TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is the latest to suggest how great it would be if there were a type a cheap ($200) 12" thin tablet running Linux for web browsing. Even if it were possible to build such a product that would sell for $200, this is not a product that would have widespread appeal.

Why? Because for only $300 more one could get a full fledged laptop from Dell (Vostro 1510) with 2GB of memory that runs Vista (from the Dell website this morning):

My System Details Intel® Celeron M® 540 (1.86GHz, 1M L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB) Genuine Windows Vista® Home Basic, Service Pack 1 1 Year Basic Limited Warranty plus 1 Year Mail-in Service 15.4 inch Widescreen WXGA LCD Anti-Glare Display 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz, 2 DIMM 24X CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive with Roxio Creator Intel® Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 80G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive Dell Wireless 1395 802.11g Wi-Fi Internal Card My Accessories 37 WHr 4-cell Primary Battery My Software Microsoft® Works 9. Does NOT Include MS Word Free Microsoft Office Live Small Business Adobe® Reader 8.1 Also Included High Definition Audio 2.0

• The space in your house to keep the device.
• The time to keep the device updated.
• The time to keep relevant data sync'd.
• The time to set up the device.
• The time and monetary cost to fix any hardware problems.

For only $300 more, I can get the following:

• The ability to visit any web page and not by stymied by plug-ins or controls that don't work with my device.
• The ability to run any Windows application.
• No worries about storage (with an 80GB HD).
• The ability to play any music.
• The ability to watch any video.
• A keyboard to type in web forms.
• The ability to play games for kids and adults that are only available on CDs.
• The ability to easily save and print information.

Sure, many people spend much of their time on a PC using the web (let's assume 75%), but that doesn't mean they wouldn't pay an extra $300 not to have to find another machine every time they want to do the other 25% of things that they use a PC for.

HT: Digital Home Thoughts

For all of Obama's vaunted ability to process new ideas, is there evidence that he had changed positions for any reason other than political expedience?

Writing in Slate, John Dickerson writes:

In his book The Audacity of Hope, he writes about pulling aside reporters who were living in Iraq to get their views about the war. He expected them to agree with his call for a troop reduction. They didn't. They said a troop reduction would start a civil war. Obama called for a troop reduction anyway, but we know his mind is alive enough to capture and remember a piece of data that didn't fit with his pre-existing views.

What good is it to capture and remember data that don't agree with your views if they don't affect the views? There is more evidence of this in my prior post.

As Dickerson observes, part of the problem is that for variety of reasons, Presidents hardly ever get to say that were wrong, so they have to disguise changes in response to new information in stories about how they were right all along. Perhaps that is what is happening with Obama softening positions on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

Maybe that is the sort of evidence that allows an affirmative answer to my initial question. Unfortunately, until Obama becomes president and words are translated into actions, it will be impossible to tell.

Because Barack Obama seems likely to be the next President of the United States, I've been trying to get a bead on what he really thinks for about the past nine months. In that time I've come across some published articles that have helped me do so. Even with the assistance of the analysis I quote in this post, I don't feel like I have a good idea of what Obama would be like as President. This post is teh best I can do to formulate such an idea.

Everyone and no one knows what Barack Obama's view of the world is. Virginia Postrel writing in the Atlantic explains:

Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics—not the faux glamour-by-association of campaigning with movie stars or sailing with the Kennedys, but the real thing. The candidate himself is glamorous. Audiences project onto him the personal qualities and political positions they want in a president. They look at Obama and see their hopes and dreams.

I think we know is a good listener and has some general inclinations to the left of center. From a New York Times article about Obama's tenure as President of the Harvard Law Review (seemingly his most significant executive experience to date):

Another of Mr. Obama’s techniques relied on his seemingly limitless appetite for hearing the opinions of others, no matter how redundant or extreme. That could lead to endless debates — a mouse infestation at the review office provoked a long exchange about rodent rights — as well as some uncertainty about what Mr. Obama himself thought about the issue at hand.

In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice.

I think that there is little objective reason to hope that Obama's willingness to listen will translate into sensible market oriented liberal policies. From The New Republic relaying an observation of his former University of Chicago Law School colleague Richard Epstein:

Of course, as Epstein points out, Obama's willingness to listen didn't necessarily mean he was willing to be convinced. "What you don't get, alas and alack, out of all this is a change in point of view," Epstein says. "If you ask me whether I had any influence on his intellectual or moral development, I'd say no, not even a little."

