As an aside to an aside, I wonder how much information about the DNA reading frame could in principle be extracted from the DNA of a female organism, given the knowledge (or the assumption) that mature females can gestate a zygote? Almost all possible reading frames would be discardable on the grounds that the resulting organism would not be able to gestate a zygote, of course, but I don't have any intuitive sense of how big the remaining search space would be.

My intuition says "very, very big". Consider: depending on womb conditions, the percentage of information expressed in the baby which is encoded in the DNA might change. As an extreme example, consider a female creature whose womb completely ignores the DNA of the zygote, creating instead a perfect clone of the mother. Such an example makes it clear that the search space is at least as large as the number of possible female creatures that are able to produce a perfect clone of themselves.

OTOH, if what I mostly care about is the computer's behavior at the level of electrical flows through circuits (for example, if I'm trying to figure out how to hack the computer without an input device by means of electrical induction, or confirm that it won't catch fire in ordinary use), then a thorough electrical analysis of the computer's circuitry provides me with tons of indispensible new information.

I accept your point. Such an analysis does provide a more complete view of the computer, which is useful in some circumstances.