Military Technology - the Special K Experiment 

A drug known on the streets as Special K (Ketamine) is said by its users to produce out-of-body experiences. While these are most likely just hallucinations it wouldn't be hard to test. Just ask some soldiers to volunteer for a test. Give them the drug and if they report an out-of-boy experience have them say what they saw on a computer screen facing away from them. If by some weird chance people really could throw their consciousness this way, sort of like ventriloquists throwing their voices, then it would be a handy tool for the military to have. They have send soldiers in their out-of-body state to search buildings and report back where ambushes had been laid (among many other things).

Political Promises Scoreboard 

This would simply be a web site where each elected official's promises were stated and flagged showing whether they were kept, broken, in-process or inactive. A percentage based on kept divided by (kept + broken) would give us a fairly accurate estimate of their reliability when re-election time comes around.

Create a Central Portal for Government Idea Banks 

If we're not going to create a National Idea Bank we should at least make the idea banks that are being maintained by various agencies like the Dept of Homeland Security, TSA, etc.. more easily accessible. (A centralized portal might actually become the de facto national idea bank after awhile.)

World of Warcraft Psychiatrists  

An avatar for spotting dangerous personalities. This idea is for a set of computerized avatars to be sent into some of the more violent online games in search of gamers who fit the profile of someone who might lose track of the distinction between the game world and the real world and go out on a shooting spree like some young people have done recently. When one of these personalities was found they'd be flagged in the real world for a hands-off analysis. An avatar under the control of an actual psychiatrist might also be sent to meet with that person in the game to perhaps do a little subtle counselling. Spotting one or two of these people in the game world might save a few lives in the real world.

Helmet Alarms 

The U.S. Army is currently researching the idea of creating helmets that can automatically pick up short thought command sequences to be relayed from one soldier to another without any visible motion. Ignoring the possibility of false commands being transmitted into the data stream for a minute, another version of these helmets could be put into production fairly fast. This version would just monitor the brain waves associated with sleepiness and shout 'WAKE UP SOLDIER' into an earpiece linked to the helmet. If we didn't want to take the blunt instrument
approach, a soldier's musical preferences could be programmed into the helmet. When the helmet sensed the soldier was getting overly nervous it would play some soothing melody; if it sensed they were getting bored or sleepy it would play an uptempo number.

** Note: This wouldn't be like the nod-off alarms that some truck drivers use. If the soldier started to nod off in the middle of the night it might be too late. We need them wide awake the whole time.

Self-Changing Lightbulbs 

Since the government has already accepted the principle that it's okay to take an ownership stake in companies for the common good (GM, the banks, etc...) it should take a stake in companies where, with a little support, new products could be brought to market, giving the government a share of the profits to help pay down the debt. Buying a stake in a lightbulb manufacturing company and helping it develop the self-changing lightbulb is one example of how this could work.

The self-changing lightbulb would have a tiny Ferris Wheel of tungsten filaments in it. When one filament burned out then the bulb, sensing the connection had been broken, would simply turn the wheel until the next filament on the wheel was connected. We'd still have to change the bulbs now and then but much less often (10 times less frequently if there were 10 filaments on the wheel). I'd be willing to pay a little more for this kind of bulb because it's a pain changing the outdoor lights when they burn out. An added bonus from this particular idea would be its effect on the environment - the disposal problem posed by the newest generation of long-lasting bulbs would simply go away.

Note: The electricity supplied to the bulb is what would also be used to turn the wheel when required.

Mixed Martial Arts Rugby 

When in Rome do as the Romans did... In this case the idea would be to create a public-private partnership that promoted the sport of Mixed Martial Arts Rugby and split the profits evenly, the private side using its profits for whatever it wanted to and the public side using its profits to pay down the debt.

The sport itself would combine the basic rules of rugby with the more primitive rules of mixed martial arts tournaments. Basically teams would be able to kick the crap out of each other on their way towards scoring a goal. It wouldn't be a game totally lacking any element of strategy though. For instance, each team would have to decide whether to keep all of their players concentrating on moving the ball or give some of them the task of trying to put opposing players into submission holds (which would remove those who submitted from the field and give the team who won the submission a numbers advantage).

