Students in California have a proposal. Rather than charging tuition, they’d like public universities in California to take 5% of their salary for the first twenty years following graduation (for incomes between $30,000 and $200,000). Essentially, rather than taking on debt students would like to sell equity in their future earnings. This means students who make more money after graduation will subsidise lower-earning peers.

We only ask that you do not redistribute the show. Once you download the file, it’s yours to keep forever, and yours to use for any reasonable personal use, such as watching, enjoying, converting to MP3 for the morning commute, making backups, burning to DVD, hosting a screening for friends, and so on

Looks like the Barnes & Noble is going to beat Amazon to the punch with front-lit e-ink Nook.

This will rule. - JT

Another misconception: The proposal doesn’t raise $47 billion over 10 years. Or, rather, it does, but only if you use the “current law baseline” that assumes the full expiration of the Bush tax cuts. No one really uses that baseline. If you look at Paul Ryan’s budget, for instance, its appendix tables use a “current policy baseline,” which assumes, among other things, that the Bush tax cuts are extended.

Compared with that baseline, the Paying a Fair Share Act actually raises about $160 billion. Still not enough to solve our deficit problems on its own, but nothing to sneeze at.

Erlend Lavik, a Norwegian academic, offers up a 36-minute video essay on the visual style of HBO’s “The Wire”

Finally. - JT

In the depths of the financial crisis, borrowers with tarnished credit like Ms. Alejandro were almost entirely shut out from credit at traditional lenders. It was hard enough for people with stellar credit to get loans. But as financial institutions recover from the losses on loans made to troubled borrowers, some of the largest lenders to the less than creditworthy, including Capital One and GM Financial, are trying to woo them back, while HSBC and JPMorgan Chase are among those tiptoeing again into subprime lending. Credit card lenders gave out 1.1 million new cards to borrowers with damaged credit in December, up 12.3 percent from the same month a year earlier, according to Equifax’s credit trends report released in March. These borrowers accounted for 23 percent of new auto loans in the fourth quarter of 2011, up from 17 percent in the same period of 2009, Experian, a credit scoring firm, said.

Fender benders, rear-enders and those three-car pileups that back up traffic may be going the way of the buggy whip. Within a few years, cars whizzing down the highway will begin chatting among themselves. Once they all are equipped to join the conversation, every car will know the speed, distance and direction of every other car close enough to pose a risk...Just as it has changed so many other aspects of life, wireless technology is about to revolutionize the way we drive...It could cut highway fatalities and injuries by more than half, eliminating billions of dollars in medical bills. It could reduce by millions more what it costs to repair damage from the more than 6 million crashes each year. By governing the flow of traffic with real-time information, it can reroute drivers to avoid congestion and reduce time and fuel wasted while stuck in traffic.

The stock price is now crashing.

The entire show from last night was amazing -- this is one of my favorite parts. The interview with the founder of PayPal is also strikingly awesome. - JT

Also currently unavailable is pricing information – that is, how much you’ll be able to get for your CDs once sent in. Surely pricing will be variable depending on artist, we would guess. After all, your Beatles CD will probably sell fast…your Barry Manilow, not so much.

The malware is said to have infected over 600,000 Macs worldwide. While 3rd party tools have been developed to test for the infection, Apple reveals they are working on their own tool to detect and remove the software.

Every time I see this on TV or a movie I facepalm. - JT

Spotify isn’t content with just dominating Facebook; the service is now allowing tracks to be embedded into websites, which…launches the Spotify app. Okay, that’s cool, I guess; if Rdio hadn’t been doing the same thing without launching an app for at least a year. But hey, maybe black and green is your thang, in which case, proceed.

The Google team has announced a redesign of their ghost town social network, Google+. Described as part of the initiative to create a “simpler, more beautiful Google” the redesign is essentially a brand new layout and, well, it looks a bit like a cleaner version of Facebook. Unfortunately, the relative lack of engagement with Google+ has never been a matter of looks (it already looked much better than other social networks) but rather a matter of motivation, which Google hasn’t solved with this redesign.

The problem with this model of Series A and B investing is that, in reality, many of the companies with big hits weren’t overnight successes. Pinterest, OMGPOP, Twitter, and Tumblr were around for years before taking off and all benefited greatly from having patient investors. In the current financing environment, a lot of good companies won’t live to get Series As and Bs and big VCs will pay valuations on hits that are priced to perfection.

Remember last year when analysts said that the lack of a full redesign with the iPhone 4S was so disappointing? Hahaha, wow, good times. AAPL closed at what, 626 today? Analysts suck. - JT