Despite its descent into cliche, Moore's Law really is quite something. Last night my father and father-in-law were talking about how much cheaper memory gets every year. We were all comparing the size of our hard-disk storage drives. (I out-geeked them at 120 GB.) What's even more amazing, is that this consistent halving of prices every 18 to 24 months was first predicted in 1965. Thirty years ago, my Dad recalled, three gigabytes of storage took up 750 square feet of space. Now I wear it without notice around my neck. Ray Kurzweil has made a career for at least the last decade speaking at conferences about how logarhythmic growth in information-storage has occurred for some time, long before Moore's Law. The number of integrated circuits on a chip is the fifth extension of this growth, after electromechanical calculators, relays, vacuum tubes and transistors.

Before me I have laid out an array of flash-memory sticks, ranging from a 128-mb stick I bought for $50 several years ago to the 1 GB I bought recently at a MicroCenter in Boston for $16. The increase in storage is certainly noteworthy, but so is this: On every one of these memory sticks, the plastic caps have broken. They crack and slide off. One of two plastic hooks breaks off and the cap no longer stays on. One manufacturer makes sure that its caps fits only its micro-drives, which is great until the cap breaks and you can no longer use it. Sometimes I hold the caps on with a black, paper binder, which makes the whole stick look like some kind of silicon-based roach clip.

An entire field of industrial chemistry is devoted to plastics failure. But apparently computer manufacturers have uniformly not applied its lessons to their flash-memory stick caps. I feel comfortable about ruling out user-error.

They can put a man on the Moon, but...