9/11 Report Iffy on Tech. The 9/11 Commission made recommendations for technology solutions in its final report — some specific, some fuzzy — to bring government into the information age. By Michael Myser. [Wired News]

The Campaign Institute trains people to be paid campaign staffers. They're doing trainings in Cambridge in August. [Scripting News]

New Republic: “The national press corps spent the better part of 1999 and 2000 insisting that George W. Bush was a centrist, because he kept repeating slogans that suggested as much. Reporters could have avoided this misinterpretation had they spent less time following Bush around the country and more time sitting at their desks doing [...]

Optimizing for Broadband. LPS 2.0 can freeze-dry an application for rapid startup, saving whatever initialization state doesn't depend on the environment. [Oliver Steele]

Carmen bin Ladin's New Book on our Saudi “Allies”. Danielle Crittenden's review of Carmen bin Ladin's new book, Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia, makes a very compelling case that this is a very important book for anyone interested in understanding the roots of the War on Terror. Equally important, however, bin Laden's [...]

Bailout Feared if Airlines Shed Their Pensions. The federal agency that insures company pensions is facing a possible cascade of bankruptcies and pension defaults that could lead to a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH. [The New York Times > Home Page]

Cyberattacks Increase. A Deloitte & Touche study found that cyberattacks on large financial institutions have doubled in the past year. Though 43% of the survey respondents who had been attacked suffered financial losses, over 25% of respondents said their security budgets remained  flat this year. Almost 10% said their budgets were cut from the previous [...]

observations about house design. PhilG has some interesting observations about house design. As someone who has lived in various apartments and keeps getting urged to buy a house, I've noticed some of the same things. A one-room apartment/house isn't attractive to me since I like the idea of a separate bedroom, but I don't want [...]

The Economist: Faster, cheaper, better. Interest in these high-powered beasts waned in the 1990s, as computing talent was drawn to the internet. This has been changing in recent years. The ability to build powerful computers cheaply, combined with growing commercial demand for high-end computing power, is creating a renaissance in the field of supercomputing. [Tomalak's [...]

FCC: Why No a La Carte Cable?. The cable industry tells the FCC that a la carte cable subscriptions would hurt advertising and cost too much. But FCC staffers ask tough questions in return, and hear from others who say the industry is full of it. Michael Grebb reports from Washington. [Wired News]