Wait, when did we start talking about Sony?

Not that it matters any more, but if you work for Google and wonder why ignored all those invites, it's because you, Google, insisted I change how I share my use of your products as a condition of joining Google+.

Before Google+, I used a variety of your products - blogspot, youtube, search. You know that the same person was using all these services - but the world in general doesn't, and most importantly, none of them were tied to my real name.

Then, to join Google+, you wanted me to "convert" my account, and attach my name to everything.* I was not interested in that, so I diligently stayed away. For Facebook, on the other hand, I knew going in that it would use my real name. (I still waited as long as possible and only signed up to avoid becoming a hermit.) Since I knew my name would be attached from the start, the way in which I share has always been somewhat sanitized.

Because you, Google, are so many things, you can't be a real-name social network, at least if you insist that I retroactively claim ownership over everything else. Sorry.

* Even if this isn't true, this is what I got from all of the media coverage, discussion, and your own promotion. If I understood this all wrong and could have keep using the other services separately and anonymously, then it's your fault for advertising Google+ so badly. That's sort of sad, given that advertising is your business.**

** IIRC they did change this eventually, but by then Google+ was already an obvious failure and it wasn't worth creating an account.

And create a new way to exploit the poor and desperate!

Sure, if you want to kill someone, you're right. I think the argument against drones is that if you push a button and someone dies on the other side of the Earth and you didn't have to go to war to do that ... well, fast forward two years and you're just sitting there hitting that button all day long. "The quarter solution" or whatever you want to call it is still resulting in deaths and, as we can see here, we're not 100% sure whose deaths that button is causing. Even if we study the targets really really hard.

No, no we don't. You might say "Al Queda hit us now we must hunt them to the ends of the Earth" but it doesn't mean that diplomacy and sovereignty just get flushed down the toilet. Those country borders will still persist despite all your shiny new self-appointed world police officer badges. Let me see if I can explain this to you: If David Koresh had set off bombs in a Beijing subway and then drones lit up Waco like the fourth of July and most of the deaths were Branch Davidians, how would you personally feel about that? Likewise, if Al Queda is our problem and we do that, we start to get more problems. Now, that said, it's completely true that Pakistan's leadership has privately condoned these strikes while publicly lambasting the US but that's a whole different problem.

Yep, think of the children -- that's why we should use drone strikes, right? Look, war means death. Death doesn't discriminate and neither does war. If you're hung up on it being okay to take a life the second that male turns 18, you're pretty much morally helpless anyway. War is bad. Drone strikes are bad. There's enough bad in there for them both to be bad. This isn't some false dichotomy where it's one or the other. It's only one or the other if you're hellbent on killing people.

News flash: you can argue against drone strikes and also be opposed to war at the same time. It does not logically follow that since you're against drone strikes, you're pro war and pro killing children. That's the most unsound and absurd flow of logic I've seen in quite some time.

This was easier to understand when I realized that each generation gets two names, one applied when they're kids and one later that sticks. When I was a kid, I remember my generation being called the "Baby Bust" generation or other similar names, as we followed the Baby Boomers. It was only when we were starting to come of age did the term "Generation X" become coined and retroactively applied to us. Then someone decided to use "Gen Y" for our kids, and it took them starting to come of age for the better term "Millenials" to come along.

I'm sure the Baby Boomers were referred to by some other name when they were young - the Postwar Generation or something - just like the WWII "Greatest Generation" certainly didn't have that name until they were grown up.

As most people age, they both naturally start to decide that some things they've learned are "good enough" for them (be it music, technology, processes) and then start to resent further change. Moreover, after a certain age everyone starts to depend more on others for support than their own abilities.

Put those together and you get a slide towards conservatism and an increased trust on institutes of order such as the government.

I don't know about that. A lot of those millennials were kids and at their most impressionable during the post-911 wars and the "if you're not with us you're our enemy" support-the-government/support-the-troops fervor.

It's more reasonable to blame the general trend toward conservatism that happens with every generation as they age and get stuck in their ways.* Hell, those boomers we're talking about were the anti-government hippies of the 60s. They (as an aggregate whole) certainly had no blind worship of their government then.

