Although it may be a bit scary to imagine, these theories mentioned below could happen.

These changes can be considered useful or catastrophic depending on our particular viewpoints. Whatever the consensus may be, we should all be ready!

1. The United States Post Office. Can you imagine a world without our mail service? This enterprise has become so deep in debt that there is absolutely no way to continue the way they are. Computerized e-mails, Fed-Ex, and UPS have taken away many of the post office’s means of money: their customers! Most of the things you receive in the mail today are considered junk or random advertisements.

2. The Check. Large countries with complicated infrastructure are making plans to do away with checks by at most the year 2018. Financial practices lose millions of dollars a year processing and sorting checks. Credit card payments and Internet purchases will inevitably amount to death of the paper check as we know it. The Post Office will also take another hit by the loss of checks: much of their business now stems from delivering checks!

3. The Newspaper. Members of the younger generations just do not read the paper like past generations have. Few and far between are they signed up for a daily subscription. The newspaper may die out just as the milk delivery man and the laundry delivery services have. For those who enjoy reading the news online, it will soon be a paid service. The rise in availability of Internet-ready equipment and online readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine writers and publishers to create alliances. They have been working with big names such as Apple, Amazon, and the many cellular phone organizations to develop a system for paid-subscription services.

I’d like to offer a “review” of sorts of my experience with Private Proxy – a software services company that provides anonymous server proxy protection.  First a bit of background.  I’m what you might call a “retail” user of the internet – I don’t have a web site of my own, I don’t try to create traffic on someone else’s website by “hitting” it many times, etc., my wife and I simply “use” the internet for email, surfing, banking, communication with family through Facebook, Google, etc.  We have 4 computers in the house (they accumulate over time like dust bunnies) and we both use the internet often through the day and often at the same time.

Over the past month or so there have been a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, that frankly, scared the bejeezus out of us.  We knew that surfing the internet exposes us to identity theft and that third parties of all kinds can, do, and are probably in some cases legally required (like our ISP) to monitor all our online activities.  Now we believe our internet use is a private matter (doesn’t everyone?).  And we don’t feel that by tracking our internet preferences third parties can “better” market us through more targeted advertising to create a “better” internet experience for us.  Call us old fashioned but we would rather make those choices for ourselves – privately.  The WSJ articles made clear that ANY internet usage by an individual can both expose that user to invasions of privacy and outright dangerous – like going to a gun fight with only a knife.  All this got us thinking about ways to protect ourselves.