rc3.org

The open source version of Movable Type has been released. There’s even a public Subversion repository.

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Anil Dash named this blog one of his blogs of the year. Needless to say, I’m completely humbled by the compliment, and especially humbled by the fine company I’m in. Anytime I’m mentioned in the same light as Nelson Minar, I know I must be doing something right.

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In rural India, a fake government office set up originally as a scam expanded to employ 20 people in various civil service roles, like street sweeping and issuing birth and death certificates. The enterprise was discovered when some of the employees complained to the government about problems at the “branch office.” Without blogs, how would [...]

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In my day to day work, the definition of precision is usually, “All my unit tests run successfully.” The level of precision achieved by the clockmakers at the NIST is significantly more impressive.

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Slate’s Emily Bazelton and Dahlia Lithwick break down exactly what was lost when the CIA lied about having taped the interrogations of top al-Qaeda detainees and then destroyed them in 2005.

Bruce Schneier notes that if the CIA destroyed the tapes, they must have been really bad, because such tapes are valuable from an intelligence perspective.

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Malcolm Gladwell has written a timely article on IQ, specifically about the Flynn effect, which is described thusly:

He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around [...]

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What’s the state of the art these days in building your own community site? The basic idea is that you start with a blog, but you want user registration, profile pages, forums, and perhaps the ability to give users their own blogs.

Yesterday I read some horrible things about Joomla in a private forum. There’s [...]

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Today we learned that top Congressional Democrats were briefed by the CIA on their plans to torture detainees in secret facilities in other countries, starting in 2002. While I’ve been hard on the Republicans for the part they’ve played in supporting the torture of suspected supporters of terrorism, the Democrats deserve plenty of blame as [...]

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We’re in the middle of the bursting of the real estate bubble, and one of the most interesting things is how unexceptional it is.

One of the best-documented bubbles in recent times was the junk bond market in the eighties that led to the collapse of the savings and loan industry. Like nearly all bubbles, it [...]

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The New York Times Bits blog writes about the acquisition of Gemstar, a company that provides electronic program guides for TV by Macrovision, a company in the copy protection business. That doesn’t sound promising for consumers.

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