'black swan' is a term of art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

Boxing used to be one of the biggest sports in the US, now it's a Vegas sideshow, and the whole "beating people retarded" problem is a pretty big reason why. It's not that people are ignoring boxing's problems, it's that they've already addressed them and the popularity of the sport has plummeted as a result. Most people don't want to box, it's hard to find people willing to fight for a pittance in return for guaranteed brain damage. (Note, by comparison, the popularity of MMA, which does not rely purely on knockouts to win -- you can still give someone brain damage, but it's not literally the only or even the easiest path to victory) Football, on the other hand, is something that a lot of people play starting as young as grade school. I've never seen a grade school boxing league, but I see ads for peewee football signups every year.

There's actually a legal term for "anecdotes about specific legal cases". The term is "precedent" and it's Kind Of A Big Deal where the law is concerned.

Why do you need an editor designed for Python? I write Python in gedit and vim reasonably often. Last time I checked both of those programs support both tabs and spaces, with no external support or plugins required...

That's a fair point, and it was admittedly uncharitable of me to put "dramatic" in sarcasm quotes. It's objectively a pretty big leap for them. It also detracts from the point I was going for, which is that if a social network has 154 million people and 4 million people join, that is not a decline. The problem I had was just that the OP presents one set of statistics for facebook, and another that uses a different site and a different methodology for google+. Using his own google+ site as a reference, both facebook and google+ grew over the same time frame.

The same site (siteanalytics.compete.com) that shows "dramatic" growth in Google+ usage (from 20.2 million in April to 31.8 million users presently) also shows considerable growth in facebook usage over the same time period (from 154.5 million to 158.5 million). If you're going to compare sites, use the same metrics for each site, otherwise you look like kind of an asshole.

That sounds awesome, but they should definitely call the City Management software Wilkins instead of Watson.

This is a special place, filled with Juffo-Wup. But it is not the source

A good idea, but here's what that will accomplish: http://xkcd.com/927/

I'm sorry your crippling autism prevents you from being interested in anything that doesn't explicitly involve shiny gadgetry. Could I make a suggestion? If you don't find an article interesting DON'T READ THE ARTICLE.

but perhaps they should spend more time and energy on making games that are worth paying for, and less time and energy on making people regret paying for their games?