When creating a work of art an artist can express himself in three ways: by choosing a media (oil on canvas for painting, english language for a poem, metal for a sculpture), a
set of restrictions on his use of the media
(paint only using fingers, arrange words so that they rhyme, make a mobile - so that all gears and chains fit), and what he wants to say.
Modern art contains examples of works that take either one of these three properties to the extreme or balance them together in a specific form. Each artists accomplishment can be considered as a specific choice of the balance
which is particular to that artist only.
Programmers use ASCII symbols to write their programs.
They choose different languages (rules for arranging ASCII symbols) and their programs definetely have content. And each programmer has their own preference of certain algorithms, constructs and formatting. And, of course, each programmer has his/her own preference of what to program.
Not everything that possesses the three properties I mentioned above is an artwork. For example not every mechanical machine is a mobile.
However, some machines or their parts, purely utilitarian at the time of their creation, may become an artwork (or part thereof) later, when an artist takes a look at it in new and completely unexpected way. Thus the forth component to an art work is the willingness of people to accept it as such.
People create programs as purely a way to express themselves, to show off their particular
understanding of a language (see Obfuscated C contest). Also, sometimes programs deserve to be admired long after their creation (see Programming Pearls, Second Edition (ACM Press)
Trade Paperback, 256 Pages, Edition Number 2, Addison-Wesley, October 1999 ,
ISBN: 0201657880,
Author: Bentley, Jon L. / Chan, Patrick
)
This demonstrates that a fair percentage of people are eagerly considering programs as an artwork, which fulfills the forth and last property of an artwork in my argument.
The signal emitted from antenna depends on the derivative (speed of change) of the signal that you drive the antenna with. The usual sine wave has about the smallest derivative - and thus minimum possible effectiveness at dissipating radio waves.
A pulse wave - which has near vertical slopes is _much_ more effective. (example - a toy car with a dc motor using brushes makes enough noise to interruptions when you watch tv. it doesn't use that much power)
A drawback to this is that only sine waves allow you to control which part of the spectrum your transmission controls. Incidentally the first "wireless telegraph" also used pulses - and thus in a given area you could only have one wireless telegraph working at a given time.
So how can one get around this limitation ? One way is to transmit two singals, not one. Imagine that both you and you partner have sources that produce identical noise. Since noise also has big slopes it's transmission is very efficient. You transmit your signal as pulses of that noise. Your partner receives all radio he/she can handle and correlates the result with the noise source he/she has. The output signal should be your pulses. And as pointed out above you don't really need to have real noise - even pseudo-random pulses will suffice.
However, whatever method you choose there is a question of how finely you can tune the receiver. In the case of correlation you won't be able to filter out all stray signals.
Thus I think the bulk of the patents aren't on the method of transmission. Rather, they should be on how tune more finely to the selected bandspace.
ideas are easy to distribute and usually do not obey any "conservation principle"
copyright and patent laws are useful in encouraging progress
creating new ideas often involves a substantial cost
The problem with all arguments(including later posts) is that they attempt to side with one point at the cost of completely ignoring others.
Let me add a few more points/examples to the discussion:
What about biological material ? Strains of bacteria can very often reproduce in the manner much similar to information.
Why arguments regarding artists rights are often quite valid, in science there is often 1 way to solve a problem. A painting can be made in so many ways and each artist has his/her own style, but solving a complex problems can only be done 1 way - the right one.
It is not possible to distinguish easily whether a certain problem can be solved in more than one way.
Property violation often results in damage to the owner - if you take a chair the owner will not have it. It is claimed that copyright violation's bring damage to the owner by reducing the market for his/her property. However this is often not true. For example the software produced in US carries prices appropriate for people who live in US and contries with similar economy levels. There are a lot of contries where people cannot afford to buy anything priced so high. These contries have never been in the market. The profits of companies are not affected at all whether their software is used or not in these regions.
The copyright and patent laws are not there to impose a particular framework on ideas - rather they are a manifestation of coexistance between objects that obey "conservation law" and objects that don't. It depends on the government to make it good or bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Modern art contains examples of works that take either one of these three properties to the extreme or balance them together in a specific form. Each artists accomplishment can be considered as a specific choice of the balance which is particular to that artist only.
Programmers use ASCII symbols to write their programs. They choose different languages (rules for arranging ASCII symbols) and their programs definetely have content. And each programmer has their own preference of certain algorithms, constructs and formatting. And, of course, each programmer has his/her own preference of what to program.
Not everything that possesses the three properties I mentioned above is an artwork. For example not every mechanical machine is a mobile. However, some machines or their parts, purely utilitarian at the time of their creation, may become an artwork (or part thereof) later, when an artist takes a look at it in new and completely unexpected way. Thus the forth component to an art work is the willingness of people to accept it as such.
People create programs as purely a way to express themselves, to show off their particular understanding of a language (see Obfuscated C contest). Also, sometimes programs deserve to be admired long after their creation (see Programming Pearls, Second Edition (ACM Press) Trade Paperback, 256 Pages, Edition Number 2, Addison-Wesley, October 1999 , ISBN: 0201657880, Author: Bentley, Jon L. / Chan, Patrick )
This demonstrates that a fair percentage of people are eagerly considering programs as an artwork, which fulfills the forth and last property of an artwork in my argument.
Vladimir Dergachev
http://www.mindspring.com/~anuta/volodya/resume.pd f
The signal emitted from antenna depends on the derivative (speed of change) of the signal that you drive the antenna with. The usual sine wave has about the smallest derivative - and thus minimum possible effectiveness at dissipating radio waves.
A pulse wave - which has near vertical slopes is _much_ more effective. (example - a toy car with a dc motor using brushes makes enough noise to interruptions when you watch tv. it doesn't use that much power)
A drawback to this is that only sine waves allow you to control which part of the spectrum your transmission controls. Incidentally the first "wireless telegraph" also used pulses - and thus in a given area you could only have one wireless telegraph working at a given time.
So how can one get around this limitation ? One way is to transmit two singals, not one. Imagine that both you and you partner have sources that produce identical noise. Since noise also has big slopes it's transmission is very efficient. You transmit your signal as pulses of that noise. Your partner receives all radio he/she can handle and correlates the result with the noise source he/she has. The output signal should be your pulses. And as pointed out above you don't really need to have real noise - even pseudo-random pulses will suffice.
However, whatever method you choose there is a question of how finely you can tune the receiver. In the case of correlation you won't be able to filter out all stray signals.
Thus I think the bulk of the patents aren't on the method of transmission. Rather, they should be on how tune more finely to the selected bandspace.
First let me highlight valid points:
The problem with all arguments(including later posts) is that they attempt to side with one point at the cost of completely ignoring others.
Let me add a few more points/examples to the discussion: