I've been tutoring math from calculus to basic arithmetic for a number of years now. I also am drawing on my own experience when I first took an honors math analysis course. There is a radically different approach between how math (really arithmatic) is taught between high school and college.
High school typically chooses a rote approach - learn the steps required to complete the problem and regurgitate on request. Even some college courses are taught this way. You are given a collection of steps and are expected to remember the steps that are applicable for each problems. I have found, tutoring, that the best approach by far is to teach a collection of 'pieces' - a particular approach to a particular sub-problem - where my students also have to learn why it works. I then encourage each of my students to visualize any problem as a jigsaw puzzle where existing pieces are combined to find a solution for the problem at hand. (i.e. There exists a sequences of steps using known 'pieces' to solve the problem and the student is expected to eventually pick up an intuitive understanding of what kind of techniques to apply when facing a new kind of problem.)
I've experienced a great deal of success teaching with this technique and recommend it whole heartedly. Create a notebook listing every technique for solving a sub-problem you have been shown to date. Each technique should have a name, a set of conditions when it applies, and how to implement the technique. If you plan to remember the techniques for an exam, also include a description of why it works - preferrably worked out / thouroughly understood by you.
Obviously, this is what I have found to work - YMMV. But I have found that, as long as an individual is capable of viewing problems abstractly enough to grasp the approach, it has been an effective problem solving technique.
Coming from someone about to go to grad school in the area - There are at least 3 entirely different disciplines all working on the topic of computer aided music analysis - musicology, computer science, and ethnomusicology. The author comes from the computer science branch. Your comments are more along the lines of ethnomusicology branch.
Musicology - long history of research, tons of papers, stuff on score analysis and psychoacoustics thats pretty incredible. However, especially for psycho acoustics, theres little research outside of western cultures.
Computer science - Frequently individuals with a hobby that have brought formidible computing skills and analysis techniques from other fields, but are largely ignorant of the works within music departments (see pretty much any IEEE paper on music for examples). Biggest problem is typically lack of statistically valid experiments (like the test sample of 4 pieces in this article).
Ethnomusicology - The first 20 years of the fields existance (~55-~75) was dedicated to this kind of research. Now that computers are powerful enough to do more meaningful analysis, the backlash against this analysis is fading, but any ethnomusicologist can tell you all the pitfalls - especially how critical cultural context is to the analysis.
As for the relationship between music and language, both music and language are tightly tied to culture. In that sense, they are similar. Anything more profound requires an accurate, precise definition of the two terms. This is extremely difficult and a good way to start a fight with ethnomusicologists if your so inclined.
A theme finder like your describing already exists. Try themefinder. It provides just that capability. The problem - it only knows how to read music files that have been transcribed into the humdrum format. If everyone used the same format for describing music (ie. MusicXML) this web site would be a lot more useful...
Take a good look at the format. Its a spec defining how to digitize musical scores. When was the last time you went looking online for the score of a particular website? Whe was the last time you went looking online for a score that you could legally download?
This is an important protocol - for all those projects out there digitizing old music scores. Think classical music like Beethoven/Mozart. Up until recently, everyone in this buisness made their own homegrown system. Just to give a taste of where this project comes from:
Humdrum Toolkit - a toolkit used by Stanford, Ohio State, and some other universities
Finale one of the first visual score editing programs. Proprietarty format hacked by researchers.
Score the 800 lb gorilla ofthe market. Music publications use this exclusively.
GUIDO - another notation system developed for and by researchers.
These are just the standards I know of.
This site lits many more I've never heard of. Hopefully MusicXML obsoletes these countless competing standards so those who research in this field can finally exchange data with one another - without porting around and maintating a collection of converters.
However, this really is irrelevant for the vast majority of slashdot readers. Unless your trying to digitize musical transcriptions, this standard is a curiosity at best. I have to wonder why it made the slashdot front page.
Just how different is real life censorship from the internet. Sure, you have access to arbitrary garbage, most of the time. When was the last time you read slashdot at -1?
We censor ourselves, generally to those publications that agree with our own views. When was the last time you read research pages at Micro$oft? In the end, the only difference between the internet and traditional media is that the brands online are not as firmly established as in the 'real world'. Given enough time, this space will be just as commericalized (read censored) as every other media. Not because some big corporation has done it, but becuase every big website has become big by pandering to its audiences prejedices and misconceptions.
