But the use of hafnium also brings up another important point, an outgrowth of Moore's Second Law that the industry, and society, continue to ignore. (Image from Luuluu, a Chinese Flickr user.)

Moore's Second Law, for those who don't know, is that as circuit lines grow closer the development costs increase geometrically. These come out through mass production, but they also squeeze out competition in basic processes. That's why there are so few real chip companies -- most are "fab-less" designers of chips who ship those designs out to foundries for production.

But that's just the financial cost. There is also an environmental cost to chip production, a high one. The acids and other chemicals used to finish goods throughout the process are nasty. The addition of hafnium to the mix just makes it that much worse.

It's these environmental costs that sent the U.S. chip industry overseas in the first place. Even 20 years ago it was impossible to both pay those costs here and to compete with countries that declined to pay them. Those costs are being hidden right now in China, and they must be paid in time, in the form of birth defects, dead zones or in hyper-expensive clean-up operations.

Thus we have Moore's Third Law. The more complex chips get, the worse they get for the environment.

Eventually, hopefully soon, the Chinese government and the other governments who have been lured into chip production will get the message, and demand those costs be paid. This will have two beneficial impacts. It will mean a clean-up, sure, but it could also lure plants back to North America, so we won't be subject to Chinese chip blackmail in the next decade as we've been subject to Arab oil blackmail in this decade.

Hopefully, at that time, someone will use The Google and find this piece. I told you so.