Dude...By the end of March RadioShack is dead. D-E-D - dead. They've filed chapter 11 bankruptcy and are liquidating. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday the local RS stores near me will be having a grab-bag event where you can fill a small bag for $5, a medium bag for $15, and a large bag for $50. Anything that fits is yours. My local store has a crap ton of R-Pi's and Arduino Kits and shields left, and no one around me wants them. I'll be able to buy out the entire stock with a $15 bag or two... that's over $500 - 1,000 worth of equipment.

As far as the continued brand name: Sprint bought something like 1700 stores at auction on the 16th of this month, GameStop got a few others, the rest of the stores in the nation will be shuttered. The ones that remain will be RadioShack in brand only, and if I read correctly, it'll be something like "RadioShack by Sprint" or some crap like that. The stores GameStop bought I think are going to be losing the brand altogether.

RadioShack's new CFO was touting money in the bank numbering in tens of Billions and several tens of Billions above that worth in assets when the new CEO took over 2 or 3 years ago. Guess where RadioShack will be at the end of the week? Any RS that remains open will either be converted into a Sprint Store with an electronics section or possibly a GameStop. The rest will be gone.

Another take would be: How long does it take for depleted Star to go from stable, to Gas Super Giant to (Super)Nova? Just because they've got net worth of 700bn doesn't mean that they have the fuel to keep that from blowing up or imploding in their face.

Dumbass, in the scenario posed the danger was coming from behind. How the fuck is slowing down gonna save your ass when a Semi is barreling down on you and has no room to stop before slamming you as it is. Or I have a real-life situation where burst speed got me out of certain death.

I'm cruising down a 2 lane (one lane each direction) road with my wife on the back of my bike at 55 (posted limit). Good visibiltiy and no blind curves for about 3 miles down the road, and I could see the road for 2 miles behind me in the mirror. There's a Bar-B-Q place on the right hand side of the road that we're coming up on about 500 feet ahead, Black Ford explorer is coming at me slowing down with the left turn blinker, I instinctively roll back off the throttle and now I'm 60 ft away at 52 MPH...then she turns left. I looked her dead in the eyes and she still turned left. I have two choices here, brake hard and slam into her, or gear down, lay on the throttle to pick up Gyro Force, and go into a swerve around the back of her. When I made the commit, I had about 20 ft of space and she was still in my lane, oblivious to the havoc she just caused. Once my swerve started, I put my thumb on the red button throwing the quad Stebel Air Horns on. I made sure that I did this after the path commit was going to be guaranteed to be behind her turn just to make sure that I didn't throw her into a panic that would have made the situation worse on me. In roughly 40 ft. passed the SUV I was back in my lane and at level cruise at 72 mph, letting off the throttle to get back down to the limit and continuing my Sunday ride to the next gas station where I could figuratively change my underwear. Another biker a ways behind us saw the scene unfold and caught up with me at that gas station and asked why I didn't stop and confront the woman as I would have loved the look on her eyes after she heard the Stebel go off right behind her. I just said "I have an aversion to 20 to Life," and left it at that.

If I had followed your logic, I'd be either dead or in the hospital right now as this only happened a week and a half ago and in no case would my bike have come out of it in ridable condition. If I had hit the brakes, I would have slammed into her and that's the end of our ride. If I slowed down to initiate the swerve, my tail would have fishtailed and either my wife would have been the first one into the SUV, or we would both be flying off the other side of the road into the ditch with the bike following us, again ending our ride. If I touched on the brakes at any time just before and during the swerve, as soon as I touched into the swerve, I'd lose all maneuvering traction to the brake traction and likely the 900 lbs of sport touring bike would have bit the pavement on the front wheel and done an end over end flip down the road behind the SUV, yet again, ending our ride.

