Forbes.com: Music Like Water:

People should pay for their music the way they pay for gas or electricity.

I like the proposal Dave Kusek and Gerd Leonhard have made for music compensation. The one minor adjustment I would suggest is that instead of compensating artists based on downloads, allow users to designate what percentage of their monthly fee goes to what artist.

A reward system based on download volume will only foster a huge hype machine centered on getting people to download a tune regardless of the quality. Users will buy into the hype machine because, hey, it doesn't cost them anything more, so no big deal.

But if artists are instead compensated based on how much their listeners are moved by their work, we can expect (or at least hope) that music will continue to evolve into something people enjoy listening to, rather than being a byproduct of a saleable image or lifestyle.

Of course, many consumers won't care enough to cultivate the artistic garden by designating who their monthly fee should support, so unvoting user's fees should be divided pro-rata to parallel the chosen allocations of people who do care enough to provide such cultivation.

Another unspoken aspect of the scheme they propose is that it need not be limited to music. Any intellectual property can be offered.

The interersting thing about such a system is that it returns art back to the days of patronage, with individual patrons deciding which artists their compensation will sponsor. But it is a democratization of the patronage system, allowing everyone to sponsor whomever they will.

What You'll Wish You'd Known This guy has written an excellent piece of advice for living. Originally crafted for high school students, the insights he shares are pertinent for everyone. And, yeah, I wish I had known (or been capable of knowing) all the stuff he describes. But in my case, like so many teens, I'd have written off whatever he said simply because it was advice from an adult. (I still can't put my finger on the point at which I went from knowing everything to realizing that my ignorance is continuously increasing :)

Men and women use different brain areas to achieve similar IQ results, UCI study finds

I can't decide what is more astonishing in this finding - the fact that women and men have brain architectures that rely on completely different mechanisms, or the fact that despite these fundamental differences, their intelligence levels are the same. Usually, a radically different architecture will give rise to noticible performance differences. It seems unlikely that this intelligence parity is coincidental. It is amazing how precisely selective evolutionary forces can be.

Haaretz - Israel News:

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday expressed concern that Israel may attack Iran, in order to eliminate any nuclear threat from Tehran.

I can't decide whether this is giving a nod and a wink to Israel to go ahead and lay the smack down on Iran, or whether it's just stereophonic sabre-rattling to make Iran feel the heat from more than one angle.

Iran is still pitching it's party line, steadfastly maintining that it's reactors are "purely for peaceful, energy-generating purposes", despite having absolutely no need for a nuclear energy program.

Looks like Condi will have a full plate.

Boing Boing: Why HP's region coding excuse is bogus:

In simple terms, HP has to worry about being paid $1US today, then try and buy $1EU of stuff next week, when that US dollar is only worth 80 cents in Europe - they just lost 20% on that transaction.

"Buck Thighmaster" has written a simple analysis of why HP's region coding scheme for printer cartridges, which HP claims is to protect them from global currency fluctuations, is totally bogus. Buck says HP ought to increase the price in a declining market (like the US) to insure themselves against further declines of the dollar against the other market economies.

What Buck fails to mention is that companies have long been able to insure themselves against currency fluctuations, and that obtaining such insurance is the precise reason why foreign exchange futures markets exist. If HP is concerned that the Euro will rise while the Dollar continues to fall, they need merely purchase a long contract on Euros for the dollar amount of merchandise they wish to insure. It isn't rocket science. All world-market players use it to insure themselves.

This just makes it all the more plain that HP is pulling wool in their justification for region-coding their print cartridges. I think it's a shame that a company with HP's stature and reputation would stoop to such simplistic attempts at deception.

'Road Block' protest group formed:

It has warned that direct action to try to stop roads - seen in the 1990s - could become common again.

On Monday, Road Block campaigners met to try to stop work on a £50m bypass from Stoke Hammond in Buckinghamshire to Linslade in Bedfordshire.

By actually preventing road development, as opposed to merely drawing attention to their cause by dancing naked in front of TV cameras, these people apparently feel that they have a right to impose their desires over those of the rest of the population by fiat. Sort of a return to the old 'might makes right' feudal lordship days of government.