after the election screw-ups in 2000, a Pew poll found that 68% of dems and68% of repubs. didn't want or trust computers being involved w/elections, Congress' response was the "help America vote act", which mandates computerized voting. Some impoverished precincts around the country are hard put to pay thousands of $ for these machines, and their attendant costs, yet they are being barred from using the old equipment,{the old reliable, easy to verify, low-tech equipment}. Are elections just a matter of trusting the software designers anymore ?

"Man of the Year" starring Robin Williams had a good take on electronic voting even though it was a Hollywood rant against conservatives.Some designer or hacker could mess things up.I like the line from an Ian Tyson(western artist)song.Technology was gonna set us free but that ain't the way it turned out to be.A little bit of leisure is gettin harder and harder to find.

yeah, Amen to that,Brian...where IS all that leisure time promised? What I see is more hours worked and diminished security for the worker...slaves, at least, had housing,health care,and were well fed...back to the touchy- feely-screen voting thing, didya know, that in '04,Diebold, the largest maker of voting machines,{and "pioneer" contributor to the bush/cheney ticket}, had two software guys for the entire country's machines, they both had served time for computer fraud. this is in the congressional record,as it came up during rep. Conyer's hearings on the stolen Ohio votes...again I'll ask, should we trust this voting system that's been forced on us, and what was wrong the old ones? were the results too slow coming in? was there any real debate on this transition? and finally, am I freakin' paranoid? {don't pull any punches,Brian.}

In general I think anything we use over and over again is useful if just for the fact that it has proven useful so often. New technology does the same thing. If it is inneffective or a waste of time it will not be accepted or used widely.

Most technology these days is designed to help us communicate faster and easier with each other. That is never a bad thing. The more people talk the more ideas,thoughts and information is spread around. So yes new technology is useful, the parts that are not will be tossed aside into the trash pile.

Swifty, if I hyad answered your question yesterday I would have said yes.Since then I watched a DVD by Aaron Russo called America:Freedom to Facism.It started out as a pursuit to find the law that says we are to be taxed on our income(it doesn't exist)and turned into something I found very disturbing.Paranoid?Maybe not.