The Great Bit Shortage of 2000

Silicon Valley (NBp) - Over the past 20 years, computers have been getting faster and have been able to store increasing amounts of data and send and receive ever growing quantities of information. All of this information is represented by "bits", tiny ones and zeroes that make computers do their things. Huge price drops for personal computers and the increasing popularity of the Internet is starting to lead to a shortage of bits.

This mine was the America's first bit mine, and it opened in 1950 to help service the first computers. Today, this mine is estimated to contain only about 40 million more bits. This isn't even enough to download that Britney Spears song you've wanted.

"This is a very serious problem," explained L. J. Kerfungle, who fancies himself to be among the most technically astute people around. "At the rate that they are mining bits today, we'll run out in just a few years.

"Just think. Fifteen to twenty years ago, people could transfer 300 bits every second across their phone lines. If they do that for an hour, that's a million bits! Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? But now, you've got people with cable modems that are a thousand times faster than that! Those people are pushing a billion bits an hour! How many bits can there be in the world?"

Some technologists theorize that the bits are not actually used up, but just transferred from one place to another. "If I read 1,000 bits from Yahoo!, I don't think those are used up," postulates Wilfred T. Manfrensingenson. "I think I then have roughly 1,000 bits of my own that I can send elsewhere. It seems like Yahoo! would run out of bits, but I think they make enough money off of those ads that they can buy more."

NBp made up a survey in which 25 experts agreed that people need to browse the web less and store fewer bits on their hard drives, otherwise the human race will forever deplete this valuable resource. "While I think it's possible to transfer some of those bits back to Yahoo!, I'm pretty sure that a few bits get lost here and there along the way. With millions of people surfing online, that adds up to a lot of lost bits," continued Manfrensingenson.