On one of those Sunday morning politics shows, the topic turned to the current financial crisis.  One of the round table talking heads made the point that it's time to learn - and brace ourselves for the use of - the word "quadrillion".  It's what comes after "trillion".

In just the preparation for the discussion of the amount of debt, waste, spending, and ultimately bailouts, we're now forced to accept another level in the endless scale that is mathematics.  But instead of within the context of the rapid acceleration and exponential growth of computer sciences, we're forced into becoming financial futurists.

We've had kilobyte files to megabyte disks and gigabyte hard drives.  And today, we've got affordable terabyte storage.  Are we ready for the financial petabyte, when our computers haven't caught up?

How did our greed so quickly surpass Moore's Law?