Changing your last name is a reasonably straightforward process in most countries, because women usually do it when they get married. The first name is a bit more difficult, but if you have appropriate and reasonable reasons, it can be changed.
That's of course an interesting point, but I don't think it would significantly change the way the discussions are currently held. That's because most people would not go clicking through every account before answering. See for example the cpercival putnam thread.
And when in fact, the credentials of the person are know, it would only raise the bar for the discussion. If, for example, some famous lawyer makes a long comment about the various legal aspects of a particular incident, and most people know it's a famous lawyer, then replies that diagree will be by people who are qualified to disagree, thus raising the bar. If johnny12 makes the same statement, a lot of people with very little knowledge would argue, and it would lead to a poorer and longer discussion.
Discussion can indeed be liberated by making comments anonymous, but this does not scale. You are going to lose either way - either you lose by making the society increasingly more formal, or you lose by making the society less formal. The second comes automatically as it grows. Working towards making it formal will only work against the informality, maintaining an equilibrium, in my opinion.
The problem of big names dominating the discussion is a different problem, but it's a better problem than that of nobodies shouting down everyone else.
Don't you get it? Anonymous and non-anonymous comments have equal ranking. The point of my system is just to encourage most people to be non-anonymous. This means that the vast majority of comments will stay civil, and when most comments are civil, the tone will tend to stay that way. If you need to make commentary on drug policy or your salary, then simply make an anonymous account and say all you want to say. There is no penalty to that.
That's why I believe there should be no real disadvantage to using an anonymous account, and no way of telling in the comments if a comment is anonymous or not. All it does is encourage people to link their real life account in a behind-the-scenes manner, which will raise the general discourse level.
I believe that the less anonymous a forum like this is, the more polite it will be. You have said you want people to speak to each other here as they would in the real world: well, I believe the more strongly you tie their real world identity to their account here, the more polite they would be.
My suggestion, similar to that experiment in the past, and similar to twitter, add a "verified user" badge in the users profile. However, to become verified requires a simple step: add a link to your facebook, linkedin or xing profile. Any already verified user can then verify you.
Non-verified users then have a very minor voting hit, for example a comment karma cap at 50 or so.
This will encourage people to associate their real life accounts with their hacker news accounts, and will result in conversation that more accurately reflects what one would say in real life.
The fundamental dynamics of the site would not change, since the advantage to being verified are not that major.
Because I believe in china, the chinese government and the chinese system. I will defend what I believe in, even though it's obviously shared by very few people here.
I think it would be unusual if I did not defend something I believe in.
And yes, you may think I am wrong, but don't forget that _I_ think you are wrong. What's the difference? If this where a chinese board, you would be the one in the minority.
It's easy to shut down the site when you are losing the search game to local competition.
In any case, even though I find freedom of speech to be necessary and encouraged, I do not think that Google is right to imply in this blog post that the Chinese government is behind the attacks.