. Of course it's not the same. And hence you need to use appropriate means. In turn you could say that you can't simply put a gun to someone's head and demand from him to hand over his bitcoins in a physical way. If you have no means to access an electronic wallet, you cannot access or manipulate bitcoins, so bitcoins are intrinsically more safe against the average street mugger because they can't afford the infrastructure to steal from you.

That does, of course, not mean security than you would have with cash. But neither does it mean less security than cash. It's not more or less secure, it's just secure from another kind of thief and you have to defend against another kind of theft.

I can't help but picture Lovell sitting on his porch, reminiscing of how great we were and how good the times were and how much everything was better back then... ...and being one of the few people who're right when they say everything used to be better... even the future.

Depends on who you ask. :)