Digital Democracy

ANY PROBLEM CAN BE SOLVED by throwing enough computers at it. Including America's ballot woes. I say we computerize the whole thing as soon as possible. I don't mind the uncertainty and random outcomes of paper ballots, but they take too long to tabulate. Anything that reduces Dan Rather's election-night airtime is good. 

One replacement for paper ballots is the Hart InterCivic's eSlate. Voters can accidentally choose Buchanan by rotating a wheel. Though Florida voters just might punch holes in the LCD screen to mark their votes, it still beats paper. 

Meanwhile, Estonia is way ahead of the U.S. The country this week began enacting laws to allow electronic Internet voting. They plan to test it in one precinct in 2002, then roll it out nationwide later on. 

(ALSO: I hope you like the new design. I've also created a new web site for the newsletter. It's clean, simple and totally free of cookies, Flash animations and unneeded clutter. Let me know how you like it! And remember: Forward to a friend!)

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Cell Phones Kill After All
European customs agents recently nabbed illegal 22-caliber pistols disguised as cell phones. Bullets are shot from the antenna when pressing any number between 5 and 8. Probably originating in Yugoslavia, cell phone guns have been found in Amsterdam, Slovenia and elsewhere. Though no cell guns have turned up in North America, you can expect them to be available at K-Mart for $49.95 any day now. This story proves that life imitates Japanese TV commercials. 

2001: A Space Junk Odyssey
As if there isn't enough space trash already -- including Timothy Leery's ashes and Mir -- we keep sending more. A DNA sample from what's left of Arthur C. Clarke's hair, along with messages and other stuff from 55,000 others, will be shot into deep space as a message from earth (presumably that message is, "we're nuts -- stay away!"). Meanwhile, aerospace researcher Dennis Wingo is proposing we litter the heavens with Apple G4 Macintosh Cubes. The idea is to toss 544 Cubes, sporting solar panels and long-range Airport cards, and one Mac server out the window of the Space Shuttle. The Cubes would serve as yet another low earth orbit network for global Internet access. The reason? To save money. The initial program would cost just $10 million, instead of the billions it would normally cost for such a big Apple promotion. 

Glow-In-the-Dark Germans
A German commission investigating the former East German secret police has discovered evidence that Stasi agents secretly "tagged" dissidents during the 1970s and 1980s with highly radioactive chemicals so they could be tracked using special Geiger counters. The devices silently vibrated like your cell phone whenever a marked citizen was near. Some East German prisons featured non-medical X-Ray machines most likely used to give prisoners that "special glow" before releasing them. Another Stasi trick was to treat the floors of known meeting places of pro-democracy dissidents so that all who attended meetings could be tracked. The Stasi also irradiated West German money to keep tabs on where it went and who touched it. Files show that the Stasi believed that if more than one irradiated bill were kept in a man's pants pockets, the radiation was enough to make him infertile.

Webmaster, Webmaster Make Me a Match
Indian mothers are embracing the Internet to turbo charge the process of arranging marriages for their eligible children. Web sites like cyberproposal.com and Indianmarriages.com facilitate the search for suitable mates, especially for Indian professionals abroad who seek a fresh supply of Indians. Visitors typically set up profiles, which can be searched for key attributes like caste, income and education. Though many in the west believe arranged marriages to be a thing of the past, a Family Planning Association of India survey claims that 60 percent of urban Indians between the ages of 15 and 29 prefer arranged marriages. And a Mike's List survey shows that 100% of Indian mothers prefer arranged marriages. 

Silicon Valley Nice Place to Work, but ...
An American Electronics Association study this week confirmed what we already know: Silicon Valley is a technology job creation machine, but a lousy place to live. The study broke down facts by city, rather than region (San Jose is the big Silicon Valley city). San Jose boasts 253,000 technology jobs, and the creation of 40% of all new tech jobs in the country each year, but didn't even show in the categories of best paying tech cities (Seattle), quality of life (Boulder), shortest commute times (Boise), or most affordable (Oklahoma City). I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read that Oklahoma City, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Melbourne (Florida) and San Antonio all had median housing prices of less than $92,000 in 1999 (the median in Silicon Valley is $540,000). Another poll by the Field Research Corporation revealed that more Silicon Valley residents have Internet access than any region on earth, a whopping 81% of area people are connected. The same poll also found that 43% are most concerned about the cost of housing -- double the percentage from last year. 

Hollywood Spy
Proof that Hollywood is incapable of new ideas, filming begins today in a $200 million Spiderman epic, starring Tobey Maquire (the reluctant abortionist in Ciderhouse Rules) as Spiderman, Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin and Kirsten Dunst as the token female. Meanwhile, Tron director Steven Lisberger is working on the second draft of a Tron 2.0 script, which may involve a hacker who physically enters the Internet to pull off a big hack (yawn!). Tom Cruise is rumored to be pursuing "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" director Ang Lee to direct a Mission Impossible 3 (I'll gouge my eyes out only after confirming this rumor). There's already a trailer for the recycled version of Rollerball  And the final insult: A new Planet of the Apes movie is in full production, as these illegal spy photos reveal.

Follow-Up
I complained bitterly in Mike's List #6 that web sites were banned and actively censored by the International Olympic Committee when covering the games. But the IOC announced this week that some sites (those with deep pockets who suck up to the ICO) will be allowed to cover the Salt Lake City games. The IOC is sticking with its ban on transmitting video or audio reports over the web from Olympic venues. 

Reader Web Site of the Week
The Clip features "the world's best belt clips and accessories." Check it out. 

(If you'd like to get YOUR web site listed, go here.) 

Mike's List o' Crazy Gadgets
1. Cell phone joystick

2. Cell phone TV

3. Cell phone ATM card

4. Space Ants

Mike's List o' Wacky Web Sites
1. Who Would Buy That? - You won't believe what some people actually purchase on eBay. 

2. The Jargonator - Paste in a press release and the Jargonator will translate it into English. 

3. Boogie Bass Hack - You know those annoying singing trophy fish? Here's a web site that tells you how to hack into their sound systems and add your own audio. 

4. The Degree Confluence Project - A site that exists to take a picture of every point on earth where longitude and latitude lines cross. Why? I have no idea. 

Mike's List o' Numbers
1. 153,844,012 - Number of Americans with access to the Internet in November, 2000 (Nielsen/Netratings). 

2. 95,353,868 - Number of Americans who actually went online in November, 2000 (Nielsen/Netratings). 

3. 15 - The number of passwords used daily by average web users (Forrester Research Inc.)

4. 50% - Approximate percentage of tech support calls to web businesses asking "What's my password?" 

5. 8% - Number of New York men who say they have less sex because of the amount of time spent playing with their "gadgets." (Youth Intelligence for Playboy Magazine)

Mike's List o' Required Reading
1. NSA Abandons Wonderous Stuff
By Laura Sullivan
SunSpot.Net

2. New Age Bidding: Against Computers, Humans Usually Lose
By Kenneth Chang
New York Times

3. China Planning Own Internet
Associated Press

4. Microsoft’s Cunning Plan
The Economist 

5. In the Bad Books
Beyond 2000

6. The Microsoft Computer? 
By John C. Dvorak 
Forbes.com

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