Saturday, 18th January 2003
The Eric Eldred act
Larry Lessig has a new campaign: a “copyright tax” that kicks in 50 years in to a copyright term, demanding copyright owners to pay a nominal fee ($1—$50) to maintain control of their copyright. Unused works that are no longer profitable should then default to falling in to the public domain, while more commercial works can stay copyrighted. Larry’s idea was first announced in this New York Times Op-Ed and is also covered on Lessig’s blog. He has also published an FAQ.
[... 107 words]Spam conference
It sounds like Paul Graham’s Spam Conference was a huge success, with attendance rocketing to 560 from the original estimate of 50—60. Scott Johnson sings its praise and promises a full write up later on. In the meantime, webcasts of the talks are available on the conference website.
[... 58 words]PEAR templates and bitshifting
Codewalker.com have a tutorial up describing PEAR’s ITX template system. Their forums also have an explanation of how bitshifting operators work in PHP (in the fifth message from the bottom of the thread).
[... 51 words]Colour blindness filter
Via Anitra Pavka (who has an excellent usability and accessibility weblog): Colourblind Web Page Filter, a clever server driven tool which shows how web pages would look to people suffering from three different forms of colour blindness.
[... 40 words]