It is, hint: time value of money.

If anything, the upside is that if we come up with better techniques for detecting unwated content we'll free these people for more productive endeavours.

My first thought was Core Wars. :-)

And badly lost. He's not even a sparring partner for Thiel.

It depends on your math background, but I've found Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa's Learning From Data the best, although Christopher M. Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning is the gold standard. ;-)

Not to dismiss your experience, but The Economist actually is a British journal.

It could be argued that in the long term it simply does not matter:

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

I'd also mention FreeBSD kernel and Niels Provos' code.

s/is_int/intable/ ;-)