This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Clever Pun: Deleted this "example", because it seems more infodump than anything else, and I'm not sure how exactly it relates to trope being presented:
- In a very limited form, an actual case of Truth in Television. Conventional computer processors prefer to work with discrete quantities of binary values at a time — mostly 32 bits, if only because it took 18 years to go from a 32-bit chip (the Intel 80386, released in 1985) to the ubiquitous 64-bit ones found in all new computers today. The same can't be said for operating systems as Microsoft still sells 32-bit versions of Windows and the shift to 64-bit Windows is quite slow. (A lot of other O Ses pulled it off handily. Microsoft just has a large number of clients, many of which are wary of compatibility issues.) There is still some legacy 16-bit software remaining from the days of DOS (which requires special software to run under modern operating systems), and other combinations of bits do exist. (Like computers with 12-, 18-, and 36-bit word sizes. Computers that counted bits in multiples of three were very common from the 1960s through to the 1980s.) Several games consoles (and graphics cards) use 128-bit or 256-bit processors, and some very old systems used the unusual combination of 10 bits. There are workarounds to the upper limits of the numerical capabilities of processors, but implementing them requires code that is both complex to write (not especially) and very slow to run (nope, not at all). Usage of concurrent programming techniques can improve speed, but will result in added code complexity. (This has nothing to do with anything.)
- If you think that's complicated, you don't want to try writing multi-threaded code. This troper will tell you that debugging it is a major headache.
Kendra Kirai: I pulled this one out, because it's wrong.
- Star Trek The Next Generation did a first-season episode in which the computer-like Bynars race steals the Enterprise to save their homeworld. Picard and Riker conclude that, as the Binars think like computers, they would not even consider asking first, as it all comes down to zeroes and ones to them: take the ship vs don't take the ship. And if you think this metaphor doesn't make sense, that's because the plot of this episode wasn't very good.
They HAD considered asking, but they didn't because they(The Federation in general and Picard in particular)'might have said no.' Considering it was a matter of life or death for their entire race, they couldn't risk it.
Blork: I think this one still counts. The Binars did say that they didn't ask because "You might have said no", but Picard responds to this by exasperatedly pointing out that there was an extremely good chance that they would have said yes. This causes Riker to give that nonsensical analogy that as they think in zeroes and ones it's either yes or no, take the ship or don't take the ship. The only vaguely coherent thing I can think of that he could have meant by this is the interpretation that computers don't understand probability.
Various Things: First paragraph of the article:
> It is an oft-repeated maxim that anything that existed when you were born is mundane and old-hat, anything that was invented in the first third of your life is exciting and novel, anything invented in the second third of your life is scary and incomprehensible, and anything invented in the last third of your life is an abomination of science run amok and is bent on corrupting our children, destroying civilization and — Hey! Get off my lawn you kids!
Douglas Adams quote from ''The Salmon of Doubt:
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
