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Originally Posted by pseudoreality
I was just thinking of something the other day. How come Data never got wi-fi? I mean they show him operating computer panels with super speed to show how impressive it is that he can do that as an android, but seriously, why does he not just link wirelessly to the ship's computer? Data even hilariously plugged in his head into the ship now and then. I guess there just wasn't much wireless technology around when the show aired. Although I do seem to recall one episode where a stolen phaser was deactivated by the computer remotely.
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there's a lot of stuff about the way Data and the Enterprise D computer work that are silly by today's standards, if you think about it too hard. our current sci-fi shows will be equally dumb when we rewatch them on holographic Netflix in 2048.
for example here's Data inputting a nice strong password to lock the computer, using Picard's voice. sure that might be enough to fool your Android's voice unlock, but he'd have been immediately thwarted if there was anything resembling the most basic biometric check that we have today, such as fingerprints or Face ID. and this is supposed to be the far future when the computer can scan for very specific life forms and signatures.
even Discovery's "breath" unlock is dumb as all hell. any sort of future security system should be pretty much infallible unless the computer itself is hacked or rewritten. also Data said once he could store a maximum of 800 quadrillion bits, which is about 100 petabytes. quite a bit of data by today's standards but there's probably large data centers and research installations out there that have more. also not that impressive considering a human brain isn't too many orders of magnitude behind at an estimated 2.5PB.
that's why it's just easier to stick to measurements like kiloquads and isotons, so that you can keep nerds arguing over it for decades instead of making it look hokey a few years down the road when humanity actually catches up in real life.