I just completed a 10 week internship in a Congressional office where they found my technically savvy to be of a great deal of use to their office. They had we working on website and streamlining their mail system after just a couple of weeks on the job. So, here are my couple of observations from those weeks.
1) e-mails are just as important as phone calls. An office gets a phone call with someone saying "I opposed issue X", they tell that person they will "pass the comment on to the Congressperson" and if your lucky, they will tally the support on a sheet. The same goes with e-mail, except that you get a nice little letter that will actually explain the Congresspersons position. Granted it will be form letter, but it usually is enough to know where the rep stands.
2) being a constituent is EVERYTHING. Most offices in the House use something call "IQ", an awful little program written to make full use of IE activeX capabilities. IQ, for all of its failings, has an incredible address checker, and can determine if a letter is from the within their district or not. But you have to get the address to them in the right format, which means using their webform submissions... NO public e-mails.
3) I really can't stress this point enough... a constituent is a constituent, whether it be phone, fax, mail, or carrier pigeon. Any office that wants to be reelected gives every piece the same effort, because people who write are people who vote. The best way to be ignored is to say "if I e-mail it will just be processed by some staffer, so I won't bother." Everything is processed by a staffer (unless you're a personal friend), so get out their and send an e-mail. Personalize it if you wish, but it really doesn't matter... they just want to know who you are and what you think your representatives stance on the issues ought to be. Never forget, these people pay money for polling data that you are giving them for free. They are happy to receive it.
I hope this helps a bit in everyones political adventures.
This looks pretty good in my opinion, I think I may even install it on my Mom's computer so she can start to understand the Linux world... my only concern was the availability of sourcecode. There was a snapshots page... but that's a far cry from a nice ISO to download and burn onto a CD. I noticed that for 10 extra bucks I could get a CD with the source, but that seems to be in violation of the spirit of the GPL. Hey, I know these guys are trying to make money... but they are trying to make money of the backs of some very dedicated volunteers... the least they could do is provide a more simple way to access their source.
Aside from that, this looks great. I just hope that it runs as well as their cute little pictures make me want to believe.
While its true that we have 36,000 students using AIX for e-mail and the like here at the UW, we don't actually have any labs setup with machines running *nix (there is one RedHat lab for the CS students). I've been trying to convince my boss in the UW polisci lab to run linux for a year-plus, but he won't even let me setup a linux server to run mySQL. So, even though UW is home to such greats as Pine and IMAP, I'm sad to report almost all of our labs are Mac/Windows.
I found this a couple of weeks ago in the Debian package archives. If your not running Debian, it can be downloaded from sourceforge. Overall the program is looking to be real solid. Its still in development in a lot of ways, but from my brief experiements, it looks like it has lots of nifty features and a very good ledger system.
While I admire Katz for his bold vision of what free software can do in the new globalized world, I must pause for a moment and point out that quoting George Soros on why globalization is good is a bit like quoting Bill Gates on why propriatary software is good.
Soros has made his billions on currency speculation, meaning he has purchased large quantities of foriegn currency and then sold it when the time was right... bringing millions to his personal account while totally undermining the economic stability of whatever poor country he chose to "invest" in. He, and investers like him, are the spark in the powder keg that start what globalization scolars call "capital flight" where even the real investers (the ones building factories or new technologies for resource extraction) who are worried about the consequences of Soros and his kind pulling out of the economy. As a result, legitimate capital leaves the market and you end up with situations like the '95 Peso crisis and the current situation in Argentina.
So, find a different guy to quote on the posibilities of globalization.
Not true... the post you refer to is the case against Dmitry Sklyarov, not the case against ElcomSoft. ElcomSoft just filed yesterday... no Wednesday the 16th, the date of the Slashdot article. Don't post just to look smart... check your facts first.
My experience with file extensions and registered file types with Windows have never been good... but for that mater, I really haven't had greate experiences with KDE either. Their registered file system is built into the Control Center and require you to fully understand nameing conventions and extensions, as well as the names of programs.
For example, if I want mpgs to be play by KDE's Media Player by default, I need to understand all of the various forms that mpgs can come in and the associated extensions... and to make it all the more worse, I need to know that the KDE's Media Player run command is noatun.
It seems that this is an issue that crosses all OS operating systems (yes... even Macs, anyone remember fighting over conflicts with Claris Works and early version of MS Word?) and one that is probably never going to be within the relm of the "average" user. The solution lies with the developer and whether they wish to play fair or not. An example of a company who still plays be the fules is Nullsoft and their mp3 player Winamp. After a succesull install it asks what kind of files you wish to play... in plain english.
That kind of behavor is a far cry from installing Word and having it automatically associate mp3s with Window's Media Player.
Before you go around claiming things, do your research. The 55 MPH speed limit was perfectlly constitutional and is classified as Block Grant Policy. This is where Congress will give extra money to a state in return for passing laws that are of benifit to the entire nation. The national speed limit was removed because of popular opinion, not because of the Supreme Court.
