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Microsoft made 54.37 billion dollars last year. Hardly "not making any money."

They only made $23.47 Billion in contrast to Apples's $25.92 Billion.

Thankfully, their model is a failure.

Record profits each year for the last seven years in a row. I wish I made failures like that!

As someone else has pointed out, this is factually incorrect. The skin depth in copper at 60 Hz (377 rad/s) is over 8 mm. The skin effect won't make a difference here.

Even that is kind of impractical.

Based on some quick and dirty calculations, it'd take about 74000 years to get even to the nearest star. That'd be a lot of clones.

>

$15 dollars today = $10.72 when DNF development began.

A pack of cigarettes back then cost ~$1.25, and gas was around a dollar a gallon. So it was quite possible, in 1997, to fill your tank and buy a pack of cigarettes for an amount of money equivalent to $15 today.

(Reason being that cigarettes and gasoline have both seen their prices rise at far more than the average rate of inflation.)

Good.

There's half the equation, now tell me what the difference in avg wages was between now and then (in Australia it's grown by about 25%) then compare disposable income. Once again, in Australia we have more disposable income then ever before.

But if we are going to cherry pick products, why dont we pick the ones at the other end of the scale. in 1997 a new laptop cost me along the lines of A$4-5000. Today I can buy one for A$500, top of the line costs about $1500-2000. So using this metric, I can buy 2.5 to 10 2012 laptops for the price of one

There is a massive flaw in comparing prices of a single product. It's gamed to present readers with a false conclusion.

So it was quite possible, in 1997, to fill your tank

At the assumed price of $1 per gallon. The real price was $1.30-1.50 but I'll run with it.

Seeing as I'm not from an archaic place that still uses imperial measurements, I'll convert that to metric, $1/3.78 = $0.26 per litre. For $10.72 in 1997 that would buy you 41.23 litres. Now the tank of a 1997 Honda Civic (a quite small car) holds 45 litres, an average sedan would hold about 65 litres whilst a proper 4 Wheel Drive such as a Toyota Landcruiser or Nissan Patrol can have tanks up to 100 litres. So $15 today wouldn't fill your tank in 1997 even if petrol was at US$1 per gallon.

After all this, I still don't have a pack of durries.

$15 dollars today = $10.72 when DNF development began.

A pack of cigarettes back then cost ~$1.25, and gas was around a dollar a gallon. So it was quite possible, in 1997, to fill your tank and buy a pack of cigarettes for an amount of money equivalent to $15 today.

(Reason being that cigarettes and gasoline have both seen their prices rise at far more than the average rate of inflation.)

Reality

Land Mass:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=land+mass+USA+vs+Europe

USA 3.719 million mi^2
Europe 2.227 million mi^2
Asia 18.46 million mi^2

Population
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+USA+vs+Europe

USA 309 million
Europe 595 million
Asia 4330 million

Economic Activity???? (i just used GDP)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=GDP+USA+vs+Europe+vs+Asia

USA $14.6 Trillion USD
Europe $17.96 Trillion USD
Asia $19.19 Trillion USD

so you are correct except that Europe alone is larger in each count.. the US is much larger than Europe (~68%) and while Europe is larger in population (~92%) it is just a little larger in GDP (~23%) and not as much as it should be given the number of people - then Asia is the oddity.. dwarfs both US & Europe in size and population.. but apparently are not very productive.

Reality

Land Mass:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=land+mass+USA+vs+Europe

USA 3.719 million mi^2
Europe 2.227 million mi^2
Asia 18.46 million mi^2

Population
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+USA+vs+Europe

USA 309 million
Europe 595 million
Asia 4330 million

Economic Activity???? (i just used GDP)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=GDP+USA+vs+Europe+vs+Asia

USA $14.6 Trillion USD
Europe $17.96 Trillion USD
Asia $19.19 Trillion USD

so you are correct except that Europe alone is larger in each count.. the US is much larger than Europe (~68%) and while Europe is larger in population (~92%) it is just a little larger in GDP (~23%) and not as much as it should be given the number of people - then Asia is the oddity.. dwarfs both US & Europe in size and population.. but apparently are not very productive.

