The Segway. The Bluetooth headset. The pocket protector. What do these three technologies have in common?

They all pretty much work as promised. They all seem like good ideas on paper. And they’re all too dorky to live.

When you’re a nerd, you forget that the problems you solve with a couple keystrokes can take other people days of tedious, error-prone work to slog through.

This is the difference,” VanDenPlas said, “between a well run professional machine and a gaggle of amateurs, posing in true Rumsfeldian fashion, who ‘don’t know what they don’t know.’

I can’t remember whether it was a consumer electronics or video company that hosted a press conference featuring Dick Clark at the Ed Sullivan Theater in 1991, but I can remember the conversation I had with him. I wormed my way up to him after the press conference and asked if he would consider acting as an advisor to a newspaper my husband Eliot and I wanted to publish. It was a newspaper for teenagers written by teenagers. Remember, this was way before we all knew about the Internet.

The lead-up to the last shuttle flight provoked a great outpouring of misplaced nostalgia, awe, admiration, and trepidation. Space aficionados are particularly upset that the U.S. now has no way to put people into orbit. (Instead, we’ll have to bum rides on the old, cheap, and dependable Russian Soyuz, which is galling not only because it highlights what a flop the shuttle was, but also because the space program still has an anachronistic whiff of the Cold War about it. Our borrowing the Soyuz is like Rocky asking Ivan Drago for a lift because he backed his Thunderbird into a Dumpster.) While it’s nice to see that people care so much about space and putting humans up into it, they’re missing the fact that we needed to drop the shuttle to make any real progress—the sooner the better. Moreover, these reactions illustrate exactly why we couldn’t cancel the shuttle decades ago, as we should have.

In my capacity as the attorney for a building co-op, I was charged with the task of overseeing the annual elections. This was an election involving only hundreds of people, not thousands, and all of these people were in one building, voting in one place. I used MS Office, and Excel, and let me tell you, even with human oversight (that included double checking the equations that Excel was using), there were still errors when data was moved from one place to another. I came to learn that there are much better ways to run an election, and even then, there are no perfect ways. “Fraud” may be too strong a word, but an election, whether it’s for a local co-op board, or for national office, is too serious a matter to be screwing around with data transfers, and too serious a matter not to have competent, reliable manners and methods of checking and rechecking data. More importantly, the process has to be completely transparent, with explanations made in language so simple that a bag of hammers could understand it. Anything less leads people to the conclusion that there’s something to hide, which gives rise to claims of “fraud,” whether or not there actually was any fraud.