This article is classified "Partly real, partly fictional"
Earth Computers are of course, as are all Galactic computers encountered by our correspondents, a complete fraud. You need to know three things about the terran variety of the unarmed bandit: 1) The marketing divisions of hardware and software (make no distinction, it's all just stuff in a box) manufacturers describe their products as electronic tools for the storage, retrieval, and manipulation of information, capable of zillions of calculations per second. Actually, calculation and manipulation are correct terms. The true purpose of these entities is the reduction of patently absurd information into digestible "bytes" that otherwise could not be swallowed, even by the more gullible residents of this backward, cheap, and money-grubbing planet. Human practitioners of this technique are referred to as "statisticians" or, more commonly, "liars." The difference between information gleaned from a computer and any kind of reality can easily be demonstrated. Take a piece of paper. Write on it. Look at it. It is a real thing. It cannot be changed without your knowledge unless you loose track of it, get totally wasted, or just don't care. Put it on a shelf. Stay up all night looking at it. Take it down. You know it's the same thing even if you don't remember what you wrote. This is not true of the information on a computer screen. Where does it go when you turn it off? Even when you just go to the refrigerator for a beer, when you come back your text is replaced by one of those .gifs of Kathy Ireland necessary to save your delicate and expensive video screen from burn-in. The subtlety of the fraud being perpetrated can easily be demonstrated by consideration of your monthly computer- produced MasterCard or Visa statement. The total is impossible. There is no way you could have spent that much money. But when you look at the individual items, some begin to assume a vague familiarity. Others begin to seem at least plausible, considering certain cash purchases you may have made. And so, simply because it is "on the computer," you are made to believe in the impossible. You go on to pay or not to pay the backward, cheap and money-grubbing people at the bank depending on that other computerized fraud, your checking account. 2) There's a great old wheeze, decades old, that you can still pull at will on the furless monkeys here, who are still always willing to believe that they are the experimenters rather than the subjects of experiments. The gag is called the "Turing Test." You enter a small windowless room. One of the walls has a little slot in it through which you can push sheets of paper. On the other side of this partition will be a cretin in a white coat whose purpose in life is to determine whether or not you are a computer. Through the wall he'll yell, "Write something in Chinese!" You may, like most of the inhabitants, be familiar with at least one form of written Chinese, but regardless of that just scribble down any lame gibberish and pass it through the slot. "Aha!" hollers the white-coated wonder. "You're not Chinese. You're a computer!" From that point on, the ninny will believe you are a dependable electronic tool for the storage, retrieval, and manipulation of information, capable of zillions of calculations per second, rather than a hung-over liberal arts major with a vicious sense of humor whose brain seizes up when confronted by a goes into sign. 3) Computers are controlled by mice.