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The Phaistos Disk. "It's beautiful, it's a mystery, and it's very old; what's not to like?"
- jim 4-08-2003 10:38 pm [link] [1 comment]

Long super geeky backgrounder on implementing VisiCalc, the program that fueled the personal computer revolution.
- jim 4-08-2003 9:10 pm [link] [add a comment]

The strange story of a guy, an accordian, a weblog, and a girl who wasn't who she said she was. Not sure what the moral of this story is. Sort of unsettling on many fronts. And he doesn't even consider the weirdest possibility: maybe she really did prove P = NP, and now the world will never know.
- jim 4-08-2003 8:34 pm [link] [1 comment]

This came up in his blog, but it seemed to me at the time like things had been worked out, and it wasn't that big of a deal. Now wired has an article about the agonist plagiarizing many of his battle updates from a pay newsletter put out by Stratfor. Wired says:

Some of the information was attributed to news outlets and other sources, but much of it was unsourced, particularly the almost real-time combat information presumably gleaned from a string of high-level sources worldwide....

The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor.
I never had the sense that he had a "string of high-level sources worldwide" but I guess that doesn't absolve him. Still, I think he provided a valuable (if slightly illegal) service. He distilled the news at a time when this was very difficult to do. Obviously he couldn't source the Stratfor stuff, because it was a paid service.

I guess you could object that he shouldn't have used the Stratfor stuff at all. Fair enough. I'm just saying that a lot of people wanted to know what was going on, and he provided that information. I put his wrong doing in the same camp as running a gnutella client. In other words: wrong, but it's not going to stop me from using such a fine service.
- jim 4-08-2003 8:27 pm [link] [4 comments]

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