The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

This would then block the future as depicted in Minority Report.

"Hi there! Would you like to buy another [highly personal and embarrassing item]?"

There's a relief.

I visited Activision in the mid 1980s, when it was a shoe-string operation. Games for the C64 were coming along and quite impressive, including Little Computer People, which was running on a desk over a weekend to check for stability.

Seems it's all about IP these days.

They're coming for the upper bands which were available to Ham Radio enthusiasts. FCC doesn't care about us anymore.

Such a useless post and reflecting lack of actual knowledge of Fry's.

20 some years ago I bought my first laptop (still have it) at Fry's in Sunnyvale. It was still in the little grocery location, the shelves (and even former refrigerated goods) aisles has resistor and capacitor models sticking out of the floor. It's long since become some health club or other business after Fry's moved to a big store a couple blocks away.

In the hey day of the stores on E. Arques, E. Brokaw and E. Hamilton had about 40 or 60 cashiers, the queue moved pretty swiftly and they didn't take American Express. I tried to buy my first digital camera there and found that out. Went over to Wolf Camera to pick it up. Anyway, over the past few years I've visited the number of cashiers has dwindled down to only a handful. Few floor walkers, where once they were all over you, asking if you needed any help. Last visit I didn't see one at all.

At the end Fry's probably only had a dozen people working in each of their giant stores, a far cry from the hundreds they employed a decade or two before. The downsizing has been happening over time. Weep not for droves of employees losing their jobs, weep for the few who worked in desolate stores, with unstocked shelves who knew the writing was on the wall. They've been circling the drain for years.

The main hurt here is losing a chain which once carried just about everything the home hobbyist/maniac could ever want. That's been going on with the closure of Weird Stuff and Halted Specialties. I'll have to look to see if there's anyone left who sells components, wire, cable, solder, special tools, etc. I'd say they failed to plan well and we've known the eventual source of stuff is going to be our mailbox.

I found that it's super easy to make human drivers crash with a simple $5 laser.

It's amazing how many of our systems only work with the underlying assumption that we're not actively trying to murder each other at any given moment.

A number of sci-fi writers have already explored the topic of us creating something which provides the perfect breeding ground for the kinds of diseases which would wipe us out. I believe there's merit in considering these possibilities. We don't yet have enough data to determine if GMO crops are going to produce some new vile bug which would prove disastrous, however findings now state that advances against pests and organisms (fungal, viral or bacterial) only beat the organism for a few years, before they adapt (clever little buggers) and start over from square one. What do we do if we create a host for a super bug? Not like we can modify our own DNA every few years to keep ahead of the game.

Sounds like he's making the point that when the user records a video, audio is likely included with the video, the audio is in fact recorded in that situation and submitted to facebook, and facebook might use the audio from that user submitted recording for quality control purposes. Quality control purposes may or may not include targeting more reasonable advertising.

Better yet, allow them access to it, have it only display a single random answer to any specific question, and don't provide a compiler to test if it actually works.

California receives $0.99 in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes paid, which is below the national average return for states of $1.22 per dollar paid

It's a "donor" state, but not by much.

And where did the "government agency" get the money from?
That's right, the taxpayers.

Generally, no. The business is fined a multiple of the wages illegally not paid, and the employee is paid from those.

So, the employee is paid by the employer, and the rest of the fine goes towards funding the government agency.

How exactly does one "plan on going" private in Ontario with health care when providing private health care is essentially illegal?

Private dental, mental, and prescription coverage, but you can go private for many doctors, too.

I use EQ virtual, but there are other apps that can basically do the same thing. It's illegal to see Ontario doctors for a fee, but it's perfectly fine to see doctors from any other province, and for $50 I can be seen in an hour or two. I also see clinics when I travel to the US - it's cheaper to pay the doctors to prescribe me medication there and fill it there than it is to fill it here. Plus, the clinics are willing to actually prescribe things like migraine medication and ADHD medication without simply telling me that I'll have to see a specialist, where I have to wait 3 months just to get an appointment.

> I doubt very much the company is going to survive this

I'm sick of hearing this stuff. I heard it about virtually every Trump-related news story for the last year, I heard it about New Orleans, I heard it about BP. I heard it about Volkswagen.

Look, the market already priced this disaster, based on what data is available. They lost about 15% of their value. They have solid fundamentals that aren't changing in any sort of way that pose an existential threat to the company; unless there's a lot more of this than we can see.

Reimplementation also gives people the option to choose their own license. As developers, it's all too easy to succumb to "not invented here" syndrome, but there are sometimes very legitimate reasons to re-write things, even if they do exactly the same thing as existing solutions.