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!

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.

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.

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

Contracts are only valid when both parties negotiate on good faith and without undue pressure. Since natural (and historically government-enforced) last-mile monopolies give ISPs undue power over end users, the best way for the government to enforce valid contracts are to ensure that the ISPs can't use their monopoly or duopoly to deliver less than the customer was due when the contract was signed. Net neutrality, along with other regulation (like punishing AT&T for throttling "unlimited" plans) does exactly that.

While this does sound rather incompetent, A) it was probably written by a big private company, since our government uses contractors far more than it uses actual employees for most projects like this*, and B) there are insufficient data points to show that big private companies are any more or less secure, when dealing with similar data. Anecdotally, I'd guess private companies are just as bad or worse, or at least would be without regulations like HIPAA to force them to improve.

* I didn't RTFA and if it states this system was developed wholly by in-house staff I stand corrected. And also we should probably raise taxes so we can afford to hire competent in-house staff for our government.

Exactly. I've posted this before, but it's worth hammering in until more people understand it.

What used to be called fraud, perpetuated against a business by tricking them into selling something on false pretenses, has instead become "identity theft", perpetuated against an innocent third-party who has nothing to do with the transaction. It's so so very clever how the business community managed to turn that around and put the fault (until proven otherwise) and responsibility to clean up the mess on a third party, instead of on themselves and/or the actual crooks.