Don't agree with me? Take a close look at what websites you visit on a regular basis. Convince yourself you visit a new webiste with a view different from yours every day....
Computers writing music will never happen. At some level, it will always be people using computers as tools to write music. But we have that already (ie Mixing of music).
First off, this is a single aleotoric (sp?) composition that is extremely similar to John Cage's 'radio symphony' produced a while ago (I don't remember the date or the exact title, but I'm sure someone will correct (or flame) me about it:-)) What classifies this as a music composition? It makes a number of algorithmic choices to create a new sound.
Even with the lack of posted details about the algorithm, there are a number of assumptions in the algorithm that explain some of the impressions reported on Slashdot.
"Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies..." - right off the bat, we're assuming that frequencies are important to how we listen to music. Research in psychoacoustics suggests that this isn't the case - we stream music into 'parts' organized by the start and stop points of frequency bands. These streams are then processed for whether the pitch/timbre/rhythm patterns are recognized or not. This is partially demonstrated by the way we talk of 'voices' or 'instruments' having pitch and color (timbre) and of particular songs having 'a good groove'. Any diagram describing this kind of process would have feedback accross the whole diagram, so I doubt its a part of the algorithm used.
"...only the beats with the highest entropy..." Repetition is a feature of all music everywhere - the only musical universal known. Similarly, the 'ideal' degree of entropy in music (how much it repeats) tends to be suprisingly high - music with the highest entropy is actually 'bad'. This differs from culture to culture, but low entropy in good music is the norm, not the exception. Music that has 'high entropy' as a feature already have two strikes against it.
"If you took a bunch of music and asked it, 'Music, what are you, really?' you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you." This assumes that all music is uniform and can be summaraized into a single source. Contrary to this assumption, there are significant differences between genre types - they exploit different mechanisms for producing pleasure in their listeners. This doesn't even begin to touch non-Western music (even non western pop music). Some of these mechanisms are mutually exclusive (polyphonic music versus homophonic music). An 'average' or 'distilled' reproduction ends up activating no psychological hooks very well and ends up sounding boring.
"They know what you really want to hear. " This assumes that the creator can know what "music" is for you. Each culture hears music differently - with different qualifications for what makes music 'good'. Brain scans of trained classical musicians and their untrained counterparts conducted both in Japan and in the US demonstrated differences in the way these sounds were processed among the four groups. The differences between trained and untrained listeners was radical. Not only do tastes differ, but the music you hear is not the same music I hear - even if the same sound is presented. No single piece of music can legitimately make this claim.
If I'm reading the article right, they're using the same technique that a doctoral candidate did his Phd thesis on at OSU about 3 years ago.
TCP is extremely bursty - it pumps all the packets it can as fast as it can over the network as soon as the window opens. Then it waits for replies to all the packets. What typically happens is the burst from the NIC overloads the local router causing numerous dropped packets. This gives the imporession to the sending machine that the network is overloaded and results in a ~90% reduction in bandwidth utilization.
The change is to include a timer that allows the NIC to space the initial burst over the entire window. This prevents the overloading at the router and permits the NIC to reach near its theoretical maximum bandwidth.
In tests involving one router, the results were an order of magnitude increase in bandwith utilization. I'd be interested in seeing their test setup to see how they got such dramatic improvements. Normally TCP/IP is not that ineffecient - even with its extreme burstiness.
Actually, I signed up for the dma's no call list and it has been ~90% effective in blocking telemarketing calls. Those remaining are either non-profit or outright scams (or both:-)). Of course, that was before they put in a $5 fee for the service...
Most legit buisnesses will respect the lists. Those who make the effort to be removed aren't likely to buy products so they're not cost effective to call anyways- even if there is no penalty.
Ironically, this actually *increases* the amount of telemarketing. The average expense per sale will drop since those who would never buy over the phone have been eliminated from the calling lists, making telemarketing more attractive...
Re:When you think about it...
on
Searching Sound
·
· Score: 1
Its been out for quite a while. The biggest difference is that the computational linguists that do this kind of thing don't get much attention from places like slashdot.
There numerous packages/toolkits that can be used to do the same thing. (If your willing to take the time to put the pieces together). One is Praat. Its a (mostly) GPL toolkit for sound and speech analysis.
It might take some work, but Eclipse from IBM has improved a great deal towards becoming a good environment for project management. Its geared towards projects written in Java, but there is a C/C++ Perspective plugin if you prefer...
