A story by The St. Petersburg Times shows that during official meetings there, county commissioners were using their government-issued laptops to “pass time on e-Bay, travel sites, and personal email.”

Ted Schrader tracks stocks on tbo.com. Fellow Pasco County Commissioner Steve Simon favors eBay and golf-related sites like hirekogolf.com. Commissioner Pat Mulieri fiddles with her AOL email account.

The three commissioners regularly visited those Web sites and many others the past three years, which is totally unremarkable except for one fact: they did so during meetings of the Pasco County Commission while ostensibly focused on public business.

Personal use of county computers, meanwhile, has gotten rank and file county employees fired.

One commissioner admitted checking the prices of Elmo and golf clubs. Matthew Waite, one of the two reporters, explains how they did it on his personal blog, in a post called “Watchdog journalism doesn’t have to be hard.”

Can you pass 8th grade math?

Who knew plagiarism was an academic discipline? Not I. Plagiary is a journal dedicated to the subject, but let’s just hope no one steals this drivel:

Devoted specifically to the scholarly, cross-disciplinary study of plagiary and related behaviors across the disciplines, articles in Plagiary address the issue of fraudulent contributions to disciplinary discourse communities and the potential (and actual) corruption of the professional literature and other genres of discourse as a result of such derivative and/or fraudulent “contributions” to discoursal interchange.

Disciplinary discourse communities? Discoursal interchange? If that’s the best they can do, maybe they should steal a few paragraphs from someone else.

beSpacific, channeling information compiled by Nathan Estey and posted on FOI-L by Michael Ravnitzky, has put online A Guide to Port Databases.