Happy New Winter Year!

Lots of interesting stuff at Slashdot. Does intellectual property expire at the new year, or on the actual anniversary of copyright/patenting? Anyway, let's start with IP issues:

• What Would Have Entered the Public Domain Tomorrow? Retroactive copyright extensions go back at least to 1976, when the US moved to the silly "Life +" system.
  
•  DRM and the Destruction of the Book. I want to own my culture.
• USPTO Awards LOL Patent To IBM. Another patent of the obvious.
  

• Why Do So Many Terrorists Have Engineering Degrees. I see this as an investigation of how personality affects both profession and ideology. It's worth remembering next time somebody lays all the world's problems at the feet of liberal arts majors from Brown University.
• TSA Subpoenas Bloggers Over New Security Directive: Secrecy for the sake of secrecy?
• Quantum Encryption Implementation Broken: Ideally, it's unbreakable, but the world isn't ideal.
  
• The Rise of Machine-Written Journalism : something neat.