I Almost Like Him or Her 

A lot of times when I vote I choose whoever\\'s platform comes closest to my preferences. The problem with this approach is that there might be one or two significant issues that I really really disagree with them on. What I\\'d like to do is be able to vote on major policy issues at the same time. That way if I\\'m in the majority and we elect candidate X then the winner would be able to see which policies we really don\\'t care for. If enough of us hated a specific policy then maybe the winner would change their position on it, making them even more favorable from our point of view.

Open Government Dialogue 

I posted this as a comment but decided it really needed to be out front where people will notice it. So here it is.

Here's an interesting side note. At this time 14,161 people have registered on this forum. Out of all those members 10 members have contributed more than 10 percent of the ideas. If you categorize the ideas, counting all the birth control ones as a single idea for example, then those 10 members have contributed a much higher percentage of the ideas. So while it might look like the President is getting a significant amount of input it really boils down to probably about a couple of dozen people speaking up.

Tower of Babel for Gangs 

Gangs in prison, and elsewhere, have all sorts if tattoos showing which gang they're affiliated with. We should add a new intake procedure at all prisons that says if you have a tattoo for any gang anywhere on your skin then you'll get free tattoos from several other gangs added to your skin. This could cause a tattoo arms race, with prisoners trying to convert the new symbols into some other sort of picture (probably some sort of insult). The remedy to that would be to simply add the same embellishment to the insignia they already have on their skin for their own gang.

Shortcut to my ideas 

It might be easier to just put a link to my ideas here instead of adding each one individually again. Here's the link - http://www.fastbreed.com/#Random

National Idea Bank (proposed by Florida not me)  

This is what we really need - an idea bank that the government can draw inspiration from. A bill to create one was passed in the Florida House but didn't make it through the Senate. Since we're talking about a National Idea Bank it seems like the U.S. government should really be the entity that supports the idea.

Survey 

I guess I misunderstood the purpose of this site so I only have myself to blame for feeling more depressed than excited about my experience. Depression translates into less participation of course. It would be interesting to take a survey to find out how each participant - i.e. did this experience increase or decrease the feeling that they were really participating in a dialogue that would be read by the President. This idea could easily serve as that survey. 'Looks promising' means you think your comments will be read (positive reinforcement); voting the other direction would mean you felt it was a waste of time and would be less enthusiastic in participating in the next state. I don't mind starting the survey off with my vote - it's a negative for me (and I'm definitely not one of the birth certificate ranters).

I wish I could remove one of my ideas. 

Is there a way to do that (aside from sending an email to the moderators, which I've already done)?

Public Service Inventions 

A lot of times I have an idea for an invention that other people might find useful but don't have the time or energy to go through the patent process. There's also no place for me to just go ahead and donate the idea to the public. This suggestion is to create a government that will do just that - accept ideas for inventions, evaluate them, patent them on behalf of the public, and then seek out companies who'd be willing to create the product. Profits could be split evenly between the company's who make the product and the government (the government's portion would go towards funding this department; if anything was left over it could be used to pay down the national debt.

A New Kind of Textbook 

This idea would start out with a contest. Maybe someone like the Gates Foundation could sponsor it to make it worthwhile. The contest would present a list of critical scientific concepts that every educated person should know. Contestants would then submit the simplest possible method they could think of for getting the concepts across. Methods would be categorized by visual, tactile and auditory to cover different learning styles. Rewards would be given to each person who came up with the simplest method of getting one of the concepts across in each of the categories. Bonus dollars might be awarded based on entertainment value. After the contest was over the winning entries would be published in grade-level textbooks, giving us a set of learning guides written for all types of learners based on the thoughts of our most creative teachers (winners).

Planting Garbage 

I'm not sure if I like this idea or not.

If the manufacturers of plastic bags, cups -basically anything that traditionally becomes litter - sealed a few seeds into a small storage section at the bottom of their product then when non-green people tossed them out the window sooner or later some of the seeds would sprout. If they were flower seeds then we'd start seeing colors in unusual places, if they were crop seeds then the homeless might wind up with an unexpected bit of extra food.

Aside from letting the manufacturers of these products claim they were going green this would at least turn some of the garbage into less of an eyesore. On the negative side though, more people might be inclined to litter figuring they'd be doing less harm. Hence my ambivalence.

The Birth Certificate Issue - You might be changing my mind 

At first I thought the continuous entry of birth certificate ideas was a bad thing but I'm beginning to realize it might work out well, at least for those of us who stick aroud long enough to post ideas on other topics. When it comes time to go through all of the ideas the birth certificate ones will simply be lumped together and tossed leaving only the ideas from those of us who weren't driven off by them for consideration. The net effect is that they're weighting the process in my favor.