Its a good platform for managing a collection of custom ant build scripts if you decide to go that direction (assuming your in java of course...)
If you'd prefer something more specialized, the plugin architecture isn't bad and could save some time with interface work. Especially since any windows from other perspectives that you like can be dropped directly into your custom-built perspective.
I can't make the trip to the meeting, but I did submit a proposal during the comment period. I requested that source code not be protected by the anti-circumvention provisions. (Essentially, reverse engineering code would no longer be a crime unless someone could prove it was actually protecting something.) Not sure if thats what you were looking for, but my 2 cents...
These boxes make an ideal single purpose servers. Only install the service its supposed to run and strip everything else. Secure, cheap and hassle free (once installed).
With a working NIC (I usually use an old ISA card), you can install linux quite effectively via ftp (especially on a LAN). You'd be surprised how many "broken" 486's can be made to work with the right NIC. Even if that fails, install on a HD using a another computer, then swap disks. Linux was designed for the low end precisely because no one else would support these kinds of machines. Its more than just "nostalgia"
In a sense, this posting is a little premature. But give/. a break. We expect the most recent developments as rapidly as possible. Sometimes that means making a choice between reliability and speed. I would hope that we are intelligent enough to realize that this article is premature and treat it accordingly.
The article raises some serious questions that some of the slashdot audience may not be aware of. Just how fair are search engine results. If you consider how much power search engines wield over the content of the internet that gets read, you'll realize just how important it is that search engines take fairness seriously. If you can bribe search engines to not list sites, you effectively have censorship. This is something that needs to be verified. If it is happening, there might be a definite need for a non-profit search engine to keep the other search engines honest.
This tool is not a 'fingerprinting' as such. It is a method of anaylzing the natural patterns in a piece of music. Each piece of music has distinctive patterns in pitch, volume, timbre, etc... Not seeing the algorithm, I can't say what aspects of the music are anaylzed, but the theory is sound. These patterns are quanticized to generate the fingerprint. Since the patterns used occur only in sounds detectable by humans, these patterns must be preserved by compression, or the compression will not be accurate enough representation of the music to be useful.
Great idea, but the devil is in the details. As much as as it would be nice to fly in as the knight in shining armor and eliminate all the hassles of proprietary software, the real problem lies in the complexity of the problem. A recent slashdot article on library software shows just how complicated the needs really are.
Instead of trying to make a magic bullet for every project, identify what each different non-profit organization really needs and build software to address those needs.
Up until just recently I worked at CCL a non-profit group that supplies newsgroup/ftp/web site for the computational chemistry community. For our site, we have very different needs.
idiot proof tool to make a working backup from one computer to another.
automation for requests for services from members
specialized searching software to handle ill-defined but frequently used comp. chem. acronyms
Obviously this is off the top of my head and some of the packages may already exist. Obviously, these needs differ from a library's needs/wants, which differ again from a lobbying group, which differe again from a church feeding the homeless. A site co-ordinating the different projects might help, but a one size fits all is impractical.
Centralization is *not* absolutely neccessary. It is not trivial to implemented distributed distribution of DNS, but not impossible. Distributed protocols are a big area of research for fault tolerance. If you central server dies, the entire system crashes. One approach that a team at OSU has taken is implementing protocolls that stay relatively stable even if a number of servers go down at once (say massive crackdown on nameservers.) Then the issue becomes, can we bring enough servers up fast enough to replace the ones taken down that the system will remain intact despite losses.
for those interested, the site is http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~anish/group
Intellectual property exists to promote the creation of intellectual ideas. What we're seeing is a serious clash of culture between what those online believe to be adequate compensation for the creation of ideas and what non-online believe to be adequate compensation. (This is a vast oversimplification, but it gets my point accross.) Online, being able to present original ideas that are widely accepted is highly respected. Simply getting your ideas disseminated and used is rewarded with a degree of respect that is not present offline. Offline, ideas are given very little relevance unless they generate money. Simply creating a cool idea is not respected in an of itself. Therefore, the offline community believes that more compensation is neccesary to encourage idea generation and that online behavior undermines this compensation. The question becomes, which culture shouuld be used to determine "adequate compensation", online or offline? Especially for mediums which cross the gap like movies and music albums, this question becomes critical. The act enforces the cultural values of offline communities. However, on the same token, the distriution of materials on the net is imposing onnline culture on the offline community. It will be insteresting to see the outcome of the debate...
