Rob Pegoraro
Monday, September 18, 2006 3:03 PM

Just because I write about computers for a living doesn't mean I want them in every aspect of my life. Sometimes they take away more than they give: in cost, complexity, time, whatever.

Take movie downloads. Last week, in this space, I wondered if the advent of Amazon and Apple's movie-download stores meant they were on the cusp of becoming a viable, much less attractive, proposition for movie watchers.

Well, after trying them for a week, they aren't. Why should I pay almost as much (or possibly more) as I would for a DVD for a download with inferior video and audio quality, without any of the usual DVD special features, which is confined to the hard drive of a computer or a portable media player, and which I cannot burn to DVD?

This could easily be fixed: you could up the video quality, add the extras back in (just as, for example, an album bought on iTunes can now include a printable booklet and a bonus video) and permit DVD burning. But the people who could make that happen -- the execs running major moving studios -- don't seem too interested.

(I realize that you can plug a laptop into a TV relatively easily. If the TV is a high-def model with a PC-compatible input, all you need is a cheap VGA cable. But having spent some serious time trying to do this on a couple of laptops, I also realize what a pain it can be wiring together the two devices, fussing with video settings on one or both devices and even -- yes, this happened to me on Friday -- figuring out why the laptop causes a buzzing noise in the speakers when it's too close.)

Maryland's Meltdown

Voting is another area where I'm starting to think that computers may be more of a problem than a solution. Last week, voters in Maryland's primary elections found themselves facing what you could call a third-world level of disarray, although that description is an insult to the people who successfully carry out elections under far more trying and dangerous conditions in real Third World nations.

First, Maryland election officials forgot to provide many of the precincts with the smart cards needed to activate the electronic voting terminals. Then, a variety of human and computer errors piled up. Some voters wound up writing out their choices on pieces of scrap paper.

Also worth reading is a blog entry by computer scientist (and noted e-voting skeptic) Avi Rubin about his day working as an election judge in Maryland.

And things might get worse between now and November, our reports in Friday's and Sunday's papers indicated.

Electronic voting was supposed to *prevent* this sort of chaos, not provoke it.

How much do we gain by using computers to count votes, and what do we lose? What are the odds of more meltdowns? How much extra do we have to spend training poll workers to use all this hardware and software? And what about how voters feel? How much confidence do they lose when an electronic voting system's inner workings are a mystery, with no opportunity for a meaningful recount?

Just like movie downloads, these problems are not all inevitable. Governments could demand that any electronic voting machine come with both an open source code and a voter-verified paper trail that confirms a voter's choice, which can also be used in recounts. Some states are part of the way there. California, for instance, mandates the paper trail.

But others just don't seem to grasp how important this is. They seem content muddling along with whatever commercial solution they first bought. With that kind of mindset, debacles like Maryland's shouldn't come as a surprise.

More Tech Stories

It's been a busy week for me. In addition to yesterday's review of the Apple and Amazon movie-download stores, I wrote an extra column for Wednesday's paper that looked at some of the more fundamental problems with these downloads.

And on Thursday, the Home section ran a story I've been working on for a while: a review of the Scooba floor-washing robot.

Yesterday's personal-tech pages also included these other stories:

* Web Watch chronicles the recent unraveling of the mystery around the identity of the YouTube "celebrity" once known only as "lonelygirl15."

* How much tech is too much for a growing child, and how involved should parents be in making that decision for a kid? Contributor Amy Alexander looks for answers.

* And in Help File, I note a strange interaction between a laptop and a TV and suggest a way to figure out which party is at fault for a bad VOIP experience.