[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in orde

[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites. Does this really seem so hard to believe? I'm one of the developers for a certain popular online video game. One time, I posted my personal email to the game's forums... it was along the lines of "If you happen to reproduce [certain really hard to reproduce problem], please type [console command] and send the results to [email address]". That kind of thing. Well, one of the fans managed to trace my name -> my email -> my Hacker News profile -> my hacker news comments, then started copy-pasting random things I had written from HN to the game's IRC channel. I didn't really mind... it was just very weird. But what if I were in an alternate reality, and I had said some really insane things on my HN account, like, say, C/C++ really isn't that terrible? You know, something absolutely crazy. Then an employer traced my name -> my email -> my Hacker News profile -> my insane comments. Now a potential employer has another data point about whether to hire me, one that I didn't necessarily want him to have. So I can see why it would potentially it would potentially be very useful to have a mechanism to very easily legally change your name. I've never looked into how to do that, since I have no reason to, but I assume it's probably difficult, or doesn't catch everything, or causes you headaches down the road, etc.