JavaWorld has an overview of the new I/O classes in Java 1.4.

The Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society is an organization that is striving to make Islam more compatible with democratic society. There are a number of interesting papers on their site, including this one: Jihad, the Arab Conquests and the Position of Non-Muslim Subjects , which takes a historical look at the position of Islam toward other religions. (It’s a long paper, I haven’t finished reading it yet.)

Phil Agre’s latest set of attack-related links.

On TV Tonight, courtesy of The Onion.

Today, Salon’s Jake Tapper takes a look at American Islamic organizations and their support for terrorists, or at least their refusal to condemn them.

Can the investigation into the terrorist attacks of 9/11 really be this scattershot? Round up all the usual suspects, indeed.

Harvard professor Jessica Stern testified before the House Committee on Government Reform last week, providing lots of useful background information on al Qaeda. The testimony contains fascinating revelations gleaned directly from interviews with former members of the organization. There’s a transcript at the Harvard web site.

Ms. Stern’s prescription for solving the terrorism problem in the long term is nation building of the sort that President Bush mocked when he was campaigning for his current office. America can hardly pretend to be isolated when we have business interests throughout the world, and the government spends billions of dollars in various ways globally to support those business interests. The idea that America can somehow solve its problems through withdrawal or unilateralism is a sad fantasy.

Here are some of Ms. Stern’s other writings that might be of interest at this time:

• Pakistan’s Jihad Culture (from Foreign Affairs)
• Meeting with the Muj — a first hand account of visits to madrisas, Islamic schools which teach their students how to become mujahideen in lieu of math or science
• an interview on how terrorist leaders attract followers and cash

Derrick Story thinks highly of Mac OS 10.1. I’m thinking of buying a laptop later this fall, and if Mac OS 10.1 is really great, maybe I’ll make it an iBook.

Is anyone else troubled by the profusion of ads for online casinos that have been popping up only slightly less frequently than X10 ads lately? I even see them on sites like Yahoo, which means that Internet ad rates have truly fallen through the floor or there are lots of people paying to gamble online. Isn’t it the case that online casinos are basically unregulated and there’s no guarantee that the computer program you’re gambling against obeys the rules at all? Maybe that’s why they can afford to buy so much advertising …

Christopher Kremmer’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Alas, our new brothers-in-arms resemble more a freaks’ gallery than a stable family. The British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, heads off today to Iran to ask its government – which is on an American list of countries that support terrorism – to join the war against, that’s right, terrorism. Perhaps Tehran’s contribution could be to explain exactly how it’s done. The same twisted logic applies to Pakistan’s Lazarus-like return from beyond the realm of civilised nations. Islamabad has escaped sanctions – and will no doubt breeze through debt-rescheduling talks – precisely because, having sponsored the Taliban, it knows all about them and is willing to sell that information for 30 pieces of silver. As a former US envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Thomsen, noted: “In the last 15 years Pakistan has been both the fireman and the arsonist in Afghanistan.”

The important thing here is that everyone else in the world knows what we’re up to here. It’s not like people in Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world are ignorant of the fact that Pakistan was a pariah state and that the West disapproved of their military government until they could give us something that we wanted.