Keith Hennessey argues we should judge debt reduction plans by their resulting deficit, not the amount their creators think they reduce the deficit by:

It is far better to evaluate a deal by looking only at Y, the deficits that would result from the deal, rather than at X-Y, the change in those deficits from an arbitrarily defined starting point. In the first example, instead of asking “Is $2 or $7 trillion of deficit reduction the right amount,” we should ask “Is a policy resulting in $5 trillion of deficits over the next decade an acceptable outcome, or do we need to do more?”

Joshua Topolsky is hearing something like an iPad Pro is coming this fall:

As hard as it might be to believe, the new tablet is said to sport a double resolution screen (2048 x 1536), and will be dubbed the “iPad HD.” The idea behind the product is apparently that it will be a “pro” device aimed at a higher end market — folks who work in video and photo production possibly — and will be introduced alongside something like an iPad version of Final Cut or Aperture.

Whether it’s this fall or in the next couple years, I think it’s something that has to happen. The iPad is not going to be a single product.

One note on Aperture for iPad: that would be fantastic. The iPad is a natural tool for photographers to use while out on shoots.

David Barnard believes touch—the direct manipulation of objects—is the largest shift in computing we’ve seen:

After a few minutes he [David's two-year old son] exited the app and looked up to see the icons of all his favorite apps on the TV. He immediately set down the iPad, walked up to the TV, and tried launching an app by touching the TV screen. My wife and I instinctually told him not to touch the TV, but he looked back at us quite puzzled. The thing is, Luke has never used a mouse-like pointing device. Other than using the TV remote to turn the TV on and off, or turning a light switch on and off, he’s never used one object to remotely manipulate another.

What’s so intriguing to me about children growing up using iOS devices is that they are learning touch-based computers first, and therefore their mental concepts for computers are based on them. For older generations, we think of computers as things you use separate interface elements to interact with content (the mouse, keyboard, user interface buttons, et cetera), and thus that’s how we conceptualize them, even in the new world of touch computing.

Children growing up on iOS devices, though, haven’t been spoiled (in the sense of spoiled fruit) by old-world computing abstractions. The current crop of iOS applications still, in many ways, reflect our old-world computing concepts. What I can’t wait to see is what the young generation comes up with, a generation which grew up using touch-based computers. That’s going to be a giant leap.

That’s also how application developers need to be thinking. Don’t design your application so it makes sense with old-world computing concepts; design it as if touch is a universal language and we never had desktop PCs. The effects of this change are tremendous. Computers are no longer so much computers as real world objects, powered by software.

HP is using celebrities to advertise the TouchPad:

Tying its marketing to Mr. Brand and Miranda Cosgrove and Lea Michele — stars of Nickelodeon’s “iCarly” and Fox Broadcasting’s “Glee,” respectively — H.P. is underscoring its slogan that the TouchPad “Works Like Nothing Else.”

And to add a little swagger, the company also hired Manny Pacquiao, the champion Filipino welterweight boxer, politician and aspiring singer, to advertise its compact Veer smartphone and its multitouch tablet.

(Via Lessien.)

Here are the Russell Brand TouchPad spots, if you haven’t seen them. Most of them are dreadful.

They need to do something to grab attention from the iPad and rise over the sea of boring Android tablets, though, and they may succeed at that. It may at least get it into people’s minds—”Oh, there’s another tablet available other than the iPad”—and that might be enough.

This also indicates that HP thinks youth are one of their target markets for the device, which is kind of odd. There’s nothing very exciting about it right now for younger people, besides perhaps Flash-support in the browser, but once they actually use it I don’t think they’ll find that much of an advantage.

Sean Sperte’s Sky Balloon Studio has a new iPhone and iPod touch app out called Capture.

The concept is great: when you launch the app, it begins taking video immediately. And when you close it, it saves the video. No fumbling with launching the Camera app, turning the switch to video and hitting record—just launch Capture and you’re capturing the moment you want.

Shawn Blanc’s epic review of the HP TouchPad:

After nearly a week with the new HP TouchPad and webOS 3.0 my overall impression is that the TouchPad is less than the sum of its parts. There is nothing the TouchPad does that the iPad cannot except play Flash video (sometimes). I could not find one compelling feature or function that was significant or compelling enough to take the TouchPad seriously compared to the iPad.

Fantastic review. It’s unfortunate, though, that the TouchPad just isn’t there yet. The iPad is in its own class right now.

Fortune’s Chadwick Matlin has a look at what it’s like for third-party companies to sell accessories in Apple’s retail stores:

Jack Klein, one of Apple’s lead visual designers, helped Lark design the packaging. “He told us several things,” Hu says. “People want to feel what they’re sleeping with. Figure out a way where you could quickly have an Apple associate prove that this is a comfortable product.’” Hu, impressed, did as she was told, rearranging what was inside the box. “I consider them almost like beta testers,” Hu says.

Apple doesn’t just sell third-party products—they consider each of them to reflect on Apple and the experience, so they help think through the products they agree to sell.