Perhaps David Frum has identified the reason that listening doesn't result in sensible policies:

Obama’s vague language [in his German speech] is the product of an unrealistic mind. He denies the reality of conflict — and flinches from the obligations of self-defense. Obama has risen to power by using a soothing cloud of meaningless words to conceal displeasing truths and avoid difficult choices. His more worldly supporters will quietly whisper that Obama thinks more incisively than his speeches suggest. Let’s hope so. Yet the speech in Berlin should cause us all to wonder: Maybe Obama’s mind really is as foggy as his language.

For good or ill, it seems unlikely that Obama Presidency would result in enacting significant legislative changes, as Virginia Postrel comments writing in her blog:

When voters motivated by charisma disagree with the leader they've backed, they support him anyway and possibly even change their minds about the right policy course. When voters motivated by glamour disagree, they become disillusioned and angry.

I would like to believe that Obama Presidency would usher in an era of successful market based reforms as the best means of helping the destitute rather than politically connected interests. Similarly, it would be great for the United States to be loved around the world. Given the above insights, however, those results seem pretty unlikely.

Apart form advances in the Logitech Harmony Remote hardware there have been some nice advances in the setup software for Harmony remote controls recently.

Well, maybe not recently, but at least the advances were new to me. My wife might not believe this, but it has been about 2 1/2 years since we added a new piece of AV equipment to our house significant enough to merit a change in the programming for our Harmony remote controls. So when I set up our new Sony Blu-Ray player last night I used the Harmony setup software and discovered that some advances has been made in the past 2 1/2 years.

Setting up the Harmony remote involves installing and using web based software installed on your PC. Your PC connects to the remote via a simple USB connection.

Here are a few of the key advances I noticed:

• Ability to associate command sequences with a key.
• The ability to reorder commands on the LCD screen.
• A nicer graphical interface.

Still missing, however, is the ability to copy activities and device setups between multiple remotes that you may own.

With the purchase of a Blu-Ray player, I wondered if I should start ripping Blu-Ray discs for playback on Media Center Extenders in the same way I now do for DVDs. The answer is "no."

The reason is a combination of the current limits of the files that the Xbox360 can play back when acting as a Media Center Extender and the lack of maturity of ripping tools.

Currently the time it takes me to rip a DVD and get it ready to add to MyMovies in Media Center is about an hour and takes only four simple steps.

In contrast, decrypting and ripping Blu-Ray discs is no problem thanks to AnyDVD HD, but the next steps are more numerous, complicated and time intensive that it would be worth for me. Further, because the Xbox 360 won't yet playback H.264 files when acting as a Media Center Extender, I would need to transcode a substantial number of files degrading quality and introducing further complications.

I expect those impediments to be addressed within a couple of years and when that happens I rip Blu-Ray discs, but until then I'll stick to ripping DVDs.

I recently described some of the features that I was looking for in Blu-Ray disc player. Last evening I noticed that Best Buy had the Sony BDP-S350 in stock and I purchased it. I had a large Best Buy gift card to dispose of and had they not had the S350 in stock, I would have purchased the Samsung BD-P1500. These players were very close in my mind. Ultimately, the Sony appeared to have fewer reports on sound dropouts and that led me to make the purchase I did.

Here is how I evaluated the features I had identified in my prior post:

I try to keep abreast of new web sites and applications that I might find useful by looking through RSS feeds from a variety of site, e.g. AppScout). I use the FeedDemon RSS reader which allows me to save stories into clippings folders which I can then access from any PC that uses FeedDemon. This lets me easily clip stories in spare moments at work for later review at home.

I recently when through a host of such saved stories and ended up adding the following potentially useful sites to my Delicious list (which I use as a synchronized personal list of favorites because the Windows Live Toolbar (which I use to sync my actual favorites in Internet Explorer between PCs) can't handle the more than 1000 such sites I want to keep links to).

Here are the sites I added recently:

miRoamer - "An online portal where users can access the world's largest and most diverse selection of Internet radio content - for FREE" Allows you to access your list of streaming sources from any PC or mobile device.

thesixtyone - A Digg-like music recommendation site.

Cookthink - A site with a search engine tailored for recipes.

TVRage.Com - A nice comprehensive site that follows TV programming. I intend to use it to find new show recommendations.