Is it just me, or does this bill seem a bit contradictory to the Micro$oft trial. One one hand, a coalition of states are punishing Micro$oft for predatory buisness practices, and now this bill is introduced which essentially legalizes this behavior!
This product is aimed at large IT departments. While we might want to believe otherwise, there are a lot of people that are still very leery of anything attached to open source, particularly in upper management...;-). Being GPL'd might actually *hurt* the release, not help. Novell might be better served putting out a commercial version first and then changing over to GPL later...
What is the goal for online campaigning? One possible motivation is as a quick and effecient way for online voters to get information online (which will probably be skewed to that demographic...) Another possible motivation would be to try to mobolize online voters as a block. Another is to attempt to get a faster feedback loop on campaign direction. A further possible motivation would be to use the online forum as a think tank. Each purpose is served best by different methods of online presence.
Hopefully I've given enough information to make the question meaningful.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been tutoring math from calculus to basic arithmetic for a number of years now. I also am drawing on my own experience when I first took an honors math analysis course. There is a radically different approach between how math (really arithmatic) is taught between high school and college.
High school typically chooses a rote approach - learn the steps required to complete the problem and regurgitate on request. Even some college courses are taught this way. You are given a collection of steps and are expected to remember the steps that are applicable for each problems. I have found, tutoring, that the best approach by far is to teach a collection of 'pieces' - a particular approach to a particular sub-problem - where my students also have to learn why it works. I then encourage each of my students to visualize any problem as a jigsaw puzzle where existing pieces are combined to find a solution for the problem at hand. (i.e. There exists a sequences of steps using known 'pieces' to solve the problem and the student is expected to eventually pick up an intuitive understanding of what kind of techniques to apply when facing a new kind of problem.)
I've experienced a great deal of success teaching with this technique and recommend it whole heartedly. Create a notebook listing every technique for solving a sub-problem you have been shown to date. Each technique should have a name, a set of conditions when it applies, and how to implement the technique. If you plan to remember the techniques for an exam, also include a description of why it works - preferrably worked out / thouroughly understood by you.
Obviously, this is what I have found to work - YMMV. But I have found that, as long as an individual is capable of viewing problems abstractly enough to grasp the approach, it has been an effective problem solving technique.
Musicology - long history of research, tons of papers, stuff on score analysis and psychoacoustics thats pretty incredible. However, especially for psycho acoustics, theres little research outside of western cultures.
Computer science - Frequently individuals with a hobby that have brought formidible computing skills and analysis techniques from other fields, but are largely ignorant of the works within music departments (see pretty much any IEEE paper on music for examples). Biggest problem is typically lack of statistically valid experiments (like the test sample of 4 pieces in this article).
Ethnomusicology - The first 20 years of the fields existance (~55-~75) was dedicated to this kind of research. Now that computers are powerful enough to do more meaningful analysis, the backlash against this analysis is fading, but any ethnomusicologist can tell you all the pitfalls - especially how critical cultural context is to the analysis.
As for the relationship between music and language, both music and language are tightly tied to culture. In that sense, they are similar. Anything more profound requires an accurate, precise definition of the two terms. This is extremely difficult and a good way to start a fight with ethnomusicologists if your so inclined.
A theme finder like your describing already exists. Try themefinder. It provides just that capability. The problem - it only knows how to read music files that have been transcribed into the humdrum format. If everyone used the same format for describing music (ie. MusicXML) this web site would be a lot more useful...
Take a good look at the format. Its a spec defining how to digitize musical scores. When was the last time you went looking online for the score of a particular website? Whe was the last time you went looking online for a score that you could legally download?
This is an important protocol - for all those projects out there digitizing old music scores. Think classical music like Beethoven/Mozart. Up until recently, everyone in this buisness made their own homegrown system. Just to give a taste of where this project comes from:
These are just the standards I know of. This site lits many more I've never heard of. Hopefully MusicXML obsoletes these countless competing standards so those who research in this field can finally exchange data with one another - without porting around and maintating a collection of converters.
However, this really is irrelevant for the vast majority of slashdot readers. Unless your trying to digitize musical transcriptions, this standard is a curiosity at best. I have to wonder why it made the slashdot front page.
Just how different is real life censorship from the internet. Sure, you have access to arbitrary garbage, most of the time. When was the last time you read slashdot at -1?
