One option may be to call up your rep's office and ask to be connected to their staffer for the issue you're interested in. When I worked there (fall 2001), we would connect you and you could talk directly. Likewise, you could ask for the staffer's name and direct any letters directly to them. We were a small office, though, so others may do it differently.
As someone not in the rep's jurisdiction though, you're probably just out of luck. By definition, they're not beholden to anyone but their constituents.
Exactly, and I'm suprised nobody's done this before. It seems like the best way to make everyone happy.
Let people listen to full songs, so they can try before they buy, but make them low enough quality so they won't want to try to circumvent the system and record the music.
The worst thing about this digital music crackdown is that there was no legal way to listen to an album or something before you buy it, to see if you like it. Well, now there is, with a decent quality hit. But I choose to buy music by how good it is, not by the bitrate.
My rep's office prints out all the email and files it in with all the regular mail. At least in that office, normal mail got no more weight than email, and the rep. himself certainly wasn't reading it. The intern (that's me) simply went through the stack of letters and printed emails and entered the names and topics into a database so they could print off form letters and stuff. Also, any correspondance from outside the rep's district was immediately thrown away.
In my experience, a lot of teenagers go through a "Beatles" period sometime in high school or early college, while they're discovering that music goes beyond Top 40.
If you've gotten interested in what the Beatles were and how they did it, the name Apple Records would be hard to miss.
For an engineering class? The vast majority of the notes are diagrams, equations, derivations... A lot of the time we're making notes on handouts with more diagrams and figures.
I guess you could do some of it with a tablet PC, but nobody in any of my classes owns one of those (or none try to take notes with it).
And for the handouts, you'd need to have PDFs of them to mark up (none of the professors make those available), or somehow reference them in your computer notes.
How is this news? None of my professors (engineering) like students using laptops in class, unless we're doing some sort of computer assignment. Several of them make us put them away (or at least close the lid) when they start lecturing.
I find it distracting when I have my computer on, but it's also distracting to the professor. Try talking to a room full of people busily browsing the web sometime.
Of course, in engineering, you'd be crazy to try to take notes on your laptop. Engineering paper and pencil is the way to go.
I wish. The closest thing I've found is the Fluendo MP3 decoder for gstreamer 0.10. It's a fully licensed, free MP3 decoder that you just unzip and drop into your gstreamer plugins directory.
Not much use at the moment, but gstreamer 0.10.0 distros should be coming out soon.
Word has it they're planning on more of those, plus a DVD player sometime soon.
Yeah, he was. I remember I was thinking of doing the same thing until I noticed that oldversion.com just launched. I talked to the kid and tried to help out where I could, but he seemed to be able to handle it pretty well on his own.
Don't know about 2000, but to a mythical matter-of-fact outside observer, 2001 marked the terror attack of September 11, and thus the beefing up of national security and the onset of two foreign wars, plus the scares of recession and dip in recreational travel, etc. One would hope (for the victims' sake) that the same trend will be visible in 2005 due to Katrina.
If he really did do nothing wrong, and if that was upheld in court, a good judge would make the company pay his legal fees. It does happen, but it's not mandated.
Of course it saves us time. If we didn't have computers, someone would have to work these Navier-Stokes equations by hand, and that would take a lot longer (or would take a lot more money) than having a computer do it.
I'd like to see a horde of wayward day laborers built a passenger jet. They may be able to do it, but eventually, they'll organize themselves so that some people manage other people. It's called leadership, and it's not a pox on humanity.
Do people still not understand the subscription music business model?
Subscription music services are a big jukebox in the sky, for which you pay $10/mo or so for access. Of course burning CDs is going to cost you more, because in burning a song, you're buying it, not just playing from their big streaming repository.
They're completely different types of services: with one, you pay a little, and you get to listen to whatever you want from their site; with the other, you pay a lot, and get to keep the music you select (subject to DRM restrictions and such).
I have to agree. When I first started with Ubuntu, I liked the earthy tones. But now a year or so in, every time I looked at it, it just brought me down. So now that I've switched to a nice blue Firefox background, the world is happy again.
"Unfortuantely, consumers are fools. They'll use a defacto format just b/c it is defacto format, even if it makes their life more the miserable for doing so. And indeed MP3 does, in the form of lower quality, higher prices and eventual DRM."
Wow, what a self-congratulatory statement.
I use MP3 because it's what my MP3 player supports, I can play it just about everywhere, it has relatively good Linux support, and with LAME, I can't tell the difference.
Here's a hint: if the general public is using something, there's probably a reason why, and it might not fit in with your idea of what's important.
"Burn to a CD and rip as whatever format you want."
Wow, that's an ugly hack. Do people really do this kind of stuff, and consider it normal? That's almost as bad as hooking up a tape recorder to the line-out jack and just recording the audio as it plays.
I'd rather get in my car, drive to the store, and actually buy the CD than buy it online, burn it, and re-rip it.
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One option may be to call up your rep's office and ask to be connected to their staffer for the issue you're interested in. When I worked there (fall 2001), we would connect you and you could talk directly. Likewise, you could ask for the staffer's name and direct any letters directly to them. We were a small office, though, so others may do it differently.
As someone not in the rep's jurisdiction though, you're probably just out of luck. By definition, they're not beholden to anyone but their constituents.
Exactly, and I'm suprised nobody's done this before. It seems like the best way to make everyone happy.
