Sorry... that URL should be:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html

Chapter 1 of Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers", which is basically this article from his site: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html/. You should try to decide for yourself how much this applies to your situation, but there's another set of articles, one called "Choices = Headaches" that you should look at as well. You may not agree with everything you read, and you won't get a simple answer to your question, but these will be food for thought.

... as long as you only care about 0% and 100% done. If you want the progress bar to reflect finer increments of work, say 10%, then it might be hard for at least two reasons: 1. there may be a large variance in different portions of the task tracked by the progress bar 2. exceptional occurrences (network lag, errors, the user suddenly increasing load on the system) can change how long things take In general though, progress bars are no harder or easier than the estimation task for what they should track. The estimation task is hell, partially because of leaky abstractions, partially just inherently. Progress bars with milestones can help, but there's no easy answer to the basic problem: it's the estimation that's difficult.

It has a nasty ending that's incredibly sad and is based on an alternate future that would be roughly now. And if you think about how war is conducted and has been conducted since it was written, the basic idea isn't too far-fetched, but was outre when Blish wrote the story. It's in a collection called "Galactic Cluster". I've claimed to various people that this story is basically cyberpunk despite predating cyberpunk by roughly 30 years, and not because of the goggle, by the way, but rather because of the tone and sensibility. I'll lay odds that Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, W. Jon Williams, and others may have read it. I'll assert that if they haven't then they should, dammit. Oh, and another selection by Blish: A Case of Conscience

Um, no. It's the song the children sing before going to bed in "The Sound of Music" that he appears to have in mind.

Seems like a lot of problems would have to be carfully mapped to such a systems... or, basically, you have to ask a crowdsource systems your questions carefully. It might be tempting to think that a crowd acts like a nondeterministic Turing machine, but it really doesn't because the space of possible solutions it might try to verify is bounded by the pool of respondents (not just the size of the pool, but what you might call the "imaginative range" of the pool). Oh, and this really reminds me of Vernor Vinge's book "A Deepness in the Sky", in which a spacefaring civilization that figures prominently in the narrative uses human slave labor given drugs to give them something like autism or OCD as processing power (they're not the good guys...).

... to any friends who might work on the content for these systems. Somewhere an irate customer on a support call could be told to "take a stress pill and lie down" during a suppot call. Of course, the customer will be irate because they were just told, over and over, "I'm sorry, , I can't do that." and "I can see your upset, .". The hold music, naturally, will be "Daisy".