Here's something that strikes me as a contradiction: disposable digital cameras:

CVS Corporation has begun selling a disposable digital camcorder at its chain of pharmacies.

Priced at $29.99, the number 2 drugstore chain operator in the US hopes to boost profits in its photo labs with the new product. Pure Digital Technologies of San Francisco developed the product according to a Reuters report.

Pure Digital notes that one-time camera use has grown to 218 million units annually, and believes the digital camcorder will drive more growth in the digital video market.

Pure Digital hopes to have the gadget in more stores under those retailers' brand names later this year. The camera records twenty minutes of video, and displays it on a 1.4 inch screen. Processing by CVS puts the video on a DVD for a fee of $12.99.

Weighing in at a mere 5 ounces, the camcorder still offers the ability to review and delete video captured on the camcorder.

The camera has three buttons and does not offer a zoom function. But for travelers who labored under the weight of a camera bag, not to mention the fear of losing an expensive camcorder, the tradeoff in cost may be worth trying out the disposable offering.

But digital memory? It can be erased, downloaded, copied, again and again. Making it "disposable" requires that buyers indulge themselves in a fiction. But it may be that the target market consists of non-geeks who don't have time to read instructions, install user-unfriendly software and navigate their way through it, burn their own DVDs, or any of that stuff.

This may tie in with the too-many-choices factor. When the market supplies too many choices, then there's a market for idiot-proofing -- to simplify choice.

I'll never forget some damnably long California ballot initiative in an election years ago. I received a copy of it from the voter registrar's office, in three-quarter inch thick pulp document form. I'm a lawyer (a fact I don't often admit), and but even my legal training was of little assistance in helping me wade through that incomprehensible drivel calling itself an "initiative." I didn't know how to vote. A "yes" might have meant a lot of things, and so might a "no" -- for a lot of different reasons, depending on the construction of certain language, which was replete with references to other laws, overstrikes of old language, and my reaction was incredible anger that garbage like this had to be printed up and mailed out to people who could barely read.

What killed the ballot initiative was a very simple commercial (against the initiative) showing two average people asking each other about the meaning of the initiative's confusing text. Naturally, they couldn't figure out what it meant. Following this, the announcement intoned,

"Vote 'NO' on Proposition X -- IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE."

Democracy is probably just as disposable as memory.