I remember reading a book by Arthur C Clarke (I think it's something called Light of Other Days), where surveillance has become so pervasive because the technology to do so has become penny cheap everybody assumes everybody will be spied on. When that point is reached, then you'll have to take it for granted that somebody somewhere has a revealing photo of you. Does the shower head have an embedded nano-camera? What about that coffee mug?

So maybe when that time come people will just try to look their best everywhere whether it's in the crapper, bed or kitchen. In bed people will simply avoid embarassing/humiliating positions unless they want to be known as the hideous kinky type.

Worse than having a leaked photo of your naked self is having a leaked photo of your warts, love handles and other ugly spots. If you're built like a body builder or a supermodel, your nude photo can well become part of your professional resume. Who knows, maybe some celebs are deliberately careless about their nude photos because subconsciously they want the whole world to see how beautiful they are even when they're not wearing designer clothes?

I'm not sure if Google already has a solution (I still use a highly anonymous payment system called cash for most of my financial transactions). But all Android needs is the right API and vendors can potentially design their phones to that spec using components from any of the dozen or so semiconductor manufacturers that matter (Samsung, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc). I mean why can't the hardware component of the payment system not be a "standard" like Bluetooth or 3G? The software part is clearly Google's problem, but the supposed fragmentation of Android isn't an unsurmountable hurdle for a unified mobile payment system.

The persecution of Christians in so-called communist regimes is really a side-effect of the fact that these Christian groups are primarily foreign-funded. The so-called "communist" regimes (in Marxist dogma there's no such thing as a truly communist regime since that is supposed to be the "perfection" of political development into a "classless" society) tend to be paranoid of anyone or anything that affects the social order. Every non-conformist is viewed as a dissident or worse, a foreign agent out to sabotage the State. Atheistic dissidents are also harrassed, locked up and murdered. Since they don't belong to an organized group, their cases tend not to be as greatly publicized.

Social networks make being a shut-in more socially acceptable when online meetings become a substitute for the real thing. FB meetings tend to be faceless except for your liberally retouched profile photo. And who knows if you're still having an intimate chat with that person in the photo and not her husband or the FBI already? With the possible exception of celebrities, you don't need the skills of an undercover agent to impersonate somebody in FB.

Ancient technology I know, but I feel really naked when I try to leave home without them.

Well it's seems Google is making a serious step toward a literally robotic future. That seems to be pretty obvious with its driverless car project. But when Google first acquired a fistful of robotics-related companies, some commentators speculated it was to allow Google to more effectively "mine" the data that would be flowing from what's effectively a mobile data scanner. Google already has Streetview and its book scanning project, so this, the reasoning went, is where Google's new robotic technologies will most likely slot in.

Now I don't know. Maybe Google is really planning to build a robot army.

Well, the statistic cited by the parent is interesting. I might be wrong in assuming that Indian kids don't get their own cellphones (maybe majority of them do have their own dumb/feature phone). Since India is a poorer country than the US, where people seem to have more of one device per device category, I'd expect a closer to 1:1 correspondence between number of cellphones to number of users, since more people wouldn't have the money to buy a second or third phone.

"Well, because that would be making an assumption without any credible data to support it, whereas there is avast amount of accumulated evidence showing that women are treated like shit in most walks of life."

There's even more overwhelming evidence that unless you're filthy rich, a celebrity, or the ruler of some big and powerful country you get treated like shit no matter if you're male, female or shemale.

I'm pretty sure Hilary Clinton will get better treated than 99% of the typical male population of the planet.

Bitcoin has been forked many times over. There are probably as many Bitcoin derivatives as there as GNU/Linux distributions. So it's not exactly the Banks (Microsoft) vs. Bitcoin (Ubuntu?).

Carrying the analogy further, there's another cryptocurrency family that's like the BSD of the virtual currency world, CryptoNote (https://cryptonote.org/coins/). One interesting CryptoNote feature is teh use of multiple public addresses generated from the owner's wallet key, in contrast to Bitcoin, where each wallet consists of a single unique public address.

Not even 1B mobile users. Indian has a relatively younger population than US and other first world countries. I'd expect that, because of poverty, most mom and pops there (who themselves own/share a cellphone) would be unwilling to spend extra to equip their children until they reach the where they can earn enough to at least work for their airtime. So no vanity sexting there, just the necessary communication.

mod parent up.

I haven't seen an original game since the PS1. Most/all of the popular most downloaded games can be shoehorned into a few dozen categories. The only "originality" I see comes from the refreshed graphics, a few plot tweaks and whatnot. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But to insist that your (the developer's) game is all so brand spanking original that Thou Shalt Not Copy My (your hapless animal species here) Game is hypocritical to say the least.

for the electronics part. Just back up your essential data in solid state storage. You'll be dead or severely injured before your SSD, SD card, etc, is damaged, at which point you stop worrying about your electronics.

As for the other, more important stuff, I have an emergency grab bag in my room just for such incidents. All the essentials, including the flashlight and first aid kid, are packed. The food is in the fridge, which is on the way out.

Your friendly neighborhood drug dealer is at least more honest in not claiming that snorting will make you look young and sexy like a hunk or supermodel. I really can't understand why big tobacco isn't banned while most countries will send you to death or to jail for a very very long time if you're caught with even a few grams of the stuff.

"your Dyson Sphere"

I'd consider that inefficient. I mean there are far simpler ways of becoming a spacefaring species without hijacking an entire star. If an advanced civilization develops a method for "mind uploading" and downloading to an appropriate android or organic body, they'd only need to build a network of small space stations before they can "email" themselves from hub to hub at the speed of light, something that can well be powered by a small fusion reactor or some other energy source virtually undetectable from a light year away.

What if the advanced civilization turned out to be masters of power efficiency? An analogy from the world of computing: the first electronic computers required the power of a house simply to boot up. The smartphone in your pocket is thousands of times more powerful while using no more power than a small light bulb. Does this mean all we'll find are vacuum tube using spacefarers who use nuclear bombs for rocket fuel?