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I just completed a 10 week internship in a Congressional office where they found my technically savvy to be of a great deal of use to their office. They had we working on website and streamlining their mail system after just a couple of weeks on the job. So, here are my couple of observations from those weeks.
1) e-mails are just as important as phone calls. An office gets a phone call with someone saying "I opposed issue X", they tell that person they will "pass the comment on to the Congressperson" and if your lucky, they will tally the support on a sheet. The same goes with e-mail, except that you get a nice little letter that will actually explain the Congresspersons position. Granted it will be form letter, but it usually is enough to know where the rep stands.
2) being a constituent is EVERYTHING. Most offices in the House use something call "IQ", an awful little program written to make full use of IE activeX capabilities. IQ, for all of its failings, has an incredible address checker, and can determine if a letter is from the within their district or not. But you have to get the address to them in the right format, which means using their webform submissions... NO public e-mails.
3) I really can't stress this point enough... a constituent is a constituent, whether it be phone, fax, mail, or carrier pigeon. Any office that wants to be reelected gives every piece the same effort, because people who write are people who vote. The best way to be ignored is to say "if I e-mail it will just be processed by some staffer, so I won't bother." Everything is processed by a staffer (unless you're a personal friend), so get out their and send an e-mail. Personalize it if you wish, but it really doesn't matter... they just want to know who you are and what you think your representatives stance on the issues ought to be. Never forget, these people pay money for polling data that you are giving them for free. They are happy to receive it.
I hope this helps a bit in everyones political adventures.
This looks pretty good in my opinion, I think I may even install it on my Mom's computer so she can start to understand the Linux world... my only concern was the availability of sourcecode. There was a snapshots page... but that's a far cry from a nice ISO to download and burn onto a CD. I noticed that for 10 extra bucks I could get a CD with the source, but that seems to be in violation of the spirit of the GPL. Hey, I know these guys are trying to make money... but they are trying to make money of the backs of some very dedicated volunteers... the least they could do is provide a more simple way to access their source.
Aside from that, this looks great. I just hope that it runs as well as their cute little pictures make me want to believe.
While its true that we have 36,000 students using AIX for e-mail and the like here at the UW, we don't actually have any labs setup with machines running *nix (there is one RedHat lab for the CS students). I've been trying to convince my boss in the UW polisci lab to run linux for a year-plus, but he won't even let me setup a linux server to run mySQL. So, even though UW is home to such greats as Pine and IMAP, I'm sad to report almost all of our labs are Mac/Windows.
I found this a couple of weeks ago in the Debian package archives. If your not running Debian, it can be downloaded from sourceforge. Overall the program is looking to be real solid. Its still in development in a lot of ways, but from my brief experiements, it looks like it has lots of nifty features and a very good ledger system.
While I admire Katz for his bold vision of what free software can do in the new globalized world, I must pause for a moment and point out that quoting George Soros on why globalization is good is a bit like quoting Bill Gates on why propriatary software is good.
Soros has made his billions on currency speculation, meaning he has purchased large quantities of foriegn currency and then sold it when the time was right... bringing millions to his personal account while totally undermining the economic stability of whatever poor country he chose to "invest" in. He, and investers like him, are the spark in the powder keg that start what globalization scolars call "capital flight" where even the real investers (the ones building factories or new technologies for resource extraction) who are worried about the consequences of Soros and his kind pulling out of the economy. As a result, legitimate capital leaves the market and you end up with situations like the '95 Peso crisis and the current situation in Argentina.
So, find a different guy to quote on the posibilities of globalization.
Not true... the post you refer to is the case against Dmitry Sklyarov, not the case against ElcomSoft. ElcomSoft just filed yesterday... no Wednesday the 16th, the date of the Slashdot article. Don't post just to look smart... check your facts first.
My experience with file extensions and registered file types with Windows have never been good... but for that mater, I really haven't had greate experiences with KDE either. Their registered file system is built into the Control Center and require you to fully understand nameing conventions and extensions, as well as the names of programs.
For example, if I want mpgs to be play by KDE's Media Player by default, I need to understand all of the various forms that mpgs can come in and the associated extensions... and to make it all the more worse, I need to know that the KDE's Media Player run command is noatun.
It seems that this is an issue that crosses all OS operating systems (yes... even Macs, anyone remember fighting over conflicts with Claris Works and early version of MS Word?) and one that is probably never going to be within the relm of the "average" user. The solution lies with the developer and whether they wish to play fair or not. An example of a company who still plays be the fules is Nullsoft and their mp3 player Winamp. After a succesull install it asks what kind of files you wish to play... in plain english.
That kind of behavor is a far cry from installing Word and having it automatically associate mp3s with Window's Media Player.
Before you go around claiming things, do your research. The 55 MPH speed limit was perfectlly constitutional and is classified as Block Grant Policy. This is where Congress will give extra money to a state in return for passing laws that are of benifit to the entire nation. The national speed limit was removed because of popular opinion, not because of the Supreme Court.