What Could Have Been Entering The Public Domain on January 1, 2011? — a list of the works that won’t be entering the public domain in the US because the copyright term was extended in 1976. Think of the movies from 1954 that would have become available this year. You could have showed clips from them. You could have showed all of them. You could have spliced and remixed and made documentaries about them. (You could have been a contender!) Instead, here are a few of the movies that we won’t see in the public domain for another 39 years …. This list will be viewed two different ways by different groups, reinforcing instead of changing their views: copyright minimalists will say “what a tragedy” but copyright maximalists will say “look at these great works we protected, they’re still earning money for their creators therefore they’re still valuable and thus worth protecting”. (via Bill Bennett on Twitter)
ProxClone — cloner for proximity cards, cost of parts around $30. (via Hacker News)
2011 Is The Year of Server-Side Javascript — explanation of why the author will be doing back-end coding in Javascript this year. Good to see an honest assessment that it’s still early days for server-side Javascript: Most of the libraries out there are young, buggy and incomplete. I got Node.js to segfault a few times. There’s no killer framework on the same caliber as Rails, nor anything that comes close to ActiveSupport and a decent standard runtime library (hmm … that gives me an idea). But then, it’s not much different than what Ruby was five years ago, or Java back in the late 90′s. We’ve all got to start somewhere.
