Oleg Zabluda's blog
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
 
The Weight of Software
The Weight of Software
http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2008/05/the_weight_of_software.php

Lots of good comments

Vacuum story is instructive that bureaucrats also have hacking streak to them. In order to reduce the problem to an already solved one, they defined "vacuum" as "asphyxiant", but, as always, this has bugs, etc... We all do a lot of that, so I sympathize.

As for weight, there is well-known quantum-information-theoretic answer, somebody gave in the comments. Somebody else correctly pointed out that it's only true about reversible computing, but incorrectly implied that with reversible computing the weight is zero.

In fact, if you want it to run with decent speed, some amount of stored energy is required, which has mass.

There is also a much better known argument from quantum thermodynamics that information i.e. entropy also has minimum mass.
http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2008/05/the_weight_of_software.php

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