Technological developments for the digital environment

The economy of bits is driven by bit architecture and by the constraints
imposed by storage and delivery mediums.

• One can fit many separate streams of bits through the same space/channel that previously could carry only one analog stream.
• Bits can be error corrected more
  easily than can analog information.
• Bits can be modified and manipulated relatively
  easily.
• A bit is a bit is a bit: Bits don't care what kinds of information they represent.

Study Questions:

1) List and describe the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches to supercomputing described in the Los Alamos article.
2) "Cascading computers" describes an approach to molecular computing. Discuss some social implications related to moving from silicon to molecular media for computational machines (remember: social implications, not technological implications).

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