PDFHammer - A web based PDF editor. Allows editing PDFs from any PC.

MyWeather - combines results from detailed local weather radars across the country onto Microsoft Virtual Earth maps.

Streamzy.com - Streaming music search engine. Allows you to find sources that will stream you the music you search for.

ModernFeed - An site that aggregates and organizes free feeds of TV shows on the web. Saves you the trouble of having to know what site might be hosting a show you want to watch, e.g. is it on Hulu.com or nbc.com?

Comedy.com - A nice collection of comedy videos.

The Hype Machine - Seems similar to thesixtyone.com. Recommended as a potential source of new music.

I noticed it pass without comment on even Megan McArdle's blog that the airlines had been deregulated. As my wife works in the industry, I know that this is only true in a very small sense and is largely inaccurate.

It is true that fares are no longer directly regulated (i.e. set) by the old Civil Aeronaughtics Board that used to regulate airline fares, but air travel are still an incredibly regulated industry.

Among the many regulators:

• The Department of Homeland Security
• The Customs and Border Patrol subsidiary of DHS
• Department of Transportation regulations of "deceptive trade practices" that can be used to justify almost any investigation or intrusion into market practices
• The FAA

Airlines' business is also heavily dependent on often unreliable government run services, for example:

• Airports, which are government entities and federally regulated.
• Air traffic control, which is is also still handled by the government and has stayed consistently behind the technology curve.
• Security screening services, which are now run by DHS

Lastly, the industry is heavily unionized-- the product of the Wagner Act.

The air travel industry is hardly a realm of unfettered capitalism.

The airlines themselves aren't necessarily great companies, but what sorts of companies would you expect to find participating in such a heavily regulated industry?

Will Wilkinson echoes Tyler Cowen's endorsement of means testing testing for Medicare. However, Greg Mankiw makes some pretty good points that prompt a mysterious accusation of misreading by Tyler.

The significance of Mankiw's points are that advocates of means testing need to say much more for several reasons:

• First, means testing has all of the disincentive effects of a tax because it reduces a benefit as one's income rises.
• Second, to the extent that assets are measured, you run into serious practical problems with how to verify or measure assets because assets can be easily hidden or transferred to a relative.
• Third, it is not obvious why equal benefits should not be given to all and the income tax made generally more progressive to accomplish whatever redistribution we would like to achieve; why focus on other elderly people (those people who would have Medicare benefits reduced by means testing) as a mechanism for finding more funds to take care of poor elderly people (those who would not have their benefits reduced and would benefit from a solvent system).

The standard way to address the first point is to phase out the benefit gradually as one's income rises. This decreases marginal disincentives to earn more income, but at the cost of a much larger program than I suspect Will would like. It begins to look a lot like the program described in the third point.

The second point could be addressed by ignoring assets when means testing, but that seems intuitively unappealing if our aim is to direct funds to the neediest. Basing the program on income alone would both (i) skew the results of the program away from that aim as those with large assets but little income benefitted at the expense of those without accumulated assets, and (ii) create an incentive for people to convert income producing assets into non-income producing assets (e.g. skewing investments toward growth stocks and away from bonds) creating both evasion of the purpose of the test and deadweight losses due to the people's assets being allocated not in accordance with their economic preferences. Perhaps you could address the problem of hiding assets through appropriate regulations, but that approach seems likely to underestimate human ingenuity and overestimate the acumen of those writing regulations (not a common mistake for most libertarians!). Further such an approach is potentially quite intrusive, for example it may involve the government second-guessing transfers among family members.

With respect to the alternative in the third point, presumably we would want to shy away from such a system as it would require the government to be involved in the healthcare of all seniors, not just the needy. This doesn't seem desirable for most of the standard (and persuasive!) reasons: the poor feedback mechanisms government systems have, their capture by interest groups etc.

All of this being said, however, it is possible that the magnitude of these practical difficulties may be less than the gains from instituting such a system. Maybe.

I suspect that a better solution would be to eliminate Medicare as a separate program and just fold it into a system of a guaranteed minimum income for the elderly combined with forced savings that would replace both Social Security and Medicare (much like Cato has proposed)? Of course that may be harder than it sounds too...

I recently purchased Plantronics Voyager 855 Bluetooth Headphones to replace my BlueTrek ST1 headphones. These are Bluetooth 2.0 headphones that can be used with the A2DP profile for high quality stereo sound.

