Except that, of your examples, two of the three (acid rain and the ozone hole) are provably real things and didn't become the doomsday scenarios thrown around when they were new news because the reporting on them spurred large scale action removing the major contributing factors. Nice try, though, with the false equivalencies.

There are worthless communities of comments (ala youtube, engadget, most general blog sites) and then communities where real discussions and interactions and even friend-like relationships develop almost like a true forum (slashdot, to a certain extent, wonkette, and - formerly - gizmodo). Gizmodo had one of the most tightly knit but still open, responsive, and interesting commenter communities of any blog I had ever seen. It even rivaled some forums. And then the entire Gawker family of blogs got their now infamous redesign, and the comment system was broken. You could no longer get notices of replies, conversations died before they even started, and most of the "starred" commenters left the site (and many of those who didn't immediately, and who spoke out against the changes and the brokenness of the new design, had their star removed and/or their accounts banned). So yes, Mr. Denton, there ARE online communities whose comment sections are worthless (like yours). But there are those whose comment sections are not, and for a man whose single minded drive to "better and newer" when in fact you were only achieving one of those (and only by virtue of it being later in time) to claim that all comment sections are worthless (because yours are) is just as disingenuous as what you did to your commenters.

Maybe this will push them to finally fix it.

Right, because it's a question of fact for a jury (not a question of law for a judge) if the case passes the threshold for viability in terms of whether or not the injury was the result of an open and obvious risk. Oh wait, it's not? Your theory went up in smoke? Oh I'm sorry! How insensitive of me to poke holes in your well thought out completely baseless assertion!

These sorts of stories always blame our "litigious society" for these stupid labels, but the reality of the situation is none of them are necessary even in our "lawsuit prone" world. There is no duty to warn of open and obvious dangers (i.e. "Don't eat this iPod" or "Do not use electrical generator in the bath tub"). Companies slap them on there because it MAY make any eventual products liability cases easier to get dismissed more quickly, but honestly, most of the warnings are so dumb there's no reason for them, legal or otherwise. It is, at best, corporate paranoia imagining what sorts of things that seem "open and obvious" aren't. Except they are. And in putting them on their products they only succeed in making themselves look bad and perpetuate stupid lawyer jokes. And stories like this, which seem to presuppose that these warnings ARE necessary for some lawsuit based reason, only make it worse.

Not to rain on your joke, but from the sounds of it it's an open mic pointed at a tone generator, so you'd still hear it even if it were broadcasting null characters. Or even if the tone generator were switched off. An open, dead, mic sounds different from an empty frequency.