James Wilson:

Just as iTunes made payment processing obsolete for software distribution, iCloud will make signing up for a service or account undesirable and I can see it dramatically reducing our tendency as developers to create and use web service or SaaS platforms behind our apps.

U.S. planes are participating in air strikes in Libya:

“U.S. aircraft continue to fly support [ISR and refueling] missions, as well as strike sorties under NATO tasking,” AFRICOM spokeswoman Nicole Dalrymple said in an emailed statement. “As of today, and since 31 March, the U.S. has flown a total of 3,475 sorties in support of OUP. Of those, 801 were strike sorties, 132 of which actually dropped ordnance.”

So, not only are we providing surveillance and refueling for NATO, and striking Libyan forces with unmanned drones, but we’re also conducting traditional air strikes as well.

Remember, according to the administration, this doesn’t amount to “hostilities.” Is that the place we’re in now, where the government believes dropping 500-2000 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles doesn’t amount to hostilities?

Walt Mossberg:

I’ve been testing the TouchPad for about a week and, in my view, despite its attractive and different user interface, this first version is simply no match for the iPad. It suffers from poor battery life, a paucity of apps and other deficits.

Consensus seems to be the user interface is clever, but it simply isn’t as usable as the iPad 2. That’s a shame.

Jason Snell, in his review of the HP TouchPad:

Sometimes I think one of the most important achievements of Apple’s iOS development team is completely overlooked by most reviewers: the fact that on iOS devices, when you move your finger, the on-screen objects under your finger move along with it. No lag, no judder of dropped frames, just a pure illusion that you’re physically manipulating an object. Almost every time I have tried a new Android phone or tablet—and when I tried the TouchPad—I am surprised to find that the interface just isn’t as responsive as Apple’s.

It’s crazy that four years after the iPhone was released, competing devices still can’t do something so basic. This is they key element to what makes the iPhone great—that things respond to the user’s touch like they’re real objects—but others haven’t really been able to duplicate it yet.

Greg Mankiw has some advice for the GOP:

My advice: Amend your line in the sand to NO INCREASES IN TAX RATES. Be willing to give up on tax expenditures if we simultaneously make current tax rates permanent–or, better yet, if we lower rates, as the Bowles-Simpson commission suggested.

Apture just released Hotspots to connect the web’s information together.

Basically, what it does is make talked about topics clickable on web pages, so you can pull up more information about it without leaving the page. Say, for example, you’re reading about Syria, and the article mentions Hezbollah—but you don’t know much about them. If enough people are highlighting it, or if it’s being discussed across the web, “Hezbollah” would automatically be turned into a link. If you click on it, a little window will pop up that aggregates information from across the web, so you can learn about it without leaving the page.

This has been done before, and it’s often annoying, but what’s really unique about their approach is (1) it dynamically links certain words or phrases depending on what’s relevant at the time, and (2) the pop-up window isn’t annoying. Go and play with it on their blog post. It doesn’t get in your way, it provides actually useful information, and it’s easy to dismiss when you’re done.

The big-picture idea here is to connect the web’s information together into a cohesive whole. Where we should be going is a future where data and information are not just available for us to find on the web, but can instantly be pulled from their sources so we can use them. That way, we won’t have to search for the right information—it will just appear when we need it.

While Hotspots is a relatively small step toward doing that, I’m excited there’s people working on doing it.

Google just announced their new social service, Google+. Here’s MG Siegler’s overview of the service.

It looks quite nice—I especially love that grouping your contacts is built into it from the very beginning. Whereas Facebook has felt heavy, convoluted and messy for years to me, this looks clean and well-designed. I’d much rather use this than Facebook, my misgivings about social networks aside.

I’m pulling for Google on this one, if only to be a counterweight to Facebook.

Ross Douthat on abortion being used to end the lives of female babies in the developing world:

For one thing, it presents a policy problem: If the right to abortion is a fundamental human liberty, how do you address sex selection without infringing dramatically on the right to privacy? (A similar problem would obtain in the Yglesian hypothetical: How far would liberals be willing to go to restrict access to the boy-producing contraception? What would a liberal court have to say about efforts to ban it? Etc.)

Douthat links to a new book by Mara Hvistendahl which alleges that selective abortions in developing nations like China and India are largely responsible for the huge disparity—160 million women—between the number of men and women in these countries.

Abortions absolutely are used for this purpose in China and India, but I haven’t read the book nor seen her evidence, so I won’t comment on the validity of her claim that selective abortions are largely responsible for the disparity, but using abortion for this purpose should be troubling regardless for those who believe it should be legal and those who don’t. In these cases, a child (or fetus, if you’d rather use a sterilized term) is killed not because the mother and father cannot care for it, but because of its gender. That’s horrifying.

If Hvistendahl’s argument is true, how do those in favor of abortion deal with it? There’s a dilemma here; a large disparity between men and women is incredibly damaging for society, but addressing it would require restricting abortion—which they’ve argued is fundamental to a woman’s privacy and autonomy.