Reality

Land Mass:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=land+mass+USA+vs+Europe

USA 3.719 million mi^2
Europe 2.227 million mi^2
Asia 18.46 million mi^2

Population
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+USA+vs+Europe

USA 309 million
Europe 595 million
Asia 4330 million

Economic Activity???? (i just used GDP)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=GDP+USA+vs+Europe+vs+Asia

USA $14.6 Trillion USD
Europe $17.96 Trillion USD
Asia $19.19 Trillion USD

so you are correct except that Europe alone is larger in each count.. the US is much larger than Europe (~68%) and while Europe is larger in population (~92%) it is just a little larger in GDP (~23%) and not as much as it should be given the number of people - then Asia is the oddity.. dwarfs both US & Europe in size and population.. but apparently are not very productive.

1. People use bulbs more than you let on. 2. 1.2 kwH = 4.32x10^6 Joules (see here) 3. The efficiences will scale to billions of fixtures, over many years. 4. The industry is actually fine with the legislation and already prepared. 5. LED lightbulbs, public transit, diesel cars and tap water are not mutually exclusive. (And I thought SF's transit was pretty decent, anyhow) 6. We have bigger fish to fry than fighting over lightbulbs. Why do people care so much?

That puts some things into perspective.

Imagine trying to build a battery-based energy storage system for intermittent power sources, like wind or solar.

The entire yearly output of batteries from this factory would be able to buffer less than an hour of the power from a 1 GW power plant!

Compared to our ability to generate power, our capability to store it is still quite poor.

Actually I'm pretty sure it is. They didn't say "300% MORE than they used to", which would have been wrong. 50% of $100m is $50m, 100% of $100m is $100m, 200% of $100m is $200m, and so on.

In fact, Wolfram Alpha confirms it!

I think you meant titanium.

If his roof is damaged, he should be able to afford repairs:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5kg+platinum+price

The message, if the USA Legal System manages to delivery it, will be : "We will catch you, no matter how much time it takes."

We will catch you and then do what?

Even if IBM gets amount they are seeking, $1.3B is only 0.60% of MSFT's market cap today. Microsoft's business has been climbing the exponential-like part of the logistic curve for 17 years since this happened; their market cap grew from $23.06B on 1 Jan 1994 to $216.78B now. Dollar figures that were meaningful then are just not meaningful now. By pushing the damages out 18 years, Microsoft got a giant interest-free loan from the government which they were able to invest into their illegal, profitable, and fast-growing business.

We need to be able to deter corporate actions contrary to the common interest (ones which are anticompetitive, risky to the economy at large, environmentally damaging, harmful to consumers, or exploitative of employees). If not through our legal system, then how will we accomplish this? If through our legal system, it needs to be quick or at the very least have damages structured in a way to have much more teeth years later. In particular, if the damages were structured as "$XB or $XB*(market cap when paid)/(market cap when alleged violation took place), whichever is greater", the second half of the 'or' would kick in and make the damages nearly 10X greater. That would be 5.6% of MSFT's market capitalization (or $12.2B). I'm not sure that'd be enough to act as a real deterrent, but it'd be much closer anyway.

Perhaps we are not yet at the point where it is practical to download 30GB of game data, but with incremental background downloads it might be feasible in the 720's timeframe.

You're damn right it's impractical. WolframAlpha says 30GB on my connection will take over 3 days. Not ideal, when it takes me 25 minutes to drive to the store and buy the game.
Source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=30GB+at+94kB%2Fs

Furthermore http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=land+area+UK%2C+US%2C+Japan

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population%20density%20of%20UK%2C%20Japan%2C%20US

I got considerably less, more in the order of 80 picoseconds (10^-12). Exact calculation here: Wolfram Alpha. t`= t/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) Check exponents, I think you used km instead of m for c, which adds a few negative orders of magnitude to the result.

The difference they got was around 10^-9, so special relativistic clock drift wouldn't throw it off nearly enough. Might be other effects though.

What "cloud" do you use where it costs $750/year to store 1TB? S3 RRD would cost you $1120 - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24.093+per+GB+*+1TB+*+12 Azure costs more. Rackspace costs more. Who do you use?

They are demanding for no logical reason except how it was taught to them. Most STEM students just need a one year survey of math course that teaches them how to use the tools that you will use in industry to complete the math related problems you will face and to understand how they work. If you want to be able to do it with a pen a paper from memory you should consider a math minor. If it can be done in Wolfram Alpha, one of its excellent mobile tools or one of its competitors then there is no point in grinding on it. We don't make kids lean arithmetic for the same reasons, calculators are cheep, plentiful and they work.

