If you are a parent yourself, you will know that suggesting education is not enough. By your logic, why is there an age limit to alcohol consumption? Your whole reasoning could be used for that as well - and enforcing alcohol age limit also costs time and money...
Maybe my analogy would also by naive, but I consider the effects of porn to be similar to effects of consuming alcohol - some enjoy it, some became addicted to it, and some people's lives will get literally destroyed by it. Therefore, alcohol is "opt-in" - you have to reach certain age, and you also need to buy it, there are not bottles of alcohol available anywhere for anybody to consume.
Similar with porn, it should be opt-in, you should read certain age to be able to access it, and then do some kind of opting for it.
I might be a minority here, but I honestly think that making internet porn opt-in is a good idea, I am not from UK, but I support it.
As a reader of /r/nofap subreddit, I have learned that porn have had a very negative impact on a lot of people, and it is certainly not healthy for very young people (or even kids) to have easy access to it (as the situation is now).
I am just not sure if I would support other categories to block (like "esoteric material"), but regarding porn - good idea. You can opt-in if you want, can't you? The only problem is that if there are more adults in a household, and only some of them wants to opt-in.
You are right, but the newly revealed indices suggests that your personal data are not collected primarily from the cloud providers after they arrived to the destination (like the spy agency would enter the Gmail repository through a backdoor and vacuum out all the data), rather, the whole (or most of) Internet traffic is monitored on the main routers and everything collected. Only thing which is not yet clear (at least to my knowledge), how much is this being done outside of U.S.
From this perspective, boycotting US based cloud providers is probably a reasonable thing to do, but it is not clear if this will results in less of your personal data being collected, if you just switch the provider. For example, I noticed it is now popular to switch from Gmail to other providers like fastmail.fm - I'm really not sure if this would be helpful at all.
What I didn't know is that according to the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, the "Tank Man" life ended that day, when he ran out in front of another column of tanks from a different unit, which didn't stop and smashed him...Wei got this information from his former classmate, who was a commander of that tank column on the iconic photo.
I believe he is talking about the web's equivalent of newspaper or magazine. Like whole magazine published as a website, where users would pay for each "issue" or monthly access. This model doesn't work, with maybe a few very rare exceptions.
I am also a redditor and some of the subreddits are a really high-quality communities. What I don't understand is, why the reddit owners allow even the most disgusting and inhumane stuff to be posted, as long as it isn't illegal.
I am not sure if it is just because of the personal preference of the owners, or they do not want to waste time with enforcing at least basic civility, or is it some inherent part of the reddit's success that anything not illegal is allowed to be posted there?
It is actually an interesting moral question: Is someone allowed to publicly deanonymize someone else?
Congratulation, good work! Anyway, the question was about passive income...I suppose you have to do a bit of marketing, user support, thinking about new features, etc...isn't it then just a business?
The design is quite ok for me, but what about the provided value?
I skimmed through the links, and I saw many of them already, on other social sites I visit, I mean HN, Techmeme and reddit. What would draw me to digg could be a community of great commenters, like one on slashdot, which would add value by providing insightful/funny commentary. Without that, it's a bit redundant to me.
I am currently going through this exercise, and here's what I done:
1) Chrome -> Firefox (Firefox 9 is surprisingly snappy, seems to me like a perfectly sensible alternative)
2) Search -> https://duckduckgo.com/lite - doesn't even show your query string in the URL. BUT: Works only in general search terms, not for specific (long) queries. There, Google is still unavoidable, it seems. But for 90% of my searches, DDG is perfecly OK.
3) Zoner instead of Picasa and zonerama.com instead of Photos in G+. [zonerama gives 2GB for free]
4) GMail: I found Hotmail to be adequate, but recently I switched to paying for my own webhosting, so I don't use free email anymore.
5) Google Calendar/Tasks -> Toodledo.com
6) Google Analytics,Adsense -> don't know...haven't found alternative yet.
In mu current understanding, it is not a problem to use some of the Google services, if one found them to be the best. What one should avoid, in my opinion, is to register account with Google and attach one's real-life identity to it. I did it in the past, and now consider it a big mistake of mine. I must say that I am still amazed so many people are ok with that.