Douglas Adams is awesome. I still laugh when I read his works.

It’s easy to foresee that a zettabyte (a trillion** gigabytes), which is about the ammount of information produced over the course of the year 2009, will some day be considered “hardly any space at all”. On the other hand, it’s possible that extraterrestrial technology may be something so alien entirely, that it may not be measurable using bytes.

* Programs which are too big to fit on a DVD usually are sold such that what the DVD actually contains is a compressed version of a program that generates what you actually want.
**this trillion is short scale, meaning “a million millions” or ten to the power of twelve. It is the longscale (i.e. non-U.S.) billion

When the ‘Drink’ button is pressed on the Nutrimatics Drinks Dispenser, it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.