ASCAP (founded 1914) was still created after the invention of the Vinyl Record. The assorted Media Foundations were built out of a necessity for managing and facilitating widespread distribution of a new technology that was too expensive for individuals to handle on their own without a way to spread the costs to a wider group (kinda like the insurance model, the wider you disburse your costs, the cheaper a product is for all involved). You first need the recording technologies in place for that to be a viable business.

Before records the way music was reproduced and distributed was through sheet music, which was handled by the Newspaper and Book Publishing houses. Back then performances were done by local live musicians or the original wandering musician/composers. Live performance royalties at that time were paid for in the purchase of the sheet music.

Fast forward to now and distribution has become so cheap that it's easily managed and facilitated by the individual without having to rely so much on a large corporation to get a name out there. The Media Companies have outlived their usefulness, just as many newspaper publishers have had to shutter their doors with the advent of Internet News when they couldn't move to the new model fast enough. There may be one way the media corps can save themselves from complete extinction, but it would mean completely changing the model they've used since their inception over 100 years ago: Drop the need to own the music and personas and help people develop a public sellable image. Good luck with convincing them of that.

There's also the fact that she very likely was coached by her son's Lawyer/Public Defender to make that statement. Whether or not she really believes it, the public will never know...

...until she releases her book a year after the case is settled.

Because the labels are so very good at making sure that songs stay musically original.

No they didn't. Media companies didn't exist before Records. Universal Music Group didn't exist before 1934 (as Decca Records). Vinyl Records were invented in 1881. Audio radio broadcasting didn't take off until the 20's. Basically, the media companies were born from these technologies, therefore they did nothing before these technologies existed. Now the Internet has started pushing the media companies into irrelevance and they feel the noose closing around their necks. They're having trouble finding new talent that want to sign with them because YouTube and Patreon and others have already performed the massive distribution for these artists without signed in blood contracts that Lucifer would be proud of. Every distribution mole Media Companies try to whack down, two more pop up, and the spring on the original mole recoils back harder causing the corps to hit themselves in the head with the mallet each time. They're finding that when both their former customers AND people with talent that's worth anything want nothing to do with them it's getting more and more difficult to survive.

Hopefully they'll find out sooner than later that they can't.

I should have probably mentioned in my other post on this level that my experience is meant as an agreement to the parent and giving a baseline datapoint of the minimum level that one must meet to be considered a real answer that shows Open Drivers on ATI/AMD can outperform the Open nouveau driver on nVidia, given that AMD's proprietary offering could not beat an equivalent nVidia offering (according to Tom's Hardware) using the open offering on my system, and was torn to shreds using nVidia's proprietary offering.

Single data point, personal experience anecdotal and all that jazz, but:

In my Linux Desktop rig (Mint 17 Desktop) I've run an ATI R9 270 using Catalyst and an nVidia GeForce 760 using nouveau and CUDA (not at the same time); I've been a lot happier with the GeForce with the nouveau drivers than the performance out of the Radeon. Also, installing the CUDA drivers to take advantage of the parallel compiling/processing has taken the performance through the roof and IMHO blew away the 270. The nVidia ran cooler when 100% pegged never even reaching 60C (usually topped off at 56-58C) where the R9 would easily reach 70-80C under load, occasionally maxing out at 85C. Blender-Renders using the Cycles engine and CUDA drivers also took about 3/4-7/8 of the time to render a scene than the ATI would... if and when I could get Blender to recognize the OpenCL drivers for GPU processing on the ATI.

To summarize, in my experience nVidia/Intel has just been a more stable and more powerful platform than the recent AMD/ATI offerings. Yeah, you pay more, but there's a lot more value when high end processing matters. It's a shame too. For the 2000's we were an AMD house, and we were happy with what we got. For the higher price of Intel at the time, there just wasn't the performance gain to justify it over AMD; unlike now. The next AMD system we built in 2011 as an HTPC wound up being an unstable heap under Windows and Linux. Unless AMD can suddenly get its shit together in the next year or two, it looks like at least the 2010's are gonna be owned by Intel/nVidia.