Agreed. There really aren't brick and mortar stores any more (at least in my area) that contain a good selection of electronic components. Radio Shack has consistently reduced its stock in favor of cell phones and other junk where they don't really provide any value or differentiation.

I would love a place that has a solid selection of electronic hobbyist stuff: Arduinos and their ilk, electronics (try to find a 12.6V transformer on a shelf anywhere), a comprehensive set of switches, LED strips, prototyping stuff. Radio shack has many/most of these products, but rarely exactly what I'm looking for, so it's usually not worth the trip. I want a brick and mortar AdaFruit or SparkFun. I suspect that does not exist because it's too hard to make money at it.

It makes me sad. I used to love Radio Shack.

The idea is interesting, but car + long line => selfish jerk behavior, always. So you mention radioing ahead to tell someone that an unauthorized car is in the express line. Then what? How do you force that car out of the line? It still seems like you're expecting people to follow the rules and, when they don't, say "gosh darnit, you're right. I was cheating" and then calmly get out of line. People who are hot, tired, dirty, and irritated are not going to be reasonable.

I agree with you, but I wonder if there is something that Amazon et al might be able to do about it. Would it be too cost/performance prohibitive to scan for known malware before a site is allowed to go live? Is that technically infeasible or are there confidentiality issues that prevent Amazon from doing that?

I'm reminded of a quote from George Carlin: "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"

I think you missed the point of the post. The OP was not griping about how inaccurate Asimov was. The griping is about NPR, Huffington Post, and Business Insider and their lauding of how right Asimov was, when he mostly wasn't.
Asimov was brilliant and certainly did better in these predictions than many could have done, but he got more wrong than right. A headline like "Genius predicted a few things but was mostly wrong" just does not make good copy.

AC, I know you were being facetious, but it did seem a bit petty to suspend the employee the day before he was to be laid off anyway, didn't it?