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From: roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Software Priacy
Message-ID: <1990Jun17.175327.2534@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 90 17:53:27 GMT
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In <31594@ut-emx.UUCP> eggplant@walt.cc.utexas.edu (johan van Zanten) writes:
> People, because they evovled for millions of year by manipulating objects
> perceive what they can sense.  And even though they can use the software,
> they view it as something very abstract.

	Perhaps this is taking the argument to such an extreme as to become
absurd, but in a very real sense, the most important thing that people do
(and the thing over which they invest the most effort, desire, pain, joy,
anguish, and emotional expense) is manipulation of abstract information that
they cannot physically sense.  I'm talking about the information contained in
your DNA, and passing that information on to copies of yourself in the form
of children.

	Recently, there was a major ho-ha when a sperm bank was suspected of
mixing up some semen samples and impregnating some women with sperm from men
other than their husbands.  The women who had children by "the wrong men"
were pretty darn upset.  Why?  They got what the wanted, in the physical
sense, but what was wrong was the information which they couldn't see, touch,
or smell.  Why can people so readily grasp the idea that DNA is simply bits
aligned in certain patterns and that it is the pattern of alignment itself
that has value, not the actual physical molecule, but have so much trouble
with the parallel concept when applied to software?
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane?  Did you say arcane?  It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"