Democracy and Technology

In the earlier days of American Democracy, each public representative represented tens of thousands of people. He could find the opinion of the people on any topic by holding a few town hall meetings.

As populations grew, it became difficult for them to know the opinion of people on specific topics.

Now, technology and biometry has made available the tools where representatives can get an opinion and get a vote from their constituents using internet or text messages, before casting their own vote. They still might make their own decisions but can get a feeling of what the constituents feel about a topic.

I suspect many internet based companies to come up with such tools.

replacement of QWERTY keyboard

The original QWERTY keyboard was designed for mechanical printers. It was designed to keep the vowels away from your index fingers and closer to your pinky fingers, so you are forced to type slowly, thus avoiding any mechanical jams from overlap of typebars.

With Electronic keyboards of personal computers, alternate more ergonomic keyboard layouts can be made popular with software to switch between the 2 keyboard layouts.

These would be more efficient and might help in alleviating carpel-tunnnel type syndromes.