I have used these for a few days and am quite pleased with them. They only cost about $75 from Amazon. The controls are relatively easy to use. They are comfortable. The in-ear design does a good job of blocking out extraneous noise. They are small and easy to fit into a pocket of briefcase (differentiating them from most other Bluetooth stereo headphones!). They are easy to put on. They don't have something behind my head or neck that prevents me from leaning or lying back on something with a headrest.

The only downside is their use of a micro USB port for charging rather than the more common mini-USB port.

When I noticed that Paul Thurrot was using FriendFeed, that in combination with Thomas Hawk's plaudits a few months ago was enough to get me to sign up for an account.

I have been skeptical for a while of Twitter, similar services, and even FaceBook's status updates as I am pretty confident no one is interested in what I am doing from hour to hour and I have no desire to spend any time updating that information.

In checking out FriendFeed I noticed that it would fill my feed automatically with things I was already doing as a matter of course, e.g. writing blong entries, commenting on TheFlyBottle.com using Disqus or adding photos to Flikr.

The more chances people have to notice the things I have taken the time to write or otherwise make public, the better. FriendFeed is just one more avenue for that.

Charlie Owen has written a long post essentially giving many reasons why the ability to stream DVDs is not built into Windows Media Center and probably won't be in the future.

There was a time when I was annoyed at the lack of this functionality in Media Center, but that time has passed. Here's why:

• DVDs are standard definition and a dying format.
• I can already use existing solutions to rip DVDs and stream the main movie to my Media Center Extenders at the cost of only about 20 minutes per DVD.
• Any solution adopted by Microsoft would have to navigate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and in so doing would probably compromise a fair amount of the functionality I would like.
• The only thing I miss when ripping DVDs for playback with MyMovies are extra features on the disk. I certainly would like access to these, but in practice, they just aren't that important to me. The evidence: they aren't important enough for me to take out the physical DVD to use them even when I am going to be watching in the same room as my collection of physical DVDs.
• I have ripped about 80 DVDs and converted the files for streaming to an extender using MyMovies and the ones that actually get watched are kids' movies. Most of the movies my wife and I actually watch are delivered by Netflix in the mail.

With the high definition video disc format war having been won by Blu-Ray, I am now considering purchasing a Blu-Ray player. Having followed the new players coming out on EngadetHD, and done a fair amount of reading of the Blu-Ray Player forum on the AVS Forum, I have determined that the following features are I would like to have, in order of importance:

• The ability to use BD-Live now or in the future. There really is no close substitute for this feature that allows interactivity over the internet for those discs that support it. Even if I don't use it that much, it would bug me to have a player that did not support this capability.
• The ability to be controlled by infrared universal remote. I have a Harmony universal remote for each TV in the house that has a high WAF (wife acceptance factor) and having to use an additional remote to play Blu-Ray discs would be bad.
• The ability to output Dolby Digital or DTS through an optical output. I purchased my receiver before HDMI was prevalent and it does not handle HDMI sources, so for the time being I will be relying on component cables and an optical output.
• The ability to have the player decode different sound tracks in the player itself rather than just sending the bitstream for a given sound track to my receiver. This seems to be essential for taking advantage of the picture-in-picture features that combine a secondary audio track with one of the main sound tracks from the movie.
• Price. I would prefer not to spend more than $400 on a player.
• The ability to handle all of the audio tracks once I get an HDMI capable receiver. As I understand it Blu-Ray discs may contain a number of different types of encoded audio tracks: (i) Dolby Digital 5.1, (ii) DTS 5.1, (iii) LPCM, (iv) Dolby Digital Plus, (v) True HD, (vi) DTS-HD HR and (vii) DTS-HD MA. I'm not sure I could hear the difference between these, but all other things being equal I would prefer that the player feed any of these audio tracks to my receiver in case my audio tastes become more refined. All Blu-Ray players must support output of (i) thru (iii) and (iii) thru (vii) can only be output using HDMI (or in some cases, analog cables for each channel).
• No audio problems. Some of the players still seem to have problems with audio dropouts in some movies. A vocal group experiences these problems for some players, many of which can't be repeated and may be due to compatibility issues between the player and given receivers.
• A relatively fast startup time after discs are inserted. The early players took much longer to start playing a disc after insertion than the current crop of players.
• The ability to upconvert DVDs. This generally requires HDMI if the player is doing the upconversion. This seems nice, but to the extent I watch DVD movies these days they have been ripped and I watch them using MyMovies on an Xbox 360 Media Center Extender, so this is less important. Another alternative would be the ability to pass unprocessed video from a DVD to a receiver that would do its own upconversion.
• No extra memory is needed for advanced features. The Blu-Ray profile 1.1 and 2.0 specifications require 256MB and 1GB, respectively, of persistent memory to be compliant. Some players allow those requirements to be satisfied only by plugging in a USB memory stick.
• Slow motion and frame-by-frame advance. These are pretty basic transport controls, but at least one new DB-Live Blu-Ray player is without them.