We censor ourselves, generally to those publications that agree with our own views. When was the last time you read research pages at Micro$oft? In the end, the only difference between the internet and traditional media is that the brands online are not as firmly established as in the 'real world'. Given enough time, this space will be just as commericalized (read censored) as every other media. Not because some big corporation has done it, but becuase every big website has become big by pandering to its audiences prejedices and misconceptions.
Don't agree with me? Take a close look at what websites you visit on a regular basis. Convince yourself you visit a new webiste with a view different from yours every day....
Computers writing music will never happen. At some level, it will always be people using computers as tools to write music. But we have that already (ie Mixing of music).
:-)) What classifies this as a music composition? It makes a number of algorithmic choices to create a new sound.
First off, this is a single aleotoric (sp?) composition that is extremely similar to John Cage's 'radio symphony' produced a while ago (I don't remember the date or the exact title, but I'm sure someone will correct (or flame) me about it
Even with the lack of posted details about the algorithm, there are a number of assumptions in the algorithm that explain some of the impressions reported on Slashdot.
"Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies..." - right off the bat, we're assuming that frequencies are important to how we listen to music. Research in psychoacoustics suggests that this isn't the case - we stream music into 'parts' organized by the start and stop points of frequency bands. These streams are then processed for whether the pitch/timbre/rhythm patterns are recognized or not. This is partially demonstrated by the way we talk of 'voices' or 'instruments' having pitch and color (timbre) and of particular songs having 'a good groove'. Any diagram describing this kind of process would have feedback accross the whole diagram, so I doubt its a part of the algorithm used.
"...only the beats with the highest entropy..." Repetition is a feature of all music everywhere - the only musical universal known. Similarly, the 'ideal' degree of entropy in music (how much it repeats) tends to be suprisingly high - music with the highest entropy is actually 'bad'. This differs from culture to culture, but low entropy in good music is the norm, not the exception. Music that has 'high entropy' as a feature already have two strikes against it.
"If you took a bunch of music and asked it, 'Music, what are you, really?' you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you." This assumes that all music is uniform and can be summaraized into a single source. Contrary to this assumption, there are significant differences between genre types - they exploit different mechanisms for producing pleasure in their listeners. This doesn't even begin to touch non-Western music (even non western pop music). Some of these mechanisms are mutually exclusive (polyphonic music versus homophonic music). An 'average' or 'distilled' reproduction ends up activating no psychological hooks very well and ends up sounding boring.
"They know what you really want to hear. " This assumes that the creator can know what "music" is for you. Each culture hears music differently - with different qualifications for what makes music 'good'. Brain scans of trained classical musicians and their untrained counterparts conducted both in Japan and in the US demonstrated differences in the way these sounds were processed among the four groups. The differences between trained and untrained listeners was radical. Not only do tastes differ, but the music you hear is not the same music I hear - even if the same sound is presented. No single piece of music can legitimately make this claim.
TCP is extremely bursty - it pumps all the packets it can as fast as it can over the network as soon as the window opens. Then it waits for replies to all the packets. What typically happens is the burst from the NIC overloads the local router causing numerous dropped packets. This gives the imporession to the sending machine that the network is overloaded and results in a ~90% reduction in bandwidth utilization.
The change is to include a timer that allows the NIC to space the initial burst over the entire window. This prevents the overloading at the router and permits the NIC to reach near its theoretical maximum bandwidth.
In tests involving one router, the results were an order of magnitude increase in bandwith utilization. I'd be interested in seeing their test setup to see how they got such dramatic improvements. Normally TCP/IP is not that ineffecient - even with its extreme burstiness.
Most legit buisnesses will respect the lists. Those who make the effort to be removed aren't likely to buy products so they're not cost effective to call anyways- even if there is no penalty.
Ironically, this actually *increases* the amount of telemarketing. The average expense per sale will drop since those who would never buy over the phone have been eliminated from the calling lists, making telemarketing more attractive...
There numerous packages/toolkits that can be used to do the same thing. (If your willing to take the time to put the pieces together). One is Praat. Its a (mostly) GPL toolkit for sound and speech analysis.
It might take some work, but Eclipse from IBM has improved a great deal towards becoming a good environment for project management. Its geared towards projects written in Java, but there is a C/C++ Perspective plugin if you prefer...
Its a good platform for managing a collection of custom ant build scripts if you decide to go that direction (assuming your in java of course...)
If you'd prefer something more specialized, the plugin architecture isn't bad and could save some time with interface work. Especially since any windows from other perspectives that you like can be dropped directly into your custom-built perspective.
