ZDNET is taking a close look at the anomalies of the cube – right out of the box.

An article in the New York Times reports on yesterday’s oral arguments on the Eldred v. Reno case.
-Anonymous Reader. ed. note: further information is found in the extended copy. The government tries to claim that the “system as a whole” provides an increased incentive to authors over the former law. Unfortunately for the government, this argument was anticipated and criticized months ago by this essay which points out that “No work not published before January 1, 1978 can ever qualify for the 67-year renewal term. Hence the extended renewal term cannot … be argued to provide an indirect incentive to future creators by virtue of being part of a uniform regulatory system which by its overall structure provides the incentive, since it applies only to an obsolete system which is no current author is able to take advantage of.” Then there is the Congressional Research Service Report 98-144E, “Copyright Term Extension: Estimating the Economic Values” by Edward Rappaport, May 11, 1998, which has this evaluation of the incentive
Provided by the life-plus-seventy term for new works: “The additional incentive afforded by adding 20 years to the current life plus 50 appears to be small compared to the already existing incentive. This is due to two considerations: the small probability of a work surviving as long as the current term, and the effect of time-discounting of future incomes.â€

The Washington Post reports that the experiment in question is “fusing sturdy Unix underpinnings with a shiny Mac interface. This could have easily resulted in a train wreck of an operating system.”

Oslo, October 5, 2000 – Opera Software today released a Beta version of
Opera 4.0 for Linux, bringing the browser for Linux one
step closer to a final release. Opera 4.0 for Linux is part of Opera Software’s ambitious project to port
its Opera browser to the most popular platforms in the market.

“Opera 4.0 for Linux has now reached a stage where we reach out and invite
the Linux community to participate in the development of the browser even
more closely than before,” says Hakon W. Lie, Chief Technology Officer,
Opera Software. “This is a great release, and with the help of Linux
aficionados everywhere a final release will come faster, be stronger, and
result in a browser that Linux users can identify with,” he ends.

Opera for Linux 4.0 has the following features:
Support for plug-ins
128 bit encryption
TLS 1.0
SSL 2/3
CSS1 and 2
XML
HTML 4.0
HTTP 1.1
ECMAScript
JavaScript 1.3.
WML

Opera has until now been known as “the third browser” on Windows. It has
achieved this position with limited expenditures on marketing, only relying
on enthusiastic users and journalists spreading the word. Opera’s small
size, low resource consumption and support for standards positions it in the rapidly expanding Internet device market. In the last
year the company has raised capital, and added personnel in marketing,
sales, and R&D. Apart from Linux and Windows, Opera also develops browsers
for EPOC, Mac, and BeOS platforms.

Opera Software AS is a developer of Web browsers
for the desktop and device markets. The Opera browser has received
international recognition from end-users and the industry press. Opera
Software AS is a privately held company headquartered in Oslo, Norway. Learn
more about Opera at www.opera.com

CONTACT:
Opera Software AS
Pal Hvistendahl, Communications Manager, pal@opera.com, +47 99 72 4331

If you are the first person to send a relevant story to NewsForge, chances are close to 100% that your submission will be accepted.We want to link to literally everything published online, anywhere in the world, about Open Source, Linux, *BSD and Free Software or that affects the people who use and create Open Source. We have a software crawler (NewsVac) that cruises hundreds of news site URLs as often as every two hours, but it is still growing and does not yet check every single Web site that might publish an article that belongs here.

And no piece of software, given real life bandwidth and hardware limitations, can possibly dig through every small or personal site that might publish an interesting piece about (for example) OpenBSD administration in a private wide-area network.

So we invite you to submit anything you see, anywhere, that you think belongs on NewsForge. Chances are, if you’ve been checking this site for more than a few days, you have a good idea of what that might be — except that there are a few areas where we don’t see much action yet but would like to see more in the future.

We’d like to see more meeting announcements, for instance, even local ones that may appeal to only a tiny fraction of our worldwide audience. We would also like to see more event notifications and calls for papers.

If you spot a new piece of technology that might be important to Open Source developers or users, we’d love to know about it – so please tell us!

We even accept press releases, whether they’re from Free Software developers or commercial companies. If they relate to our core interests, we’ll run them — generally without elaboration or comment. NewsForge is an information supplier, not a source of opinions.

(Of course, if you have an opinion you want to share about something we’ve published, we have a discussion page where you are welcome to do so.)

Many weblog-style news and discussion sites place strict limits on the number of articles they run every day. Slashdot, a prime example, runs between 10 and 20 per day, and that’s all. NewsForge is unlimited. If we find 50 relevant articles in one day, that’s how many we run. If we find 100, we run 100. There is, literally, no limit in either direction.

We have a (very small) group of editors who select NewsForge stories and write the summaries you see on our main page, but they do not “judge” submissions in the sense of accepting only a few and rejecting all others. They just try to avoid duplicate submissions as much as possible, and do their best to make sure that most of the words on the site are spelled right. All of our editors are Open Source software users, experienced journalists, or both, and when they are not working on the NewForge feed they are either writing stories or writing code.

Since this is still a new site with comparatively few readers (although the number grows steadily every week), you can use the discussion page to ask questions, and you will get an answer from one of us. Or you can send us e-mail and we will send you a personal reply, usually within a few hours on weekdays, and within 24 hours on weekends.

But the main place we hope you’ll get involved with NewsForge is on our submissions page. Slashdot, by dint of its nature, only runs a tiny percentage of what gets submitted so most submittors go away disappointed. NewsForge has only rejected a few submissions, ever, mostly because they were duplicates of stories we had already run.

NewsForge is an experiment; an attempt to create a true “online newspaper” that either links to or directly covers all Open Source news, not just some little bit of it. And with your help, we might just pull it off.

Robin ‘roblimo’ Miller
editor-in-chief
http://newsforge.com

Comment heard from the peanut gallery: “Anything that happens to them that could lead to getting rid of those annoying commercials with
Captain Kirk is good.” From Upside Today.

“Has the Web lived up to the wide-eyed promise of the early years —
circa 1995? Heck, no. My desktop doesn’t talk to my toaster, and I can’t
download the Gladiator movie and a Russell Crowe inflatable doll in half a
second. I don’t check my stock quotes using a broadband chip implanted in
my femur, which also washes my car.” From a (funny) report at Business Week.

Slashdot says, “This is a detailed description which should interest anyone lucky enough to have one of these
cuties.”

OSOpinion: “Apple has been, from the beginning, the only company in Silicon Valley that mattered. They were, and may very well continue to be, the force behind computers, the face of the screen, and its design. Every component you are touching right now, whether it is the keyboard, or its monitor, has somehow reached into Apple’s life and pulled its existence from it. To be more specific, it came from Steve Jobs.” –Kelly McNeill

Slashdot is discussing a ZDNET article that analyzes the dangers of humans translating syntax into meaning.