To make the whole deal even sweeter, we're pretending we are reverse engineering the spacecraft. This way, if one crashes or if they shoot one down then the China or the Russians will spend countless fruitless man-hours trying to understand the technology. The fake tech will be deliberately obfuscated to waste their time. The real tech will be replaced by a decoy in the last minute that "crashes" or something akin to that. It's the most plausible explanation and infinitely more likely than interdimensional aliens

I'd bet good money that this is a secret government operation to misled the world. This is an excuse to fly aircraft over military installations around the world without anyone blaming the USA. Why wouldn't they blame the USA you ask? Becaues we are pretending it's happening to us but really we're just developing the technology. It's an elaborate hoax to give us a free pass to invade sovereign territory

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.

This is the bullshit they resort to when terrorists don't seem scary anymore...

"As a High Ranking Member of Dr. Seuss: We Own the Rights to Him Inc, I'm uncomfortable with the thought of Dr. Seuss being seen as a racist - let's pull a few of his books from publication so hopefully they won't accidentally cause a fuss and taint his legacy".

"Hm, yes, I agree, that could be bad for us. Shall we quietly delete the offending books from the catalog?"

"No, let's announce what we're doing to the media. I'm sure this won't turn into one of those weeks-long moral panic shitstorms."

You can dress it up however you like, but when a single company controls a vast segment of the market, hiding behind the disingenuous argument that "they shouldn't be forced to [let other people] sell [what the company considers to be] rude and offensive materials" is functionally siding with the book-burners.

And I'd be careful where you go on that train. Some people consider public displays of homosexual relationships rude and offensive. Some pharmacists consider birth control rude and offensive. Some people consider Dr. Seuss's caricatures of white people rude and offensive. Green Eggs and Ham can be read as a sneering and contemptuous belittlement of the challenges those on the autistic spectrum face when being asked to step outside their comfort zone.

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.

No, and they shouldn't. If driverless cars cause only 10% of the accidents then there is a net 90% of lives saved and you want to put the behind bars for saving people from 90% of wrecks? Let's just focus on decreasing the number as much as possible. We don't expect perfect performance from machines in any other sector. We should be satisfied that they are better than any other alternative. If we don't cut 90% of accidents because we are waiting for 100% perfection that this is unethical. We're wasting human lives and causing undue hardships on familiesl

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.

Which 2 original shows? You're definitely missing out on some quality stuff.

It's really not that complicated. Netflix has prospered by doing away with crap people were forced to endure. That's been done. I suppose you can look to remove MORE things people are forced to endure. Remove all the credits from every show and make them all available to anyone who gives a crap about the name of the associate producer's assistant. Make that available online and spare us. After that, just having a slick interface, exclusive content, and as wide a range of non-exclusive content as possible. Also, provide a catalog of everything ever made even if you're not offering it (perhaps at an additional cost?) so that I can make a master queue of everything I ever want to watch. Throw in IMDB so that I can queue up all of Jim Carrey's movies to my list and I'm a paying customer.