Teach how the various math disciplines work, where they came from and how to use proper tools to solve them. Freshman Chem/Phys are just math classes with some memorization of simple concepts and high school level lab assignments. Those concepts are diluted by all the math teaching that is not necessary (to make it last four years). It is important to understand that you will use computerized tools to solve almost every one of these "math" issues in your industrial career, if you don't, you are inefficient at your job (academia). If an employee brings me a page+ long handwritten math problem he should expect me to send him back to do it in Mathematica, I don't have time and neither does anyone else to check his work for errors and half the time I cant read his writing, its 2012, everything is on the computer, deal with it.

I am not suggesting just handing them a calculator, they of course need an understanding of how it works and the underlining concepts. Most students get the calculator treatment and no understanding of the underlying math or how to use the the calculator properly. I don't think most math professors understand how to use calculators and computer math tools properly. I can pass the College Algebra CLEP exam with an approved calculator using very limited mental math and no scratch paper. The difference is understanding the concepts of algebra and how to use the calculator (tool) properly. Ten pages of long algebra problems does not give the student time to master the actual subject and they will never do it that way again once they leave academia. Every thing that people had trouble with in Freshman Chem can be determined using the wolfram general Chem assistant mobile app. This form of teaching is great at educating academics who can teach in this manner and pushes out the creative minds and risk takers that will lead to future major discoveries.

They are demanding for no logical reason except how it was taught to them. Most STEM students just need a one year survey of math course that teaches them how to use the tools that you will use in industry to complete the math related problems you will face and to understand how they work. If you want to be able to do it with a pen a paper from memory you should consider a math minor. If it can be done in Wolfram Alpha, one of its excellent mobile tools or one of its competitors then there is no point in grinding on it. We don't make kids lean arithmetic for the same reasons, calculators are cheep, plentiful and they work.

Teach how the various math disciplines work, where they came from and how to use proper tools to solve them. Freshman Chem/Phys are just math classes with some memorization of simple concepts and high school level lab assignments. Those concepts are diluted by all the math teaching that is not necessary (to make it last four years). It is important to understand that you will use computerized tools to solve almost every one of these "math" issues in your industrial career, if you don't, you are inefficient at your job (academia). If an employee brings me a page+ long handwritten math problem he should expect me to send him back to do it in Mathematica, I don't have time and neither does anyone else to check his work for errors and half the time I cant read his writing, its 2012, everything is on the computer, deal with it.

I am not suggesting just handing them a calculator, they of course need an understanding of how it works and the underlining concepts. Most students get the calculator treatment and no understanding of the underlying math or how to use the the calculator properly. I don't think most math professors understand how to use calculators and computer math tools properly. I can pass the College Algebra CLEP exam with an approved calculator using very limited mental math and no scratch paper. The difference is understanding the concepts of algebra and how to use the calculator (tool) properly. Ten pages of long algebra problems does not give the student time to master the actual subject and they will never do it that way again once they leave academia. Every thing that people had trouble with in Freshman Chem can be determined using the wolfram general Chem assistant mobile app. This form of teaching is great at educating academics who can teach in this manner and pushes out the creative minds and risk takers that will lead to future major discoveries.

They are demanding for no logical reason except how it was taught to them. Most STEM students just need a one year survey of math course that teaches them how to use the tools that you will use in industry to complete the math related problems you will face and to understand how they work. If you want to be able to do it with a pen a paper from memory you should consider a math minor. If it can be done in Wolfram Alpha, one of its excellent mobile tools or one of its competitors then there is no point in grinding on it. We don't make kids lean arithmetic for the same reasons, calculators are cheep, plentiful and they work.

Teach how the various math disciplines work, where they came from and how to use proper tools to solve them. Freshman Chem/Phys are just math classes with some memorization of simple concepts and high school level lab assignments. Those concepts are diluted by all the math teaching that is not necessary (to make it last four years). It is important to understand that you will use computerized tools to solve almost every one of these "math" issues in your industrial career, if you don't, you are inefficient at your job (academia). If an employee brings me a page+ long handwritten math problem he should expect me to send him back to do it in Mathematica, I don't have time and neither does anyone else to check his work for errors and half the time I cant read his writing, its 2012, everything is on the computer, deal with it.

