By the way, you're mistaken about the "whatever metric you choose" part. All you need is a factor-able parameter in your numerator that converges to zero over time and where is your metric headed?

If all you were trying to say was "shit gets superseded", I imagine you would have used fewer words in the OP.

My interest is not in the obvious. (Like, for example, the fact that systems don't run away to infinity on metrics that are monotonic with energy/resources required, or the fact that R.K. if a profit-motivated blowhard).

My interest is in specific examples of phenomena that have been advertised as being a big deal in the future because of some exponential fit to a small data set, later to be found to reasonably obey a sigmoid function.

Perhaps I didn't make that clear, but in any event, your entertaining reply does not address my point, and I imagine you would have used data instead of sarcasm if you had it.

Interesting, but not convincing with out examples and accompanying data.

There are *so* many examples like this where there is a sound investigative idea and not a shred of methodological rigor.
Just a refresher for many of you:
1. Choose your outcome
2. Choose a threshold that will count as an important effect size
3. Power your study (choose how many units will be tested) based on #2
4. Document 1 - 3 before you do the study so we know you didn't go fishing for spurious correlations after the fact
5. Run the study
6. Inferential statistics!
7. Profit! Except, not really.

Those who think #6 is more about obscuring things than revealing them don't know much about #6.

Our best hope for the desired outcome (keep the status quo: no one controls the web) is that legislators like the web the way it works now.
I recall that when DVRs were new, there was doubt about whether or not the FCC would get involved and make things suck.
The chairman of the FCC at the time was quoted as saying "I just got one of these Tivo things and it's great!"
As far as I could tell, that was that.
It's not a perfect analogy because corruption *could* have influenced that attitude, whereas anarchy on the Web benefits everyone in general and no one in particular.
Still, I suspect that our legislators know that the Web is a beautiful thing and wish to leave it the way it is.
This is all off-topic for TFA, but the provocative headline leads us towards this more (most?) important topic.

Some shared commonsense notion of justice?
I jest.

It seems to me that what some other country would do to a similar criminal is irrelevant. If North Korea were involved, would that justify a still harsher punishment?
How about this: the punishment is fair because the guy is a crook and the crime wasn't petty (though as an automotive engineer in R&D I would agree that it was less consequential than advertised).

Here here. The arrogance-to-usefulness ratio around here is getting tough to stomach. The more focused one is on scoring cleverness points, the fewer available cycles there are to actually get things done. Now, back to work... for the underprivileged.

Forgive me if I'm parroting someone else here, but no one seems to have mentioned the fucking DAZZLING array of free services that Google offers to the whole world for free. A sane debate on this topic would be more about whether the costs (and risks) associated with Google's dominance are worth the benefits of, to name a few: andoid, docs, gmail, google calendars, groups, code hosting, scholar, maps... Is the ad clutter worth it? So far, HELL yes. And stop talking about adbl*ck. That shit gets too popular and this all falls apart.

YOU, sir or madam, have the idea. I'm disappointed by the modded-up comments on this one. Of course the idea as implemented is pretty much a disease vector with no utility. The interesting question is what would happen if we had local public wifi darknets sitting around. Of course they would be plagued by malware as well, but /. starts to sound like The Man when it wants to shoot down a nice anarchical idea because it's obviously not secure. Net neutrality goes away, your precious torrents become unavailable, and all of a sudden we have good reasons to go local and dark. "But how would you know that you're actually connecting to..." ...I know, but let's not be too safe, here. There is such a thing.

Thanks for the advocacy in your sig. You might add an apostrophe to "youths".

The constitution also fails to mention the right of *individuals* to bear arms (who's in those "state malitias" anyway?). Yet, we want access to guns to be protected by law. Some might argue that federal guarantees of access to health care are at least as constitutional and, dare I say, more relevant to our general welfare than many other matters into which congress feels free to step; gun control being but one. Then again, it's not like our president was a professor of constitutional law at one of the most renowned institutions in the country or anything. He probably never read the constitution and made the glaring error to which you refer.

But it's magical. MAGICAL!

Like I said in the OP: silly, I know. Cheers ;)