gas is hardly "unaffordable to average person", even the burger mashers where I live drive to work

plenty of reputable doctors question the very existence of the disease, since children diagnosed with it in one setting show no signs of it in others (doing something they are actually interested in). So your point 1 might have a problem and if so the whole thing collapses.

plenty of new plants built since 1970, amount of electricity from coal almost tripled, peaking in 2007 but now declining.

Something has to generate the 39% of electricity that is currently coal powered. Nuclear? Massive trillion dollar plus solar farm in the west?

I am going to be infected by the three site I exclusively use with my Windows XP machine for busines reasons? no I am not. no reason to disable any functionality.

but what of the 80486 doing about 80% of the MIPS of the clock frequency, while 386 only 33% and the Pentium I did 150% (e.g. 75MHz == 125 million x86 MIPS) ?

Some would argue Mac with MacOSX with Motorola chip is a next-gen NeXT, and a LOT of those sold.

Sun was selling 50,000 sparc workstations per quarter in 1992.

1. We hypothesize a disorder X
2. We observe eople respond differently to stimulants
3. We conclude disorder X exists

Nope, back to logic 101 for you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

I appreciate how movie instructs in the proper etiquette should the line of questioning become too uncomfortable or the questioned feel the inquisitor is learning of negative traits best left undisclosed: "My mother? Let me tell you about my mother!" *BLAM* *BLAM*

and if anyone interested, 1976 I had a SWTP 6800

But there was ALWAYS alternatives to intel processors even for personal computer (e.g. motorola) from day one of the personal computer movement, and so the Megahertz Myth was always meaningless. My home computer in 1991 had a Motorola chip (NeXTStation), in 1996 it had a Sparc chip.

it's not the volts that get them, it's the amps -- obligatory "running scared" misquote

in an 11,000 volt cable (yup they go that high now), it's about 0.4 A

yes, it was first sentence of John Timmer's Ars article set me off: "When I first started reading Ars Technica, performance of a processor was measured in megahertz"

Marketing and sales to ignorant consumers don't count. The "MHz Myth" has been time and again a subject in many a PC magazines

More meaningful benchmarks have existed long before that era (e.g. Whetstone from early 70s) and many were (e.g. Dhrystone in mid 80s) used all through the rise of the microprocessor (8080, 6502, etc.)

what about Google's Protocol Buffer's Zig Zag encoding (sign on lsd)?

three decades in the industry and I've never seen performance measured or stated in MHz. At various times MIPS (and referencing a specific architecture, e.g. VAX MIPS or Mainframe MIPS) or MFLOPS might have been used, but never clock speed alone. As now other benchmarks also were used.