I am not suggesting just handing them a calculator, they of course need an understanding of how it works and the underlining concepts. Most students get the calculator treatment and no understanding of the underlying math or how to use the the calculator properly. I don't think most math professors understand how to use calculators and computer math tools properly. I can pass the College Algebra CLEP exam with an approved calculator using very limited mental math and no scratch paper. The difference is understanding the concepts of algebra and how to use the calculator (tool) properly. Ten pages of long algebra problems does not give the student time to master the actual subject and they will never do it that way again once they leave academia. Every thing that people had trouble with in Freshman Chem can be determined using the wolfram general Chem assistant mobile app. This form of teaching is great at educating academics who can teach in this manner and pushes out the creative minds and risk takers that will lead to future major discoveries.

I'd personally be more concerned with the possibility of having some of my data clobbered if there's a collision with a hash for somebody elses file.

Trust me, you have better things to be worried about than hash collisions on Dropbox. :)

Based on my quick research, Dropbox uses the SHA-256 algorithm with 4 Mbytes chunks. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the total amount of data Dropbox stores for its users is (pinky finger!) 1 million terabytes of data.

That would mean there are 262,144,000,000 chunks. A SHA-256 hash is 256 bits long.

Applying the Birthday Paradox, the probability of a collision is thus:

P = 1-EXP((-(262144000000^2))/(2*(2^256)))

That evaluates to a 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002967% probability of even just one collision existing in the entire data set. Put another way, there is a 1 in 3.369 million trillion trillion trillion trillion chance of there being a collision.

Put another way... I'd say it's slightly more likely that Zeus is going to appear before you tomorrow to anally rape you with his lightning bolt before destroying the Earth.

You can take a trip to Wolfram Alpha to verify my math.

Looking at the youth unemployment figures for the USA (17.6%) and that of for instance the Netherlands (6.6%), you seem to be mistaken.

Cherry picking one small country out of Western Europe is misleading.
From wolframalpha:
US - 17.6%
France - 22.6%
Spain - 37.9%
Belgium - 21.9%
Italy - 25.4%
Poland - 20.7% (was WAY higher ~2002 - ~42%)
England - 18.9%

Looking at the youth unemployment figures for the USA (17.6%) and that of for instance the Netherlands (6.6%), you seem to be mistaken.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=youth+unemployment+USA+vs+Netherlands

Wolfram Alpha says: mass of the earth / (mass of the atmosphere) = 1.2 x 10^6.

Basically:

• We've only changed the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere by less than a degree in a hundred years
• The rest of the Earth is a million times more massive
• We're not directly changing the temperature of the atmosphere -- the greenhouse effect is doing most of the work. Basically, we're not concerned about how hot your car's engine is, we're concerned about the effect of the emissions.

You can look up age distributions in Wolfram Alpha

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=China+age+distribution or estimated future distributions

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Saudi+Arabia+age+pyramid+2030

Japan is going to need robots
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=japan+age+pyramid+2030

The US, not so bad
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+age+pyramid+2030

You can look up age distributions in Wolfram Alpha

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=China+age+distribution or estimated future distributions

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Saudi+Arabia+age+pyramid+2030

Japan is going to need robots
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=japan+age+pyramid+2030

The US, not so bad
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+age+pyramid+2030

You can look up age distributions in Wolfram Alpha

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=China+age+distribution or estimated future distributions

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Saudi+Arabia+age+pyramid+2030

Japan is going to need robots
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=japan+age+pyramid+2030

The US, not so bad
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+age+pyramid+2030

You can look up age distributions in Wolfram Alpha

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=China+age+distribution or estimated future distributions

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Saudi+Arabia+age+pyramid+2030

Japan is going to need robots
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=japan+age+pyramid+2030

The US, not so bad
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+age+pyramid+2030

I would love to know this. My physics isn't great, but I did a quick Google.

It looks like the consensus is that it is not possible, those materials do not exist.

The other thing is that is would not make much difference than using helium:
Density of air is 1.2 kg/m3.
The density of helium is 0.166 kg/m3.

If we had a balloon filled with air, and replaced it with helium, the density reduces to 14%. This means that that much helium could support 86% of the weight of the air. A vacuum's density is 0, so it was possible it would support the weight of 100% of the air it 'displaced'. So a perfect vacuum is only 16% better at lifting (in air) than helium is.