* Though, even with this slope, each generation tends to start and end slightly more liberal than the last, leading to the society's overall slow trend towards liberalism despite every generation complaining along the way.

I'm pretty certain a used iPhone 4, now with its third owner, covers a good portion of that bottom 60%. The 60-85% range you mention are using hand-me-down iPhone 5s.

The services fail intermittently, which means they still work intermittently. That strongly implies that this wasn't an intentional change by Apple, but instead is a bug introduced with some other change. Said bug was likely not caught, in my opinion, due to limited access to test equipment running XP. Apple, like my employer, likely has IT policies that exclude XP machines from the common intranet, and it's a hassle to set up, maintain, and access the separate XP test lab. A bug that only occurs when an XP machine tries to access an online service is exactly the kind that would be missed by such a test farm setup.

So you're saying everyone knew she was lying about her charity donations as well? Or was it only the charities that knew that? From the article:

So you're saying the 300,000 downloads are by people that knew they were downloading the app architected by a liar? And they were paying $3.79 to Apple and this liar for a recipe app that contain recipes that someone lied about helping her cure cancer? And you're saying that everyone at Apple that featured her app on the Apple Watch knew they were showing a snake oil app on their brand new shiny device? And that the people at Penguin did all their fact checking on any additional information this cookbook might contain about Belle Gibson's alleged cancer survival? And that everybody involved in these events know society's been parading around a fucking liar and rewarding her with cash money while she basically capitalizes on a horrendous disease that afflicts millions of people worldwide ... that she never had?

No, this is not the same as "water is wet" and it needs to be shown that holistic medicine is temporarily propped up on a bed of anecdotal lies ... anybody who accepts it as the sole cure for their ailment is putting their health in the hands of such charlatans and quacks.

Ok, show me how a corporation is put in jail.

Absolutely. Create and popularize the NotDrWhoNet communications platform, and you can make those decisions. For your platform.

Your scenario isn't that hard to imagine. Back when most people did disseminate information using printed pamphlets, only a few people owned the printing presses that could manufacturing such pamphlets en masse. We survived as a species, even though those pamphlets were often inaccurate and inflammatory.

You are upset about a possible future regarding "communication", but communication requires two parties - one speaking, one listening - and optionally includes a third party - one to convey the information from the speaker to the listener. In all cases, speakers have the most limited rights, as it exists today and as it would be in your supposed society.

No speaker has the right to demand the service of any given conveyor or the ear of any given listener, except for limited common-carriers such as the postal service. (Even then, they must only carry your service if you pay for the transaction, similar to other common carriers such as the phone company that have to carry your speech if and only if you maintain an account with them.)

On the other hand, listeners very often have the right to decide who can speak with them. I can choose not to pick up my phone, add my phone to a Do Not Call list, and block your number, and even have you charged with harassment if you don't stop calling. I can't stop all junk mail, letters, and post cards, but I can throw them away without reading them. I can't stop you from holding up signs on a public street or shouting out to me as I walk past, but if you do these things at my house I have various resources (harassment laws, noise ordinances, zoning laws, soundproofing) that can block you from me.

In this society you describe, what you mean by "everyone communicates using only 'social' media" is that listeners confine themselves to their homes and only make themselves available via social media platforms, and those platforms choose to cater to listeners over speakers, and that you as a speaker won't be able to post signs or yell at listeners who don't want to hear you. Your freedom to speak does not and never has imposed an obligation to listen, and listeners can choose to (or empower others to) filter content they hear. The system works as intended.

Why don't the automakers just seek refuge under the DMCA from all those evil automobile hackers? Clearly, figuring out how your car works is a direct attack on the very hard work and property of those automakers.

Time to pass a bill state by state. I'm the sure the invisible hand of the free market will line all the right politicians' pockets to rush those through. Hopefully someday we won't be able to own our cars and we can go back to the Ma Bell days when every phone was rented.

Poorer people have to live everywhere, because the jobs they fill are everywhere.