7-8 year-olds typically don't have Facebook, Blogger, or any other personal presence on the web at that age. Don't underestimate the inspirational power of creation. A simple drawing or watercolor painting from scratch is much more likely to inspire a young person to take an interest in art than tracing a comic book or coloring in a coloring book. Sure it may not look as great as what they're exposed to out in the world, but it's completely their own, and that can be powerful.

I think you hit on a lot of great points here - I was 9 when I wrote my first AppleSoft BASIC programs on an Apple IIe on loan from my school. Prompting for input and doing simple arithmetic with somebody's age was ok, but the thing that had me hooked was writing a looping program that drew random boxes and lines in random colors on the screen indefinitely. The thing that really made that great was that at the time (1990-ish) those text prompts and colored lines and boxes weren't visually that far from "state of the art" games like Oregon Trail. It made me feel that at 9 years old, I wasn't that far from mastering all that a computer could do. Nowadays, the bar is set much higher. Kids grow up with Playstation 3 games that are rendered in near-lifelike detail with speech and making the mental jump from your first dozen-line program to something like that is just huge. I've been writing web/DB business applications for 7 years now as part of my job (and have been a computer geek for more than 20 years) and even I have a hard time grasping what goes into creating an A-list console game. The rift between a first program and something useful and/or impressive has unfortunately grown exponentially along with Moore's Law and that spark of inspiration that so many of us experienced in the early stages of personal computing is becoming more and more elusive.

I think the one saving grace is the relative ease with which you can develop and publish a real working website. It may not compare to top sites in terms of design and functionality, but it is conceivable that a young person could figure out enough HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (probably with a little "help" from the web and Ctrl+C) and actually create something from nothing. More importantly, they can easily share their accomplishment with others by just emailing a link or posting it on Facebook and get the encouragement they need to inspire them to go further.

So after my long nostalgic diatribe, my real contribution to the conversation is this: Give them a crash course on HTML (tags, links, styles, etc.) and using input from the class, collaboratively build a simple webpage. Include a photo of the class, a link or two, some student-chosen colors or font style elements, and **publish it to the web, giving the students the link to show their friends and family**. If they can go home to mom and dad and say "hey, look what I helped to make!" I think you have a pretty good chance of inspiring at least a few of them to explore more.

With smartphones, it comes down to a battle between advanced ("hacker") customers and the megacorp wireless carriers. For example, from Motorola's perspective, Verizon is the primary customer. Joe Smartphoneuser comes second at best. The carriers have a vested interest in maintaining control over the devices, especially when they do underhanded things like charge extra for the same data bandwidth depending on whether it's consumed by the phone or by a tethered laptop. Losing that control means losing significant (zero-cost) revenue and they communicate this interest to phone manufacturers, threatening not to carry their devices if they're too easy to circumvent. The flipside of the coin is the small minority of customers who may choose a different phone or different carrier because they like rooting their devices or side-stepping certain carrier-imposed software or controls. This group's buying power and influence over a phone manufacturer is dwarfed by that of any of the major carriers. It's dollars and cents, plain and simple.

Having seen this play out in the smartphone world, I won't be too surprised to see it continue with tablets. The one hope is that since not all tablets are tied to a wireless carrier, the manufacturers won't be handcuffed when it comes to listening to and responding to customer wants and needs. There's no pressure from wireless carriers for tablet makers to lock-down their devices if they're WiFi only.

The Average Joe doesn't understand SSL or public key encryption yet they happily fork over their most personal information to Amazon for the latest paperback or HDTV as long as they see the little padlock icon on their browser.

Adoption will definitely be slow at first like it was with eCommerce but once it hits critical mass and the safety and security of the system is common knowledge (like the padlock icon) it will take off exponentially. Of course all of this assumes that it is implemented and maintained in a way that avoids serious pitfalls and scandals that undermine public opinion.

My mistake, thanks for the info. That simple change would go a long way to reducing voter fraud here in the US, but it has yet to be implemented despite the logic behind it.

Yes, online voting is a challenge to get right, but definitely not an impossibility and should not be written-off right away. If you showed up a the polls to find that somebody had already signed the little book and voted in your place, you'd do something about it. Wouldn't you do the same with online voting?

There is essentially no verification that the voter is who they claim to be at physical polls - just show up and sign the little book (right next to the easily copied sample signature). I still don't understand how this is considered enough to validate a vote.

Billions of dollars in tax revenue/refunds are processed online each year. One fairly straightforward (and arguably much more robust) way to verify voters is to use tax information. When e-filing taxes, one or two numbers from the previous year's return is required as a form of verification. Centralizing the voting computer(s) into a secure data center like the IRS's consolidates the risk of getting hacked. Yes, it's a single point of failure as opposed to hundreds of thousands of individual electronic or paper voting machines, but it can be better controlled and intrusions can be more easily detected. In the case of trojans on voters' computers stealing individual votes - if your computer is infected, you've probably got bigger things to worry about (like your bank accounts and identity).

All of the usual avenues of buying votes and intimidating voters can and will still happen. I don't think that moving voting to the privacy of one's home (as opposed to the privacy of the voting booth) will have an appreciable effect.

Online voting would also potentially save a significant amount of money in the form of polling location costs, transportation costs, ballot counting costs, lost time/wages for voters, lost productivity for employers who provide time off to vote, etc.

I fully acknowledge that there are inherent challenges, but the potential benefits are also quite significant. If implemented by a group of smart people (academics, motivated by pride in democracy, not corporations motivated by political and fiscal gains) and overseen by anybody who cares to look (Open Source the whole thing) I think there is a great chance of success.

It's got electrolytes!

Seriously though, I think the enlightened people who "know better" still need to respect the idea of pure democracy. If your country shifts toward a majority of people supporting something that you fundamentally disagree with, then you need to either try to shift the balance back to your perspective, or consider changing your allegiance to another country whose values are more in line with your own. Corrupting democracy by forcing something on people despite their votes because "it's for their own good" is a slippery slope that leads to dictatorship.

NB: the "you"s in the previous paragraph are not directed to the author of the parent, I just loved Idiocracy and chose to reply to this thread with my 2 cents

Here in the US, Verizon operates a CDMA network (different chips, different frequencies, no SIM card). The other big carrier, AT&T, has a GSM network (similar to Europe, Asia, and most of the rest of the world) and it is often trivially easy to "unlock" a phone with a software hack that will allow you to just stick in a competitors SIM. With Verizon, your only other big national option is Sprint since they also use CDMA.

Sell it on eBay for more than what I paid for it, use some of the proceeds to buy a discounted phone on another carrier (or Verizon even). Or you can even keep the phone and just re-activate it on Verizon as a month-to-month customer. Contract changes are essentially a get-out-of-ETF-free-card. The carriers know this and don't exercise the option very often - they'd rather have you finish out your contract on the old terms and hook you into the new terms when you re-up. If you're given the opportunity, you might as well use it, even if the changes aren't so bad that you're forced to switch carriers.

Contracts and activation fees are a relic of the early "mobile phone" days when the carriers actually had to so some significant work to get your new line provisioned across all of the towers on their network and roaming charges took months to hit the books. Today that can be accomplished by a sales person at the wireless store with a click of a mouse. The carriers haven't voluntarily given up their unnecessary anti-competitive contracts so you shouldn't feel bad about taking advantage of any opportunities those oppressive contracts may offer you as a consumer.