I would love to know this. My physics isn't great, but I did a quick Google.

It looks like the consensus is that it is not possible, those materials do not exist.

The other thing is that is would not make much difference than using helium:
Density of air is 1.2 kg/m3.
The density of helium is 0.166 kg/m3.

If we had a balloon filled with air, and replaced it with helium, the density reduces to 14%. This means that that much helium could support 86% of the weight of the air. A vacuum's density is 0, so it was possible it would support the weight of 100% of the air it 'displaced'. So a perfect vacuum is only 16% better at lifting (in air) than helium is.

I would love to know this. My physics isn't great, but I did a quick Google.

It looks like the consensus is that it is not possible, those materials do not exist.

The other thing is that is would not make much difference than using helium:
Density of air is 1.2 kg/m3.
The density of helium is 0.166 kg/m3.

If we had a balloon filled with air, and replaced it with helium, the density reduces to 14%. This means that that much helium could support 86% of the weight of the air. A vacuum's density is 0, so it was possible it would support the weight of 100% of the air it 'displaced'. So a perfect vacuum is only 16% better at lifting (in air) than helium is.

Over 300 people have died

Over 300 people die every day in motor vehicle accidents.
Over 300 people die every day from cancer.
Over 300 people die every day... well you get the idea.
Over 150 THOUSAND people die EVERY DAY.

Do you weep for all of them?
Oh, and in the time it took you to read this post, another 10 people died. Better buy another box of kleenex.

Don't worry, it doesn't.

Siri is just a repackaged voice control that's been given a spiffy new name and now uses WolframAlpha to get simple answers to questions.

Just about any "clever" response you see from Siri is actually a WolframAlpha response. For example, open the pod bay doors. "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." Siri's amazing! Oh, wait, that's just a WolframAlpha response.

Everything else is just a somewhat looser text commands. So they tied "umbrella" to "weather" so if you ask about an umbrella, it shows the weather. Innovative in that they came up with a really dumb-ass way to ask "what's the weather report today," I guess?

And it's not that hard to phrase things in ways Siri can't figure out. There are plenty of YouTube videos if you look. (Just search for "Siri fail.") Although the best one is probably when someone tries to use Siri to send an email, and it asks him "which address, work or home?" He answers "work." Siri replies "I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you meant by 'fuck.' Which address, work or home?"

Don't worry, it doesn't.

Siri is just a repackaged voice control that's been given a spiffy new name and now uses WolframAlpha to get simple answers to questions.

Just about any "clever" response you see from Siri is actually a WolframAlpha response. For example, open the pod bay doors. "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." Siri's amazing! Oh, wait, that's just a WolframAlpha response.

Everything else is just a somewhat looser text commands. So they tied "umbrella" to "weather" so if you ask about an umbrella, it shows the weather. Innovative in that they came up with a really dumb-ass way to ask "what's the weather report today," I guess?

And it's not that hard to phrase things in ways Siri can't figure out. There are plenty of YouTube videos if you look. (Just search for "Siri fail.") Although the best one is probably when someone tries to use Siri to send an email, and it asks him "which address, work or home?" He answers "work." Siri replies "I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you meant by 'fuck.' Which address, work or home?"

Interestingly, the population of the world in 1974 (when Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn proposed TCP/IP) was also ~4 billion. source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+the+world+in+1974

1: We'll colonize and even explore space (because if we don't get off this rock, we're as good as dead).

Tens of millions of dead smokers proves that the rationale is not valid, but tens of millions of dead natives in colonized areas proves your basic prediction is sound, if only for other reasons.

2: We'll have something much closer to true virtual reality devices and use them willingly (a bit obvious I suppose)

I'd debate this more extensively, but my guild just issued its mass invite for our weekly Firelands raid, so I have to go.

3: Not everyone will go the cyborg route. In fact, only a few may, because of the 'ick' format that many people will detest. Star Trek agrees here (and no, Geordi La Forge doesn't count).

Frankly, most people want to "look normal". Hence, even the most innocuous "prosthetics"--eyeglasses--have a zero-cosmetic-impact alternative (contact lenses). No bet there.

