Pffff... noobs.

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.

Amazing how quickly morons adopt the terminology propagandized by their party's political officers. "Insurrectionists" indeed.

Though I did enjoy your Beautiful Mind-level tapestry of innuendo, projection, and theorizing utilized to support it.

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'm no fan of corporate welfare, but $50B is cheap.

Half of the federal budget is actual welfare, about $2T, which doesn't exactly go into the pockets of Americans either. It's a big trough where lots of other corporations feed, and millions of middlemen wet their beak.

Returning the silicon to Silicon Valley (or, more likely, Texas) is a good thing all around for America and Americans. If we can keep our chips from even having a whiff of NSA fingers, that's a competitive advantage to the rest of the world. And it makes a home for the technically inclined so they have a career path that doesn't end in yak shaving in the bowels of some high-frequency trading company to gain an extra nanosecond. Offshoring our manufacturing is 100% the worst thing our leaders, both corporate and government, has done to the country.

What is the endgame of these transparently partisan articles? Do they really think that people are so gullible they'll read the headline and say, "I guess Trump is the worst thing in the entire world. Literally Hitler."?

It's all so tiresome.

That's daft. Entering into the search market when Google did is a completely different animal than entering into the search market now. Google's one good idea--PageRank--was so much better than the other methods that it quickly dominated. From that it built a market valuation with very few rivals. During that time, the Internet grew exponentially, and the technology required to keep up has grown commensurately. Google may have started as a box under Sergei's desk, but you can't do that now. There's simply too much.

Even if you have a killer idea to revitalize Internet searching, good luck getting the kind of funding you would require. Your best bet is to bootstrap it, hope Google doesn't patent-troll you to death, and have getting bought out by Bing (or Google) as your exit strategy.

In any event, the quality of Google's primary product (that isn't slurping your personal data) isn't what it used to be. Trying to find something using Google is no longer the go-to. You have to use Google, Bing, DDG, whatever else you can find in order to get what you're looking for. Google's taken their dominant platform, and using political correctness as cover, to mold reality. Search terms for things Google doesn't like aren't suggested. Sites that Google determines are "untrustworthy" are deranked. And Google likes it that way.

If your instinctive reaction to anything Google touches isn't "how is this bad for my personal data and good for Google," you have to turn in your nerd card. Google is worse than '90s Microsoft on every metric, with the added insult that they think they're still an upstart with noble goals.

You know this is true from the fact were now in day 1 billion of open rioting in the streets by mobs of conservatives smashing windows, attacking people, and looting stores.

If Trump, or conservatives, or anybody else you hate who's to the right of Che were half as bad as your fevered dreams imagined them to be, you'd be in a gulag. You're not. Major, multi-national corporations, the entire Democrat party, half the Republican party, and the entire media apparatus of this country all bend over backward to accommodate your hurt fee-fees, and yet you still think you're oppressed. It's so astonishing it can only be explained by some kind of mental illness.

It's almost like allowing Google to become a single point-of-failure for the Internet is a bad idea.