Let people listen to full songs, so they can try before they buy, but make them low enough quality so they won't want to try to circumvent the system and record the music.
The worst thing about this digital music crackdown is that there was no legal way to listen to an album or something before you buy it, to see if you like it. Well, now there is, with a decent quality hit. But I choose to buy music by how good it is, not by the bitrate.
It's Flash, and so should work on any OS with an updated Flash plugin.
What happened to all the personal responsibility people like to throw around on here?
If your congressman votes for stuff you don't like, you have a bad congressman. Raise some support at home and vote him out. It's real simple.
My rep's office prints out all the email and files it in with all the regular mail. At least in that office, normal mail got no more weight than email, and the rep. himself certainly wasn't reading it. The intern (that's me) simply went through the stack of letters and printed emails and entered the names and topics into a database so they could print off form letters and stuff. Also, any correspondance from outside the rep's district was immediately thrown away.
Everyone will just call it a Nintendo, like always.
In my experience, a lot of teenagers go through a "Beatles" period sometime in high school or early college, while they're discovering that music goes beyond Top 40.
If you've gotten interested in what the Beatles were and how they did it, the name Apple Records would be hard to miss.
For an engineering class? The vast majority of the notes are diagrams, equations, derivations... A lot of the time we're making notes on handouts with more diagrams and figures.
I guess you could do some of it with a tablet PC, but nobody in any of my classes owns one of those (or none try to take notes with it).
And for the handouts, you'd need to have PDFs of them to mark up (none of the professors make those available), or somehow reference them in your computer notes.
Yeah, really.
How is this news? None of my professors (engineering) like students using laptops in class, unless we're doing some sort of computer assignment. Several of them make us put them away (or at least close the lid) when they start lecturing.
I find it distracting when I have my computer on, but it's also distracting to the professor. Try talking to a room full of people busily browsing the web sometime.
Of course, in engineering, you'd be crazy to try to take notes on your laptop. Engineering paper and pencil is the way to go.
Not on Linux (at least not with middle-click-URLs enabled).
This wasn't a criminal case, it was a civil settlement.
I wish. The closest thing I've found is the Fluendo MP3 decoder for gstreamer 0.10. It's a fully licensed, free MP3 decoder that you just unzip and drop into your gstreamer plugins directory.
Not much use at the moment, but gstreamer 0.10.0 distros should be coming out soon.
Word has it they're planning on more of those, plus a DVD player sometime soon.
Yeah, he was. I remember I was thinking of doing the same thing until I noticed that oldversion.com just launched. I talked to the kid and tried to help out where I could, but he seemed to be able to handle it pretty well on his own.
Don't know about 2000, but to a mythical matter-of-fact outside observer, 2001 marked the terror attack of September 11, and thus the beefing up of national security and the onset of two foreign wars, plus the scares of recession and dip in recreational travel, etc. One would hope (for the victims' sake) that the same trend will be visible in 2005 due to Katrina.
If he really did do nothing wrong, and if that was upheld in court, a good judge would make the company pay his legal fees. It does happen, but it's not mandated.
Well in the business world, you'd have at least someone at the top that does give a damn, and he would fire any subordinates that don't give a damn.
I guess this model is upended with all the employee security in government. It's really hard to fire someone for not giving a damn.
And when it's not precious anymore, maybe we can actually do something cool with it. Humanity benefits.
Of course it saves us time. If we didn't have computers, someone would have to work these Navier-Stokes equations by hand, and that would take a lot longer (or would take a lot more money) than having a computer do it.
I'd like to see a horde of wayward day laborers built a passenger jet. They may be able to do it, but eventually, they'll organize themselves so that some people manage other people. It's called leadership, and it's not a pox on humanity.
I realize this post was (probably) a joke, but still, people say this kind of crap all the time.
What do you want them to do, come up with some project that requires no manpower and resources whatsoever?
Because we don't have much of a choice?
:-).
But if you want to help me sign up with a Denmark cell phone company, it'd be much appreciated
Do people still not understand the subscription music business model?
Subscription music services are a big jukebox in the sky, for which you pay $10/mo or so for access. Of course burning CDs is going to cost you more, because in burning a song, you're buying it, not just playing from their big streaming repository.
They're completely different types of services: with one, you pay a little, and you get to listen to whatever you want from their site; with the other, you pay a lot, and get to keep the music you select (subject to DRM restrictions and such).
I have to agree. When I first started with Ubuntu, I liked the earthy tones. But now a year or so in, every time I looked at it, it just brought me down. So now that I've switched to a nice blue Firefox background, the world is happy again.
"Unfortuantely, consumers are fools. They'll use a defacto format just b/c it is defacto format, even if it makes their life more the miserable for doing so. And indeed MP3 does, in the form of lower quality, higher prices and eventual DRM."
Wow, what a self-congratulatory statement.
I use MP3 because it's what my MP3 player supports, I can play it just about everywhere, it has relatively good Linux support, and with LAME, I can't tell the difference.
Here's a hint: if the general public is using something, there's probably a reason why, and it might not fit in with your idea of what's important.
"Burn to a CD and rip as whatever format you want."
Wow, that's an ugly hack. Do people really do this kind of stuff, and consider it normal? That's almost as bad as hooking up a tape recorder to the line-out jack and just recording the audio as it plays.
I'd rather get in my car, drive to the store, and actually buy the CD than buy it online, burn it, and re-rip it.