Well, it wouldn't be a "mega monopoly", it would just be one of 4 major studios instead of 5. And that's with Netflix and Amazon both looking to add themselves to that list.

The industry is in a mess of transitions. Streaming has upended everything. Cable is falling apart, theaters are in trouble, and the industry needs to realign. That means some have to merge, some will fail, and new players will enter.

We don't want this to go like the airlines went. In that case, a merger was blocked to "preserve competition", but the result was Spirit went out of business, taking a competitor out of the market anyway, but with a lot of people losing their jobs who could have kept them.

Industries in trouble need mergers. Blocking them can have a worse outcome than market consolidation.

Don't put too much faith into their "Security Edge". I was talking to a tech a couple months ago who told me he usually uninstalls it because it's broken.

Well, last week's look like they had already been fixed in prior patches. For example, I think they released OS v5.1.21 the day before this came out, and the vulnerabilities were patched in 5.1.19.

They have a solid auto-updater and don't slouch when it comes to patches.

These economists don't know what will happen, so they can't know what to do about it. Let's not write prescriptions before seeing the patient.

What candidate advocated for restoring slavery? Do you mean Hakim Jeffries, the House minority leader, who said we need cheap illegal aliens to pick our crops?

I can't think of any candidate who actually said we should return to slavery though. Or any that said only wealthy white men matter. Are you sure you aren't just inventing these loathsome positions and building straw men from them?

That's an odd problem I've never run into. Do you have a lot of shell extensions installed?

But it was horrible in XP! I was working in my University's IT department back then, and we would disable it by default due to the performance hit.

You and I remember Google Desktop Search very differently. It wasn't confusing at all, its results were very distinctly separated from web search results. I tried Everything and a few others. These tools tend to mindlessly find things, often requiring you to tweak configuration settings. But their relevance scoring tends to suck. Go ahead, try searching for "everything" in Everything, or common phrases, or misspelled words, see how well it works. In all these alternative search tools, you have to be very precise in your search terms, to get the result you want. That was where Google Desktop excelled.

There was an option to exclude web results, at least for a while, in Win10. I've been annoyed by its removal, and look forward to the return.

Better to look at business cycles within individual industrial sectors, I think. That framework was developed through the observation of economies with one industry.

Click Start, start typing. When it works, it's the fastest way to start anything on Windows. But half the time, it shows you, for example, a web search result for "Control Panel" instead of showing you the...Control Panel.

That's a search engine for Windows that actually worked. Too bad it was... https://killedbygoogle.com/

The index database had grown to 190 GB, with another temporary working storage file taking up another 50 GB. I had to stop the search service, delete the temp file, and rebuild the index.

And all that for a search that has never, ever worked.

Couple of things. One is that Citizens United didn't really change anything, it preserved a definition that is thousands of years old. Another is that employer verification has been a thing for... 25 years now? It was never given teeth though. There has been a constant push to do so, but it doesn't get out of Congress.

Well, in fields that require specific skills there can be a labor shortage, but as a general rule, you're right. Increasing wages is always the best way to attract labor.