Bacteria cultures propagate until they exhaust all their resources. The the populations collapses. Humans are smarter that this... but they are also arrogant. IMO, the 2 will cancel each other out, and we'll end up at the same destination. North America, AUS & NZ will be fine, as we have an abundance of food & water resources.

The problem is the corporate influencing the political class. This lead to the bail-outs. Investment banking and commercial banking should be separated. Investment banking should not hold commercial banking as ransom. Furthermore, there needs to be an adequate capital base. Leveraging a firm 30:1 (3% capital) or more is ridiculous. The max should be 10:1 (10%). The larger and more systemic the bank, then the lower the ratio...NOT higher. Finally, there was -and still is- no good reason to save failed institutions. Capitalism is about creative destruction. Shareholder get wiped out, bond holders get the assets, and management gets the boot.

The guy just plugged some number in to an equation, and got an answer. The trick in Modern Physics is to know which law/equation applies in each problem. The mass of an electron is 9.11x10^-31 kg. It does not get heavier. If an electron is traveling near the speed of light, it's "effective mass", m*, increases. Effective mass is lumping gamma (c/sqrt(c^2-v^2)) in with the rest mass m (m* == gamma*rest_mass). Furthermore, both the "1" state and "0" state must be stable for storage, so the higher energy electron would have more potential energy than the lower state. It does not have more mass.

You are missing a key piece of the theory. Nothing can travel faster than c, and the speed of light is independent from the reference frame. He an example. One person is on a train that is traveling at 0.1c. Another person is standing somewhere ahead of train (next to the tracks). The person on the train signals the stationary observer with a flashlight. At what speed does the light travel? The speed of the light from the train travel at c, not at 1.1c. For more nfo read, Reference frames, coordinates and the Lorentz transformation @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity

High frequency trading is a zero sum game. Eventually, the losers will exit the market, and then winners will have no one to trade with.

until we get some sharks involved.

Unfortunately, this would take too long and thus cost too much. Space is at a premium. You can't put a massive 1mm size hole in a wafer with 22nm features. We are talking about a 450mm (18-inch) diameter wafer that is about 900um thick. KOH etches Si at 1um/min. So it's take 450 minutes (7.5 hours) to etch through a wafer. Even if you limited each die to 1 hole, the wafer would be too fragile to survive the etch.

Opps! Carbon 12 has to get to C-14 first. So... longer, but not forever.

The half-life of carbon-14 is 5730±40 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14). All elements move towards iron (Fe).

I always wondered what the whalers ate.