2012 is the year that Europe shuts down its proto-Internets. First, the BBC announced that teletex was getting the axe and today France is shutting down the Minitel x.25 network. These technologies, both started in the late 1970s, were ahead of their times and, in many ways, may still be.

Small errors of history presented in this Guardian article sum up to a government directed, top-down history of diffusion, learning & innovation. In any history of the British adoption of microcomputers, Sinclair should earn top billing for popular influence over the BBC/Acorn.

A textual comparison between the Terms of Service for DropBox, the Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive, reveals that they are not materially different in the licenses granted, rights claimed or uses permitted.
 

A follow-up to the ngram.sh post with data sources for Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg ngrams. The ngram.sh script can easily be modified to extract keywords from these databases, and many others.
 

The Google Ngram Viewer is a database browser used to chart the relative frequency of words or phrases. The data source is the Google Books database and the graphic engine is Google Charts. It’s cool. It’s pretty. It doesn’t easily give up the raw data. This script helps.

This is a short HowTo for making a Facebook page and inserting an iFrame from to a website.

Note: SSL became mandatory for page tab apps in October 2011. This post has not been updated.

This article describes the use of a simple AJAX-powered webpage to display a real-time feed from Twitter. It suggests use cases and reasons to pair it with an IRC webapp to provide a back channel to noisy hashtags.

Note: code uses Twitter REST API v1. This post has not been updated.

Aaaaarg.org is a human-generated index of pirated academic works popular among graduate students. This document is an introduction to using the system. The site software changes often, breaking links, but the social process largely remains the same.

Teaching Assistantsfrequently trade tips for discovering plagiarism in the papers they grade. While google has made it easy to catch the lazy copy-paste form, we recognize that cheaters with financial resources can buy term papers. The following chat occurred with an essay mill which as “among the premier essay writing companies in the world”.

American birthright citizenship does not derive from a “misinterpretation” of the 14th amendment. It is, instead, an American legal principle with a nearly unbroken tradition dating to the earliest days of republic.