Lily Vasquez, a marketing manager from Clifton, New Jersey, spent nearly eight years trying to break into the music business as a singer before she stumbled across SellaBand.com.

On Monday, January 28, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) begins the hearing that will determine mechanical rates for every songwriter and music publisher in America. It will be the most important rate hearing in the history of the music industry because in addition to setting rates for physical products, rates will be set for the first time ever for digital products such as digital downloads, subscription services and ringtones.

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Online Colleges to Post Effectiveness of Programs - Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education

Network Newsletter: This week, advisories were released for exiv2, php, scponly, xfree86, xine-lib, libvorbis, horde3, flac, tomcat, xorg, mantis, tikiwiki, libcdio, libxfont, cairo, mysql, lzma, regression, and apt-listchanges. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, SuSE, and Ubuntu.

On Feb. 1 the National Institute of Standards and Technology will release a list of validated scanners that check for Federal Desktop Core Configuration compliance. The scanners all use the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) to automatically scan desktop computers and return the results, said Peter Mell, NISTs SCAP validation program manager, at an FDCC workshop held yesterday in Gaithersburg, Md.

The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, invites applications for IMLS fellowships for studies toward the PhD degree. The fellowships are funded by a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). At least four fellowships of $40,000/year (including tuition and research stipend) will be awarded.

On March 13-14, 2008, leading scholars from throughout the United States will join experts from the Library of Congress in a free public presentation at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The symposium will re-focus attention on the New Deal, the multi-faceted social, cultural, and fiscal recovery programs launched by the Roosevelt administration in 1933, to reform and reinvigorate national life in the wake of the Great Depression.

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