Moore's Law

IT Journalists who realise they haven't researched anything to write about for their weekly column end up publishing something about how much faster computers have become. They often rant and rave about "Moore's Law"...not the Moore that said that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Gordon Moore, the CEO of Intel, who once predicted that computer processing power will double every 18 months.
Pseudo-nerds like to talk about Moore's Law, to pretend they're smart. Problem is, the "law" does not describe reality, and hasn't done so for some time. 4.5 years ago, I bought a 1.8GHz processor. If the "law" was correct, by now I'd be using a 14.4GHz processor. 4GHz is the fastest available, however. So computer CPUs have taken 4.5 years to roughly double in speed. They've hardly advanced in speed at all in 3 years (I could get 3.4GHz, 3 years ago). Moore's "Law", conclusively, is bullshit. What annoys me more is the thought that people ever believed there was reason to think that miraculously, research would just happen to advance in such a way that every 18 months, CPUs would double in speed. Deserving pain are the journalists who write as though Moore's prediction actually CAUSED computers to become faster, as though, by trying to keep up with his prediction, research has gone faster than it otherwise would have. What absolute nonsense.