So, in other words your friend runs a barely viable business that can not survive another economic head wind no matter where it comes from. He is probably going out of business soon anyway but he wants to score political points by blaming it on Obamacare.

Intel is inching into the foundry business.
They are *not* making chips for Altera. They have a deal with Altera to make chips at 14nm but Intel doesn't even have a production 14nm process yet. The Cisco deal was only signed in January. No word on when they expect to ship. Their shipping customers (Achronix, Tabula, Netronome) are all startups with limited volumes. Apple needs huge volume. I don't think Intel is ready for that yet.

Quite the contrary. Terrorism is expensive business. Extremists need weapons, ammunition, and training. They also need food, clothing and shelter in difficult to supply areas because they are obviously not working for a living. Right now those bills are paid by us via the the petrol-dollars we send to the Middle East. When that spigot dries up, the Middle East will still be volatile but it won't really effect us much since they won't have the resources to wage war on a large scale and we will lack the motivation to mess around in their world. Sort of like Africa: sad, disheartening even but not really threatening.

Unfortunately, hardware startups (the kind that would hire an electrical engineer) are scarce these days. There's also the problem that large companies look for experience with other large successful companies so choosing the startup route prematurely can bring difficulty later.,

Reciprocation is entirely fair by definition. However, that doesn't make it reasonable or productive. If China doesn't want to buy Cisco gear it should be because of actual concerns about Cisco gear, not as retalation for the US not buying Huawai gear. That path leads only to deadlock or agreement to mutually ignore the problem.

I think this has already happened. They traced the attacks to a specific building in Shanghai operated by the Chinese military and learned a great deal about the operations taking place there.

Probably because all the useful counter-espionage plays have been done. Now the biggest payoff is from using the information for political leverage.

You don't? Well, OK, they aren't made by Tesla but electric buses have been running in San Francsico for decades. Neat thing about buses: they run a set route so you can power them from overhead wires and not even have to carry batteries. Hybrid buses are common in the South Bay, where densities do not support the infrastructure for electric buses.

Buses are generally way ahead of private cars in terms of propulsive technology. A lot of buses around here run on compressed natural gas. A decade ago there were buses (in Toronto, I think) that used fly wheels as a form of regenerative braking.

If I'm going to use precious vacation time to get away, I'm going to use it to fly some place nice when the weather is cold and ugly at home. If it's nice here, why leave?

The relevant question would be what be what percentage beyond that required for a comfortable existence have you committed to give to charity. The saints give over 100%. They live in poverty so that others may live better. Bill Gates is able to give a large percentage of his total income to charity because his has far far more than he needs. What remains after his charitable donations is still much more than most of us here can hope to earn.

Where they can use their authority to force everyone else to use obsolete and "considered harmful" methods as policy because it needs to be done that way so they can still understand it.

No that I've ever had to deal with this situation.....

When is recently? Keep in mind that when a locally owned bookstore closes, it doesn't usually make the national news. Palo Alto has lost two. Stanford Books Store doesn't operate Downtown any more either so maybe that is three. Adjacent Menlo Park has only managed to save Kepler's through extraordinary measures. Now, I don't think any of these events occurred within the last two years but there weren't that many book stores to start with.

In many areas the chains were all they had.

From what I see of how local government works around here, I find it hard to agree with you. About the only reason "local" seems more competent than federal is that there is only one federal but many locals to chose from. At any given time for any given function, you can usually find at least one local government doing the right thing. The rest, though, and the rest of the time, it is not so pretty.

Because dead or alive isn't nearly as much fun as dead and alive!

No, it didn't. Spam was a big issue for a while but server side spam filters like cleanfeed and distributed systems like nocem became very sophisticated and effective. Unlike email filters, Usenet filters have the advantage in being able to see *all* the destinations. If an article that appeared in more than a handful of groups was quickly squashed. Spam never entirely went away but it well under control long before the decline of Usenet.

There were also efforts like Usenet2 that created a network of trusted servers who would keep spam out. It worked fairly well but interest waned initially because the spam problem was effectively controlled in regular Usenet but even more so as total volume declined and the Usenet2 corner became too thinly populated to be of much use.

Now there is still the problem of idiots posting things in inappropriate places but that's a problem of moderation, something Usenet never did well. (Usenet *did* have moderated groups but it drastically slowed conversation and did not scale well)

I still run a small news server. Spam is only a "problem" is groups where the posting volume has dropped near zero and spam is all that is left. A bigger problem is that I keep losing peers as people give up and shutdown thier servers.