Greetings Economists,
On Jan 14, 2008, at 6:15 PM, g.a.s. wrote:

the machine?  http://tinyurl.com/2jor4n & http://tinyurl.com/2fn7vl

Doyle;
You like to use photos to sort of make a point.  I like to make photos
too.  However open I am to reuse of my photos I seldom have an ant
hill to offer to someone else to reuse and make a comment.  And
besides this image is low resolution, very noisy with detail and
washed out exposure.

This small scale file size image implies we could use photos to
'illustrate' ideas much as cartoonist have done for years on editorial
pages.  But that job is in a big decline due to the changes in
newspaper distribution.  One of the more recent economic bubbles tells
us about how things are going in the economy of information technology.

When the tech bubble burst a major symptom was the drop in value of
data transmission by over building the infrastructure of data
transmission with no particular need in the public to use high speed
internet connection.  The purpose of high speed data transfer is to
accommodate large files mainly audio and visual data.  As a result of
the economic bubble the U.S. fell behind Japan, South Korea, and
Northern Europe in laying the back bone for high speed data transfer.

In the U.S. we have rinky dink visual image exchange.  So does the
rest of the world out side of some exceptional development areas like
those I mention above.  Not that the big companies don't understand
the model of visual information exchange being a huge market.  One of
the Micro Soft execs looking down the road sees everyone document all
their life from cradle to grave.  But what's the purpose?  I would
guess Micro Soft Photosynthe in their new OS Vista is a result of
trying to figure out sharing information with others.  But no one is
going to sit down to watch every second of three days activity by
anyone else unless the value of doing that warrants such excessive
immobilization of human living time.

An ant hill is a metaphor of human cities.  This implies sameness of
the comparison.  We can of course say the obvious and say no that's
not useful comparison.  But it is the sameness I am aiming at here.
Sameness (symmetry transformational processes) implies layers laid on
top of layers visually to find sameness.  Some in neuroscience call
this mapping, but I like layering better because we can work on a
layer apart from one to one mapping.  A layer in the brain is a real
estate occupied to do a particular job.  Seeing is in the occipital
lobe, but remember specifics of the seen is in the temporal lobe.
Doing something to the seen is in parietal lobe, and figuring out how
to work the layers is in the front of the brain.

Hence I see multiple layers rather than a single layer is visual data
(lossless photo files are an example).  So this multiple layering of
an image is a part of the process of reusing images.  This requires a
lot of random access memory (8 gigs seems to be the norm for now),
fast internet connection, (100 gigs ps), and commercial reasons to
share information that generate a lot of profitable value in the
exchange.

In other words this dinky photo file would balloon into some sort of
matrix of information about 100 mega bytes in size in order to capture
enough layering to meet some sort of practical exchange value.  Right
now reuse (digital rights management) of say movies prohibits you
working on the movie to resell value in this sort of file.  You can
get away with using an image if you don't get permission to use it to
add meaning to the file by doing everything for free and keeping the
work in a strictly low low cost environment.

That awaits the big companies then developing reuse in their own
ways.  They corner the market in old information like old libraries.
They provide low cost cultural centers like Flickr, or Myspace to
stimulate the exchange data networks and try out ideas on large scale
exchange processes that really do require reuse.

Your reuse here is rinky dink because it is not location oriented.
Most real value is generated in reuse by application to a real world
location.  One can store the files in server farms but the value of
reuse is created at the node of producing new data layers upon the
original file.  If reuse is not done the server farms fill up with
data and knowledge work grinds to a halt.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

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