Food for thought...
www.eclipse.org
I can't make the trip to the meeting, but I did submit a proposal during the comment period. I requested that source code not be protected by the anti-circumvention provisions. (Essentially, reverse engineering code would no longer be a crime unless someone could prove it was actually protecting something.) Not sure if thats what you were looking for, but my 2 cents...
old (486) intel boxes are in frequent use!
These boxes make an ideal single purpose servers. Only install the service its supposed to run and strip everything else. Secure, cheap and hassle free (once installed).
With a working NIC (I usually use an old ISA card), you can install linux quite effectively via ftp (especially on a LAN). You'd be surprised how many "broken" 486's can be made to work with the right NIC. Even if that fails, install on a HD using a another computer, then swap disks. Linux was designed for the low end precisely because no one else would support these kinds of machines. Its more than just "nostalgia"
The article raises some serious questions that some of the slashdot audience may not be aware of. Just how fair are search engine results. If you consider how much power search engines wield over the content of the internet that gets read, you'll realize just how important it is that search engines take fairness seriously. If you can bribe search engines to not list sites, you effectively have censorship. This is something that needs to be verified. If it is happening, there might be a definite need for a non-profit search engine to keep the other search engines honest.
This tool is not a 'fingerprinting' as such. It is a method of anaylzing the natural patterns in a piece of music. Each piece of music has distinctive patterns in pitch, volume, timbre, etc... Not seeing the algorithm, I can't say what aspects of the music are anaylzed, but the theory is sound. These patterns are quanticized to generate the fingerprint. Since the patterns used occur only in sounds detectable by humans, these patterns must be preserved by compression, or the compression will not be accurate enough representation of the music to be useful.
Instead of trying to make a magic bullet for every project, identify what each different non-profit organization really needs and build software to address those needs.
Up until just recently I worked at CCL a non-profit group that supplies newsgroup/ftp/web site for the computational chemistry community. For our site, we have very different needs.
- idiot proof tool to make a working backup from one computer to another.
- automation for requests for services from members
- specialized searching software to handle ill-defined but frequently used comp. chem. acronyms
Obviously this is off the top of my head and some of the packages may already exist. Obviously, these needs differ from a library's needs/wants, which differ again from a lobbying group, which differe again from a church feeding the homeless. A site co-ordinating the different projects might help, but a one size fits all is impractical.Centralization is *not* absolutely neccessary. It is not trivial to implemented distributed distribution of DNS, but not impossible. Distributed protocols are a big area of research for fault tolerance. If you central server dies, the entire system crashes. One approach that a team at OSU has taken is implementing protocolls that stay relatively stable even if a number of servers go down at once (say massive crackdown on nameservers.) Then the issue becomes, can we bring enough servers up fast enough to replace the ones taken down that the system will remain intact despite losses.
for those interested, the site is http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~anish/group
Intellectual property exists to promote the creation of intellectual ideas. What we're seeing is a serious clash of culture between what those online believe to be adequate compensation for the creation of ideas and what non-online believe to be adequate compensation. (This is a vast oversimplification, but it gets my point accross.) Online, being able to present original ideas that are widely accepted is highly respected. Simply getting your ideas disseminated and used is rewarded with a degree of respect that is not present offline. Offline, ideas are given very little relevance unless they generate money. Simply creating a cool idea is not respected in an of itself. Therefore, the offline community believes that more compensation is neccesary to encourage idea generation and that online behavior undermines this compensation. The question becomes, which culture shouuld be used to determine "adequate compensation", online or offline? Especially for mediums which cross the gap like movies and music albums, this question becomes critical. The act enforces the cultural values of offline communities. However, on the same token, the distriution of materials on the net is imposing onnline culture on the offline community. It will be insteresting to see the outcome of the debate...
This product is aimed at large IT departments. While we might want to believe otherwise, there are a lot of people that are still very leery of anything attached to open source, particularly in upper management... ;-). Being GPL'd might actually *hurt* the release, not help. Novell might be better served putting out a commercial version first and then changing over to GPL later...
What is the goal for online campaigning? One possible motivation is as a quick and effecient way for online voters to get information online (which will probably be skewed to that demographic...) Another possible motivation would be to try to mobolize online voters as a block. Another is to attempt to get a faster feedback loop on campaign direction. A further possible motivation would be to use the online forum as a think tank. Each purpose is served best by different methods of online presence.
Hopefully I've given enough information to make the question meaningful.