The other fascinating idea I came across was sent to me by a PR hack as a pre-beta, post-alpha test unit. It's a mouse developed by Danube.com, an up and coming e-commerce site. Apparently, Danube.com has identified one of the major stumbling blocks to the growth of Internet commerce: poor people with little or no credit. The Danube.com mouse looks like any other mouse, but it is capable of delivering a small electric shock that acts as an activity suppressor in humans.

Ingenious little device. So, you get a poor person, or someone without a credit card, or a student type, and they're surfing the Web. After about fifteen minutes the little thing kicks in. It recognizes tags in a Web page that identify a purchase option, or a banner ad. If the Web surfer using the mouse doesn't click on an ad, or stick something in an online shopping cart within 25 minutes of getting online, the mouse administers consecutive pulses of electricity, each greater in voltage than the other, until the poor person, or student, buys something, or at least clicks on a banner.

The folk at Danube.com tell me that they're working on a device that rewards online shoppers by shooting jelly beans at them every time they enter a credit card number on someone's site. I think this is just great. Many people consider the invention of the Internet as being as important as that of the printing press, but fail to realize that books were, for a number of centuries, the preserve of upper middle-class, and well-to-do people. Danube.com has successfully managed to find a way of recreating the same environment for the Web by eliminating anyone without money from cluttering up bandwidth.

Now, to be realistic, this device would be under threat if governments around the world made access to the Internet as available as that to a telephone, resulting in subsidized telephone lines for lower income households. From a social and moral point of view I can't see anything wrong with that myself, but it seems to me that with 99 per cent of the Web moving towards becoming a mass of shopping centers, you need to keep those poor people out. I mean, if they're not going to buy anything, or be motivated by flickering images on top of a Web page enticing them to check out a new mortgage, why have them on the Web. The Web is no place for people who browse.