What a 'sweeeet' idea - charging eligible voters a fee for not voting. Notice this article from an Australian news report. Ignore for the moment the human interest side of the story (e.g. that the woman's excuse was that she was having group sex, so was too busy to vote). Note that no-show eligible voters are being fined $37.50 for not participating in the election. I think this would be a PERFECT source of additional revenue for the federal government. Failure to vote in a federal election could carry a similar penalty in the United States. Administered by the same agencies that register you to vote in the first place, it would either improve voter turn-out, or act as an 'Aloof Tax'. What do you think?

On the scope: millimeter waves and T-rays. May start a new section on 'up and coming tech'...stay tuned.

Thanks to the LangaList (and maybe to a slashdotter originally?) for the information at this link regarding a NIST study of DVD and CD life. If you're archiving important information (business OR personal! think digital photos!) on DVD or CD media, you should probably read this information before you expect it to last you for the long run.

Aha! Mystery solved! Mike's List linked to my website in Mike's List #78 from 3 February That explains the hits from his site. The DHTML behaviors on Tripod appear to be turned on on at least one of their servers, explaining the many hits to hilite.htc. If my guess is right, then DHTML behavior is seriously broken in its currently supported form on the client side(s). It should not be necessary for the client to continually download the behaviors from the support files. It generates way too much traffic. While I don't know what would be better, I'm going to integrate the behaviors into the HTML file itself and see if I can make that work a bit nicer.

When I have time that is. Looks like I'm about a week behind on my Calc homework. I need to catch up on that, since it's the ONLY thing standing between me and an Associate's Degree in April. It was a busy weekend and I never had the chance to update my site look. I've been too busy checking out links on GeekNews and SlashDot. Just this morning, I was reading about a robot-PC on SlashDot. What's nice about this piece is that it brings robotics down to the PC hobbyist level. Not every PC geek is going to be a servo-motor geek (I know I'm not...I can never finish a project). If they make the programming easy enough, building the robotics into the case may just make the low-utility robot something that hobbyists with ca$h will want to buy.

Speaking of buying things. I went to the mall this weekend, and poked around at Best-Buy and some other stores. It wasn't crowded at all, and as for myself, I didn't buy anything. It just seemed kind of boring. There doesn't seem to be anything 'new' on the horizon. The marketplace seems ripe for 'The Next Big Thing'. Don't know what it will be, but whatever it is, consumers seem ready to spring into action on the next fad item. Have any ideas? Email me...

Jeff Harrow's newsletter came out this weekend. There's a big piece about RFID technology in there. While not as futuristic as many of Jeff's pieces, it's interesting reading about a technology that has the potential to change the business world. Considering what I was reading (Money magazine) about WalMart affecting the economy in the past few years with average NEGATIVE INFLATION of 3% on its pricing shelf, and their own RFID plans (Wired), I can see businesses using this technology to further control back-end pricing.