Hart's speech impressed me, and I expect I'll hand him my vote in the D.C. primary next year. (Which, if it is held in January, seems to be shaping up as a Sharpton vs. Moseley Braun affair. Ecch.) But the speech confirmed my view that Hart is the best qualified and the least likely future president. There have been candidates unserved by soundbite coverage, but Hart's entire monologue -- 45 minutes, mind you -- was just a survey of his platform. And it takes that long to understand what is essentially a Grand Unified Theory of geopolitics and the American polity today. So while there is an important and original message there, it will be very hard for the public, however interested, to hear it

While Lysander certainly has a point - it takes some work to realize the breadth of Senator Hart's vision - I don't think this makes him the 'least likely'. It just means there's got to be some work put into boiling his ideas down to those points that might resonate with the latent patriot in the undecided and/or non-voting electorate.

The music service Jobs unveiled is a delight. Called the iTunes Music Store, the service -- it's available only on Apple machines for now but will be ready for Windows "by the end of the year" -- is fully integrated into the company's jukebox software. Users can search for songs to purchase in the same way they'd look for songs they already have on their machines. The system is foolproof: You type in a name, a song comes up, and you press a button to buy it. That's it. You're in the hole for 99 cents for each song you download ($10 for each album), but you see none of the transaction details; all the purchases are "one-click." And here's the stunning thing: Once you've bought a song, you own it. You can do (pretty much) whatever you want to do with the songs you download, including burning them to CDs, transferring them to iPods, or sending them to other Macs.

$0.99 a song, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it when you're done - legally! The system uses AAC rather than the popular MP3 format - and at the same event, Jobs announced new ipods (and upgrades for existing ones) to handle the new format. AAC allegedly provides higher quality in less space than MP3. Itunes 4 (with Quicktime 6.2) can encode to it for those wanting to take advantage. I've put off the purchase of an MP3 player, since I haven't been happy with the sound quality, but the combination of better quality, and cheap music may push me over the edge. The new ipod's come out Friday.