Whatever happened to the art of debate?  Here we are, about to pull the trigger on the Next World War, and the level of genuine confrontation over the wisdom of doing so is virtually nil.  True, there are columns, largely online, that argue against war, but I'm talking about the old fashioned, face-to-face kind of debate, between two or more people, in front of a live audience.  And of course, I'm talking about every issue in which the government intrudes, often brutally and with little comment.

It's easy enough to see why the few live debates that do take place are total yawn-enforcers.  It's the format, stupid!  Most are artificially rigged to maximize unchallenged sound-bytes and minimize the sort of quick exchanges that make a debate exciting and informative.  Some of the problem could be fixed by changing the rules, without adding any new hardware to the equation.

I have in mind adding hardware, however, to arbitrate the encounter in a rapid real-time way.

This is the idea: There are n debaters, where n is 2 or more.  We start with a total amount of time for the debate, and divide by the number of speakers, giving the time allocated to each one.  Let's imagine a one-hour debate, with three participants, each having 20 minutes on his clock at the start.

Each speaker has a microphone in front of him, and a "request to speak" button.  Ideally, each person would see his and everyone else's time remaining, and a light would inform him if he actually has the floor, meaning that his mic is wired to the audience while the other guys' mics aren't.

Anyone can get the floor if he alone presses his "request to speak" button.  While he has the floor, his voice is transmitted through, and his clock runs.  When his clock runs out, he can't speak any more.  Or rather, he can speak all he likes, but no one will hear.

Now comes the fun part.  If person A is speaking, person B can choose to interrupt by pressing his "request to speak" button.  The request will be honored only if B has more time remaining than A, however.  When this happens, A is still pressing HIS button, because he hasn't finished, but B's interruption shuts A off, and also, of course, causes B's clock to run while A's clock stops.

If B keeps talking till his time remaining is equal to A's, and both are still pressing their "request to speak" buttons, then BOTH are wired through, and each one's clock runs at half-speed.  They can, if they choose, engage in a heated argument where both vociferate at once (perhaps the device will normalize the volume of each speaker so that there's not an advantage to screaming).

If nobody is pressing his button, all participants (whose clocks have not expired) will have their clocks run at 1/n speed.  This provides a motivation to go ahead and speak rather than waiting for someone else to run down his time before I start to use up mine.

The ability to interrupt is a powerful weapon, but one which may either delight or alienate the audience depending upon how it is used.  There would be a strong incentive to use it, but use it sparingly and cleverly.  One could interrupt, for example, to challenge, "What do you mean by freedom?" or to issue other goads to speakers who are blathering emptily.

At the end of the hour, everyone's clocks will have expired, with the last one(s) reaching zero at exactly that moment.

What we have is a free-for-all, yet one in which every participant is guaranteed an equal amount of time to speak.  Wouldn't this make a debate exciting?  Possibly enough to be entertaining enough to appeal to mainstream TV networks and (of course) their viewers?  That would be my hope.

Need to intersperse commercials?  No problem.  They would come at known points, and the speakers would have to plan around them.  Everybody's clock would stop running during the ads.  Or the clocks could be set to run down before each break, to make a number of "mini-debates" within the complete time period.

Human moderator?  None would be needed.  No doubt there'd be someone on hand to introduce the speakers, but s/he'd have to shut up for the exchange to begin.

I think I'll call this a Debate Arbitration Device, or [you guessed it] for short.  As far as I know, such a device has never been built.  My reason for proposing it is not personal gain, however, so even if it is my original idea, I offer it free to the world. 

A prototype could be constructed quite cheaply, probably using a PC or Mac to do the arbitration, minimizing the one-of-a-kind circuitry necessary for the external hardware.  The computer would poll the device several times per second to find out who's pressing his "request" button(s).  Then it would instruct the hardware as to which microphones, if any, to let through.  The state of each clock could be displayed on the computer's monitor, and projected onto an external screen using existing presentation equipment.  I'd volunteer to take part in building such a prototype, within reasonable time and cost constraints.

Oh, and I'll also volunteer to participate in testing.  Bring on the statists!