I've considered the PlayStation 3, the Sony BDP-S350, the Samsung BD-P1500. I have not seriously considered the Panasonic DMP-BD50 (because of its $700 price tag and not being available quite yet) or Sony BDP-S550 (because it will not be available until Fall). These are the only BD-Live capable players and none satisfied all of my criteria.

I'm currently leaning toward the Samsung BD-P1500 for reasons I'll explain in more detail once I make a purchase (something I'm not in a huge hurry to do, but a big enough hurry that I probably won't wait until Fall).

[Updated 7/16/08]

My pair of BlueTrek ST1 Bluetooth headphones broke for what seems like about the seventh time in the past year. Each time the manufacturer has dutifully replaced them with a new pair that breaks again in a matter of weeks or months. The problem isn't the electronics, its that the flexible headphones aren't quite flexible enough to stand being flexed with each wearing.

A higher capitalization rate hides a multitude of sins.

The failure of two-year old X-10 switch proved to be a major hassle to address. It led to a chain of events that reminded of the rhyme that begins "For want of a nail" and illustrates some of the time often wasted with time saving technology. The broad though this inspires is that most investments in home technology don't save that much time, but they can bring capabilities that can enhance your life in ways that were impossible before.

We had an X-10 Smarthome KeypadLinc X-10 dimmer that was installed with two other switches to control a set of seven can lights in the main seating area of our family room.

That switch failed (Several other switches just like it have failed as well lending credence to the questionable reputation for quality of Smarthome products.) and the result was that we could not operate the can lights in the family room and many other X-10 devices thoughout the house ceased to operate (because without the builtin X-10 amplifier, the signal going to those devices was not strong enough).

My first thought was to replace it the successor Insteon keypad switch (cost: $70), which can be programmed to respond to X-10 signals, but there were several problems that led me to abandon this solution: (i) Insteon switched lack X-10 amplifiers; (ii) the wiring scheme for the Insteon switch was different and my electrical skills are limited to replacing one device with another similarly wired device; and (iii) the Insteon switch would have required replacing the two other X-10 switches connected to this one as well (with new Insteon switches that cost about $50 each). I would have to add a SignaLinc amplifier/repeater (hooked into a dryer outlet to bridge the two 110 volt AC legs in the house) easily for another $120. So this one failed switch would potentially cost about $400 in parts to replace, plus potentially having to use an electrician.

As it turned out I was able to replace another KeypadLinc X-10 dimmer that we have connected as the only switch for a light with a new KeypadLinc Insteon switch and then use that old KeypadLinc X-10 dimmer to replace the failed switch. Part cost: $70; and about an hour of wrangling with wires in electrical boxes.

I kept the SignaLinc amplifier I had ordered because it actually improved some X-10 signal issues I had been having elsewhere in the house. This is a nice device, but it will ultimately require us to get a new exhaust hose for our dryer because of the unique configuration of our laundry room.

Solving these problems consumed a fair amount of time and left us without some key lights for about two weeks as I ordered parts and worked through these issues. To make matters worse, we seldom use the X-10 capabilities of the family room switch in question.

But here are some ways the X-10 system really improves our lives:

• The picture lights in our living room and the outside lights turn on automatically at sundown and off at midnight. This lets us come home to a nicely lit house instead of a depressingly dark house.
• A wireless remote can turn on seven lights in the living room and four lights in our media room on and off with one button press. This makes us more likely to use the living room and more likely to use all of our preferred lights in the media room.
• When we leave the house for a trip a couple of clicks in HomeSeer set up a lighting scheme for the house in our absence, making travel alternatively less of a hassle or increasing our sense of security while doing so.

These have far more to do with a better quality of life than with saving time.