4: At some point, we'll have sky cars. We'll need better batteries, and good AI for stability and non-crashability, but we'll get there (eventually, we'll even be able to drive them for fun (with the safety mechanisms kicking in if we make a wrong move).

There are other implications, too. Does privacy extend to the airspace above your house? Otherwise your neighbors could just hover over your house to watch your comings and goings. And yeah, if the technology becomes cheap enough and sufficiently different than conventional aviation (i.e., not needing specialty training and licensing), then it'll have some ugly public safety impacts. But when cars were new a century ago, they'd have been surprised and horrified at the quarter million casualties a year car accidents cause.

5: (Hot) fusion will become viable at some stage too (we could really do with the energy to feed our sky cars etc. with.)

It's happening now. Too bad we're not so good at collecting and distributing that energy, considering it already travels 99.99993% of the way here by itself.

6: And the big one; fewer and fewer people will have traditional jobs, letting the robots/computers do the admin / manual work for them. Instead, we'll be exploring, learning, creating, having fun, or socializing (eventually mankind will realize that higher unemployment is a good thing, and not a bad)

Alas, having the machines do all the work liberates the working man to abject poverty and crime or starvation. Economies function on scarcity, and if you don't have natural scarcity, you invent artificial scarcity. The wealth of the "haves" tends to increase towards 100% of total value of the economy, and the wealth of the "have-nots" decreases towards 0. The costs of production are already a non-factor in a lot of the economy, but that hasn't made the important things zero-cost for the consumer.

7: There will be a universal currency, universal language, and universal OS (don't worry, not necessarily Windows, MacOS, or Linux) at some point which most (>99%) can and will use. It'll take a while, and will probably happen after most people stop working, but at some point, we will all agree to get along (traveling to outer space, and to the stars may add some confusion to this point however).

In many ways, we're almost already there. What percentage of the world's nations and economies has a working understanding of English and access to some basically-interoperable computer networking system? If you believe in the curse of the Tower of Babel, you might be inclined to argue that humanity is overcoming the confounding of languages and is again a viable candidate to ascend to the heavens.

Mind blowing achievement that I think gets little attention. If only we could pair the Siri interface with Watson, and have him tie back to Google, Wikipedia, and Wolfram Alpha, the amount of discoveries we could make would happen in weeks if not days.

Oh boy; here we go again. As a cognitive scientist, I'm appalled by /. people buying on the hype.

Hmm.... huge discoveries... intelligent machines... let's see:

Wolfram: who was the cowboy in washington?

Google: who was the cowboy in washington?

Yup. No improvement after all these years.

Wanna Tip? Please read some Hofstadter.

Try:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24240+in+1925+dollars
Inflation has been far from steady.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=compare+mercury+to+the+moon

Trillions of years is generous. A million monkeys each making a unique 100 bit binary string every second would still take around 40 quadrillion years. This *vastly* underestimates the time of an actual paragraph, let alone multiple paragraphs, and it's still 40,000 times larger than the trillion years estimate.

Wolfram Alpha tells us that the direct path round trip by fiber would take 90 milliseconds. I'm rather impressed that it takes less than twice that to do the trip in reality, what with all of the additional routing delays and non-ideal paths that the data must take.

1) C is speed of light in vacuum, fiber is not vacuum, hence speed of light in this case is not necessarily C
2) No routing equipment can do calculations faster than C (unless you had the perfect parelel processor and OS), so you have packet, then A -> D conversion, then OSI model parsing, then protocol-specific filtering, then routing, then route-based filtering, then D -> A conversion, then send packet back out
3) Repeat step 2 for each hop
4) Last hop, repeat step 2, but add "request/response" processing there somewhere, such as ICMP ping for the most low-level test.

Wolfram Alpha tells us that the direct path round trip by fiber would take 90 milliseconds. I'm rather impressed that it takes less than twice that to do the trip in reality, what with all of the additional routing delays and non-ideal paths that the data must take.

Wolfram is better for math

WolframAlpha is really great at such things: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+cm%2Fc+in+ps

Result:
convert 2 cm/c (centimeters per speed of light in vacuum) to picoseconds
66.71 ps (picoseconds)

It would be nice someday if Google would give "2cm/c in ps" the same stature.

switch to https://duckduckgo.com/ or use http://www.wolframalpha.com/ directly...

Try Wolfram Alpha.