Some years ago, my college roomate asked me an interesting question about our current system of taxation. He was wondering if the democracy that we have would improve if the taxed citizens were allowed to choose where the money went. They would pick the important programs by giving a certain percentage of their tax money to different government agencies. A new tax form would have to be devised that would allow the paying public to allot a percent of their money to different departments of...

Why have a house and senate? Suppose legislation was to be brought to the voting public instead of debated and voted on in the house and senate. With the internet being what it is today, why do we need elected representatives to vote on laws on our behalf when we now have a level of technology that can enable us to vote for ourselves? Maybe a certain day of every month could be devised to vote on, like for example the second Thursdays of every month. Legislators could make the bills to be...

I would like to introduce an idea that I have had for an application for the internet to be used for. There are several different terms for this idea from internet brain storming to collective creating to global reasoning. The general idea is to use the internet to bring up a host of ideas about any type of engineering problem that has confounded the experts and may need an outsiders perspective to solve the problem (thinking out of the box). The goal would be to introduce specific...