January 2001 - Vol. 44 No. 1

January 2001 issue cover image

Features

Opinion

Editorial

A new U.S. president was named last night. The pronouncement came 36 nights after the election took place and what occurred between then and now will be dissected for decades to come. Countless words—in every language—have been written on this unprecedented race for the U.S. presidency, and you can bet this is just a warm-up […]
News

News Track

The U.S. Copyright Office endorsed a new federal law, a provision of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that makes it illegal to break the technological safeguards for books, movies, and music distributed in digital form. The ruling was a defeat for several constituencies—including universities, libraries, and computer programmers—that had argued the law should preserve […]
Research and Advances

Democracy in an It-Framed Society: Introduction

Interest in the use of computers for improving a democracy widely considered decayed seems to be increasing with the growing use of the Internet. Indeed, a recent AltaVista search for "electronic democracy" yielded well over 5,000 pages. Much of this material discusses projects trying to make an impact on democratic practices. Electronic democracy, sometimes teledemocracy […]
Research and Advances

Is Online Democracy in the Eu For Professionals Only?

An essential part of democracy is the debate. In a thin democracy (see Åström's article in this section), the elected representatives do the debating. This is not only for ideological reasons, but also for practical reasons. It was relatively easy to gather citizens at agoras in ancient Athens and create dialogue, but harder to do so with millions of citizens over a large territory.
Research and Advances

Icts, Bureaucracies, and the Future of Democracy

Democracy theory is in need of a new foundation. The existing paradigm is that people’s representation—by parliamentarians, members of Congress, or local councillors—is a democratic arrangement that is, at best, second best. The perceived weaknesses of existing democratic arrangements are that members of the representative assemblies reflect partisan interests under the guise of the general […]
Opinion

Are Handheld Viruses a Significant Threat?

Since its introduction in 1997, the Palm line of handheld computers has become a popular product choice, with many millions of units sold worldwide. A large number of third-party applications exist, from personal organizer programs to spreadsheet applications, email, and Web browser clients. Many of these programs are low-cost shareware, available for downloading from individual […]

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