A BETTER IDEA (C)1998 Alan M. Schwartz (Tip of the hat to B. Reed, J. Logatan, K. Foster, J. Popelish for grinding Matlab, Python, and MathCad.) Java was first brought forth to program kitchen appliances. Java applets now pestilently infest the World Wide Web (that singular conceptus whose three letter abbreviation has three times as many syllables as its whole words summed). Data transfer constipates as Mickeysoft Windoze' scourge of icons vigorously scratching their asses and exhibiting animated clonic fits subsumes entire Merced microprocessors planetwide. In the spirit of government oversight, that any bad idea vies 5% closer to grace through doubling its budget, a better future awaits. Telephones began as clunky multipartite objects wired into walls. Sleek wireless cell telephony blankets the Earth, from Botswana to Pacoima, immune to copper cable thieves and the homeless urinating into public telephone coin return slots. For a mere pittance one can snare global communication, and it you. Coded cell feedback allows triangulation and localization of any transmitter, soon to directly interface with the Global Positioning Satellite system. Nobody need ever again be lost, or lost to State intendance. A better future is aborning. What debasements source inchoate sin and sedition? US penal systems reveal the futility of punishing 4% of the population with gratis three square meals/day, air conditioning, cable TV, recreational facilities, recreational pharmaceuticals, and free habitation. Ditto Welfare. A child is the aggregate of its experiences. If an infant could be - microsecond to microsecond through adulthood - subject to only good thought, thoughtcrime would be expunged within a generation or two, one way or another. In earlier times this required 90% of the population continuously surveilling the remaining 10%, and whom could we trust? The future is no longer state of the art. Six trillion people populate Earth. If each hoards 1000 consequential chattels there is a trifling array of six quadrillion (15,50F,7DC,A70,000 hexadecimal) objects hewn into the pervasive State Web. Do you have any idea how much surplus RAM floods our planet? No problem. Chip in everything, give it cell addresses, Web addresses, a central server, and be done with it. Every toaster, every Barbie and GI Joe, every television set and VCR, every adult toy can embrace its owner with jackbooted State compassion 24 hours/day. Blue collar crime will be ended. No object of value will be truant lest a Federal endictment and summary judgement swiftly follow. National Security Agency pattern recognition software intercepts and interprets for Official concern all analog and digital; wireless, wired, and fiberoptic traffic in North America. The NSA's global surveillance network, Echelon, assays all European email, telephone, and fax (Wired 6.06 106 (1998)). Communicate a death threat against the President and the Secret Service will be on you like stink on the homeless. (Matters of State like India and Pakistan popping a dozen nukes underground to rattle each other's cages in mid-1998 proceed unnoticed.) Every human could be unceasingly monitored down to heartbeat and respiration for the cost of building our obsolete B-1 bomber fleet. Every child could be saved with good thought, and only certified and credentialed molesters allowed to operate. (Call it another Federal enforcement pseudopod - the War on Bad Childhood.) Data physical storage requirements would be met by military surplus equipment hangars in Bell, California, current contents to be dumped in the Mariana Trench (as a cultural anthropolgical benchmark) or written off as a data glitch. The future has been here for years! PETtrac/AVID already supplies radio-addressable, implantable encapsulated chip monitors the size of rice grains for animals. Employees burdened by their smard ID badges could be liberated by a tiny forearm bump. Then, as with our Social Security numbers not being a valid mode of identification and used for that very purpose at every turn, everybody gets an implant suite at birth or retrofitted, as a humanitarian gesture, by law. America would be saved! Your wallet or purse bulging with cards, slips, and licenses would be emptied at a stroke, nor would you need money. All would be infallably handled and continuously monitored by the State through your chipset. The Most Wanted list vanishes overnight. Nobody could enter a Smart Doorway without being fingered. Undocumented miscreants would be free fire zones for constabulary and concerned citizens alike (their weapons chipped into the system, of course). If you are bad, there might be technical difficulties. I suggest the Mickeysoft Windows environment. It is free of all bugs, fast, compact, efficient, utterly secure against intrusion, and never crashes. We are from the government. We are here to help ourselves to you. We have come for a piece of all mankind.