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If I may, computers, and dare I say computer scientists, only recognise bits and bytes. It’s humans, even if it’s only through the medium of programming, who
impose some sort of order and meaning on those bits and bytes. There are people who do say something like, “I’ve a terabyte of information on (such and such) a topic ”. Bytes as information? Which encoding standards are being understood/enforced? Programmers
read those bytes, or used to in earlier times, to find out where a program went wrong. I wonder how many of us do that nowadays. We haven’t got to the stage where those terabytes will be understood implicitly by everyone as, say, so many images or pages of
text or whatever. From: HILLMAN, Tomos [mailto:tomos.hillman@oup.com]
Only in the sense that all words, stories, lines of reasonings, economies and concepts of individual things are "purely a fiction."
Or are you suggesting that, for example, books contain no information? They are only tree pulp and toner, after all… From:
<Costello>, "Roger L." <costello@mitre.org> The notion that there are words or sentences or poetry in the computer is purely a fiction.
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