1. One part of the reading that really puzzled me was on page 63 and three paragraphs down. It reads according to a Macintosh computer, " Of course while they run, OS and applications constantly create, write to, and erase various temporary files, as well as swap data between RAM and virtual memory files on a hard drive, but most of this activity remains invisible to the user." This part of the reading really pushed me to think in two different ways. The first thing I thought was that if computers can erase and create files unknowingly then do they have some sort of mind to their own? This thought, at first, scared me. I thought if computers can do things without you controlling them then they are independent in some ways. Another thought that had crossed my mind has to do with the programmer. The person that invented a Macintosh hard-drive created it to erase and create files with a mind of its own. How can someone go about creating a machine that has that much intelligence?
2. On page 65, the second paragraph, I believe discusses the idea of copy and paste. I know that everyone knows what copy and paste is and now I know it is apart of the modern GUI. My question has to deal with plagiarism. The paragraph states, "This operation (copy and paste) renders insignificant the traditional distinction between spatial and temporal media, since the user can cut and paste parts of images, regions of space, and part of a temporal compostition in exactly the same way. It is also 'blind' to traditional distinctions in scale: the user can cut and paste a single pixel, an image, or a whole digital movie in the same way". Is this part of the reading about plagiarism? If it doesn't have to do with copying pieces of artwork and changing them around then what is it about?
