To Talk of Many Things

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 Nexis searches,
where they could have unearthed old Bush quotes like this one from
1996: 'The Republican Party must put a compassionate face on a
conservative philosophy.' Surely that would have told them more about
how Bush was actually planning to govern than the number of times he
described himself as 'compassionate' or was filmed with black or
Hispanic children.” [Scripting News]

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 book apparently raises very
serious questions about whether the Saudi alliance is really in our
longterm national interest:

She has emerged from her
ordeal with some urgent insights into the kingdom from which she
escaped: “Osama bin Laden and those like him didn't spring, fully
formed, from the desert sand. They were made. They were fashioned by
the workings of an opaque and intolerant medieval society that is
closed to the outside world. It is a society where half the population
have had their basic rights as people amputated, and obedience to the
strictest rules of Islam must be absolute. Despite all the power of
their oil-revenue, the Saudis are structured by a hateful,
backward-looking view of religion and an education that is a school for
intolerance . . . .When Osama dies, I fear there will be a thousand men
to take his place.”

Go read the whole review. I suspect you'll end up joining me both in ordering bin Ladin's book and moving it to the top of your reading stack. [ProfessorBainbridge.com]

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
year.

Thanks to Bytes in Brief for the link. [Netlawblog]

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 a big bedroom since I don't spend much time there and
don't have much furniture. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

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 Realm]

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]