Oh, and they're also creating a backlash against their position by being so strident about it. The law of unintended consequences rears its head again :)

A Failure to Prioritize - the Never-Ending Birth Certificate Issue 

Is this issue more important than coming up with new ideas on how to house the homeless, develop energy independence, protect our borders from terrorists, provide jobs for unemployed workers, etc, etc...? I think whoever is behind this campaign has expressed their only idea sufficiently for the rest of us to know it's important to them. Now if they only had one or two new solutions for more important problems....

Require students to take at least one class in informal logic 

It would save us a lot of time.

Repeal section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act  

Let's see now, the big accounting scandals like Enron were due to accountants. So what did the government think the best way would be to make them pay for this - create a new law requiring the oversight of a business function that was in no way responsible for the accounting scandals and...wait for it...wait...pay accountants to do the oversight. This in effect financially rewards their profession for causing harm to thousands of people. Not only that, it makes the companies who have to pay for this compliance (on average 5 million dollars for a fair-sized company) less competitive in global markets because they're incurring a cost that their competitors in other countries don't have to pay.

There's a conceptual flaw in this process 

The goal of having the most popular ideas bubble up to the surface for discussion in the next phase is a good one, but ideas that generate a huge amount of voting could sink to the bottom the way the votes are logged now. If half a million people like an idea and half a million don't then it will show up with zero votes on the balance. Personally I'd like to see the total number of votes displayed too so these ideas could get noticed. It might be worth having a discussion about them too.

Create a National Curriculum for Education 

Millions of dollars are wasted in this country on an inefficient educational system that is rooted in constitutional law that gives each state the right to determine its own standards. Examples of federal laws that create unnecessary waste and cost in education because of the lack of provision for a natioanl education system under our current contsitutional system are - the individuals with disabilites education act (IDEA) and No Child Left Behind. Both federal laws require states to come up with their own processes and forms for documenting compliance with the law. In addition, No Child Left Behind and lawas that led to that Act, required states to each identify their own standards for student learning and to develop assessments for measuring student growth for each of those standards. Given the fact that for most content areas a developmental scope and sequence is fairly standard (for example children in any state will learn to count before they learn to add, and they will learn to add before they learn to subtract) the cost to taxpayers when each of the 50 states are required to develop their own state standards and practices is astounding. And frankly a crime in a nation in which 20 to 25 percent of the children live in poverty. Developing a national scope and sequence for curriculum and national assessment practices would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution and would benefit our nation by reducing dramatically the cost of education as well as allowing students to move from state to state without a major disruption in their learning processes.

Be the Bank of 2nd Resort 

This should have happened when the government took over WAMU but there will be more opportunities with other big banks that are still floundering out there. When the next big bank fails turn it into a true National Bank(providing the new bank with accessible branches). Part of the stimulus money would be used to make it solvent. Once it's up an running it should offer credit to qualified customers/buisnesses at a rate that's half of a point higher than the best run banks are offerring. This would almost immediately ease the credit crunch. Banks that weren't well run would fail as they should. Their depositors could then either go to one of the better run banks or do their banking at the National Bank. By keeping the interest rate slightly higher than the good banks are offering it wouldn't drive the good banks out of business. It would however encourage them to take a closer look at potential customers so they could grab the good ones and make some money instead of letting them fall through the cracks to the National Bank.

The Undercover Web  

For all anyone knows this might already be being done. If it's not it could save the government a lot of money when it comes time to build the next version of the web. The current system uses IP addresses formatted in such a way that the root servers can pretty much look through something akin to a phone book to determine the address the user is looking for. These addresses are based on a very specific format. Anything that's not in that format won't be recognized and the browser will display a message saying something like "page not found". There's no reason a second version of the root server phone books couldn't be created though. The format for addresses in this phone book would be entirely different (and each address would be encrypted to help prevent line snifferes from even coming close to guessing what it is). Once in place government agencies could send messages using the web in a layer that's outside the current system, opening whole new channels at a minimal cost.

Speaking of the web, it's far more vulnerable than most people, and most governments for that matter, think it is. And I'm not talking about hackers here. Nor am I going to say exactly how it could easily be compromised.