I don't want have to decide *before* I read an article whether I want to pay for it, I want to decide *after*. To that end, I propose the following micropayment system. If I want to get content from a consortium of providers (say, anything owned by The New York Times Company, or Time-Warner, or Seed Media Group, or a group of publishers that set up their own consortium), I set up an account, pay my $50/year, and get access. If I like a piece of content (article, podcast, interactive graphic, whatever), I click the "Tip the Author(s)" button, and a chunk of my $50, maybe 10 cents, gets redirected to the actual people creating the content I actually like (not just start to read). If I don't use up my $50 for the year, it just gets split internally by the consortium. This way, readers have control over where the money goes and get to associate "paying money" with "feeling good about what they read", providers get cash, and the best providers get the most cash.

I don't think so. This treatment should be on the order of thousands of dollars, versus tens out thousands of dollars for brain surgery or repeated radiation treatments. Plus, there should be much, much fewer side effects. Also, many disorders of the type they're interested in treating with this technique affect young people whose lifetime incomes will dwarf the costs of successful treatments.

From the New York Times ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/technology/companies/08operate.html?hp )

"Chrome is basically a modern operating system," Mr. Andreessen said.

Uh, no. It's not. It might be a reasonable approach to a lightweight GUI for an OS, but it doesn't do any of the following: memory management, device management, process management, disk management, I/O management, network management, etc, etc, etc.