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because they aren't going to exist much longer into the future. http://www.idtechex.com/products/en/articles/00000591.asp

I also find it ironic that everyone seems to love that mercury is not contained in LED's, yet is it essential to the extraction of gallium from ore.

suggest Korean?

http://www.engadget.com/2005/10/05/new-songdo-the-south-korean-ubiquitous-city-of-the-future/

http://www.idtechex.com/products/en/presentation.asp?presentationid=272

With Korean, you only have to learn some 41 "characters", tho it can be daunting stringing together a number of verb endings.

Also, see:

http://www.linkroll.com/computer-programming/on-the-way-to-learning-computer-programming-in-nano.php

http://www.learn-korean.net/

http://www.learn-korean.net/learn-korean-classes-listarticles-1.html

These guys claim we have 20-30 years at the current rare we're using Zinc. It's the 23rd most abundant element in the earth's crust. I don't see this being an issue right now (2011), but will inevitably be one

Before accepting the argument that we are imminently running out of a whole slew of elements, it would be nice to see a reasonably solid case presented for even one of them.

Looking around for a source that actually makes a case for running out of any of these elements what I came up with are references to New Scientist articles that do nothing of the sort: http://www.idtechex.com/products/en/articles/00000591.asp
and
http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/027ns_005.htm

To the extent that this is even addressed, the articles make appeals to uncertainty - production figures are lacking and good estimates of reserves don't exist - then offer specific dates for running out, alluding to the USGS as providing the data used to make these claims. No explanation of how any of the calculations were done, nor an enumeration of the assumptions regarding supply on which they were based.

So lets pick one of the elements deemed most at risk, gallium say, nearly all of which is used in GaAs electronics.

Actually reading the relevant USGA report: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/gallium/mcs-2008-galli.pdf and also consulting this industry paper (gallium is discussed near the end): http://www.indium.com/_dynamo/download.php?docid=552
we learn the following.

• The principal source of gallium is bauxite, a widely distributed ore of aluminium for which the reserves are immense.
• Currently, less than 10% of the gallium in bauxite is extracted, apparently due to technology and cost considerations (that is, at current prices and with current technologies it isn't sufficiently profitable to do it).
• Current refinery production is around 80 tons annually, substantial gallium is already recycled, but considerable growth in demand is expected.
• The total world supply of gallium in mineable bauxite ore is estimated at (whether or not the gallium is considered recoverable) is estimated to exceed one million tons.

So: if extraction rates can rise to 10% then the world supply is really 100,000 tons. About a 1000 year supply at current usage rates. If we suppose that higher prices and more advanced technology can increase the extraction efficiency beyond this, then the supply is correspondingly increased.

Now there might be an impending imbalance in supply and demand if the total extraction rate by the aluminum industry is too low to match demand in the future. But this is quite different from "running out". Better extraction and more efficient use of gallium could redress it (both natural results of higher prices), and new technologies might largely supplant GaAs with superior products (quantum dot lasers, organic solar cells, anyone?). At some point recycling might take over as the principal supply (one of the reasons that iron production has flattened).

Yep, clueless, check this story
The authors apparently do not realize that the available amount of Gallium depend on the price:
Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram

Pff. Done already.

The bottom line is that RFID is not any more secure or any less secure than what you currently have. Do you have a credit card? A bank card? Then you are have already been violated.

No card in my wallet is remotely readable, at least to the best of my knowledge. You missed the point entirely.

The RFID used in credit cards and passports are HF (13.56 mhz). The range on these tags is incredibly small. Even with the best equipment you cannot read farther than 6 - 12 inches. You can build a fancy contraption with a huge antenna and power co-efficient but you will probably cause a lot of damage to other components before you are going to increase that range not to mention looking like a walking weather station.

All that is required is more gain on the receiving side, which in turn requires intelligent filtering and design to have a useful SnR to begin with. Anyway here is an article about a company with a solution currently in the field for reading HF tags at ranges up to ten meters.

Also, 6-12 inches is enough if you can get people walking through doorways, or walking up and pressing a button on a traffic light, et cetera. You can always also just bump into them and then you can get absolute proximity.

Also HF is notoriously bad at high speed so it is going to be hard for anyone to track your tires much less to hide an antenna in the ground they are quite fragile too. Also the readers themselves require power, circuitry, and ethernet/wireless conection etc etc blah blah. You can see my point.

Making the antenna durable is a triviality. You can place it into the road surface at the same place as the metal detector used to see if your car has pulled up to a light. Want to know what RFIDs are in the tires of an upcoming car? Just switch the light at the right time to stop them. And if they run the light, now you can drag them into court and look up their ass with a flashlight.

I suspect in fact that sooner or later they will devise the technology to use the same loop antenna used to detect your car to read RFID.

The point is that there are far easier ways to steal information. Take for instance myself. I know quite a bit about RFID, I can get acess to the best RFID equipment but even with all that if I wanted to steal your information I would much rather hold you up (or hire someone else to do it) than to devise an elaborate plot where I would have to monitor your habits and then set up readers in your path so that I can get your information.

It's not about stealing information via RFID. Get that idea out of your head right now. It's about uniquely identifying people by their RFID tag constellation, and being able to track them. It's one more piece in the "ubiquitous surveillance" puzzle. Just as RFID can't save the world, it can't doom it, either. It's part of the problem.