In many, many remote places, high-speed Internet is a bit, shall we say... curtailed. Most of my 'neighborhood' in the Oregon Coastal Range has exactly one option for anything faster than dial-up: Satellite Internet. Mind you, Sat Internet almost always comes with bandwidth caps, so doing all your shopping on Amazon (let alone 'cutting the cord') is either a no-go, or gets expensive as hell (best deal I've found is Exede, which costs $170/mo. for a soft 30GB cap.)
Even with slightly inflated prices (due to transport costs), the nearest stores (20 miles off from my house) are *still* cheaper than paying $170/mo + $10/mo for Prime + 2 days waiting for stuff to arrive. Don't get me wrong, Amazon is still useful out here, but not for day-to-day things.
I won't even go into heavy detail in describing the nightmare of using only Amazon for ordering stuff like lumber, bulk livestock feed/supplies, gasoline/diesel, mulch and/or topsoil (think 50 bags or more at a go), gravel (10 cubic yard was my last order), propane (hint: we use more than a puny 5 gallon tank each year), vegetables (where folks almost always want to see and touch it before buying), etc.
Well, as someone who works form home 4 days a week, I've found a couple of easy solutions to this:
* Corporate IM. Require all remote employees to keep it running. You find that you're able to reach employees *more* this way, since strolling up to a desk often ends with the employee out to lunch, in a meeting room, off to get coffee, taking a dump, etc. With IM, if they're at the desk (or in many cases such as HipChat, have their phone on them), you can reach 'em. As a bonus, many of these applications (most, really) allow for impromptu 3-way or n-way conversations as well.
* Collaboration software (e.g. webex, GoToMeeting, etc): regular mandatory standups using this software means everyone is in one virtual spot, you can interact just like you can if everyone was in one room, etc. As a bonus, you don;t have to dork around with a cranky projector (instead you just share your screen.)
-- Now as a manager, you need to get your ass into the office - daily. Politics and all that BS requires face-to-face. On my part (technical/architectural lead, non-management), I use the one day a week on-site to stack my meetings. Everyone (that I care about) knows I'm onsite that day as well, which actually makes scheduling things with me much, much easier.
Now managing remote workers is a bit different, but if you're having a hard time moving the needle on projects remotely? Well, I hate to say it, but one of these factors is the problem: * you're not using the right tools * your reports are slacking off and lean towards the unprofessional * you need help running and structuring meetings * the projects are poorly planned/executed * you're one of those dreaded micromanagement types.
Seriously - those are the only reasons I can think of that require you to keep your reports right there where you can bug them whenever you (or circumstance) require.
What it does have that the Mac doesn't is PCIe slots which I think are better if you're only going to have one anyways.
You're comparing a 3-year-old box to one built within what, the last month? That is seriously apples-to-oranges.
I say this because Macs generally come standard with PCIe nowadays (and the internal drives are connected to it by default.) Pick any four-year-old high performance PC (if it's still operational - too many die off within 24 months) and you can likely beat that old Mac too.
This is exactly why I think patents should only be valid when the invention has a physical component that is the novelty itself, which destroys software patents, and that any patent which is not sufficiently clear should be frickin' rejected (or at least sent back for clarification). Problem with the latter is that the USPTO has become less of a patent authority and more of a rubber-stamp mill.:/
Not really - there's a difference between Samsung directly ripping off a design patent, and Apple being sued for buying chips for their phones from someone other than Qualcomm.
It is gambling in a way, though... for every 20 startups that you (intelligently and with forethought!) dump $1m into, one of them is fairly guaranteed to get you $25-30m back or more within five years.
Obviously Jawbone could've been one of the moneymakers - if they IPO'd or sold to a bigger company like 3 years ago.:/
They;re one of the few paywalled publications that actually do quite well online. Also, consider that the WSJ is one thick mofo of a paper, so that's gotta be costly to ship (printing it likely isn't a massive cost per copy for them due to the scale, but shipping has got to be a beast of a cost).
But when the news is something like “Mary Elizabeth is expecting a baby”....
You do know that evidence of this specific hypothesis would begin to present itself in as little as 4-5 months, and irrefutable proof generally arrives in 9, yes?
Then again, I'd wait for the proof if I were you - only a flaming dipshit would be so stupid as to ask a woman with a protruding belly, out-of-the-blue, if she is pregnant, you know?
Two reasons. A) it would have created confusion and panic in our voting system as to whether votes were being correctly recorded (with electronic voting we don't know, but that's another issue) and B) it would have given another excuse for the con artist to claim the election was being rigged (though you'll note he never said which way it was being rigged).
First up, seriously, ditch the name-calling. I get that you hate the guy (thanks to that), but let's keep it objective.
Trump did say that the election may be rigged, yes... but Obama's response was to totally refute it. I understand the argument of not wanting to cause panic or uncertainty, but Obama's administration specifically said nothing to the state election commissions - that part is the most troubling. Did he think it would be rigged in Clinton's favor and so didn't bother, or (Occam's argument) did he fail to do so out of...? It's not a case of avoiding panic if you have an underling send word to various elections commissioners - that is, assuming something actually happened (or happened successfully) to imperil said voting machine infrastructures.
No it's not. It was a concern since they called Moscow directly to let them know we knew what they were doing. Similar to above, had Obama said anything about Russia interfering with the election it would have been seen as an excuse and would have given more fire to the con artist's delusions about the election being rigged.
I'm pretty certain that a simple admonition wouldn't deter any spy agency, let alone as old, subtle or as skilled as the Russian ones. And Trump was the only one complaining publicly about it (Clinton joined Obama in telling everyone that he was simply complaining for no reason).
Perhaps they (Obama and Clinton) pooh-poohed the charge due to a misguided notion that the election, if rigged, would put Clinton in the White House (or worse, that perhaps they were assured that the real hacking attempts were occurring via some Russian VPN connection from DNC-paid operatives)? I don't hypothesize that last bit without basis, mind - after all, the Democrat National Committee literally (both publicly and privately) rigged the primaries to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination, so the possibility is certainly there.
I also have a very hard time believing that there was any success in the alleged effort (if it were via Russian attempts), else we would have heard about it loudly, publicly, and with mountains of concrete evidence made public - by every elected Democrat and media source to lay eyes on said evidence.
Yes, we would have, because since Hillary would have been president, the same Republican-led House and Senate which are running interference for the con artist over the current Russia investigations, would have spared no expense to get to the bottom of what happened. They would have used it to claim her presidency wasn't legitimate or it was tainted, neither of which they are doing now. They would be digging as deep as possible to find every scrap of information regarding Russia's interference, the exact opposite of what they are doing now where many members are saying it's no big deal and the investigations should be dropped.
I disagree with part of this, and here's why: Certainly, there would be shouting from certain quarters of the Republican Party, but it would be as effective as the whole 'birther' outcry... in that it would be just a few "nutjobs" speaking about it, and I daresay that the MSM (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et al) would have quickly relegated it to the realm of Alex Jones and Jesse Ventura.
You don't hack the ballot, you use propaganda to influence voters.
You mean just like politicians do?
...and media corporations, and special interest groups, and political parties, and talk radio jocks, and co-workers, and advertisers (to an extent), and even private corporations (again, to an extent), and...
To be fair, Clinton did have an unsecured Exchange server hanging on the public Internet, and her lieutenant John Podesta fell for the world's dumbest phishing scam... I mean, c'mon.
(note: I voted Libertarian and live in the People's Republic of Oregon, so I have no dog in this fight and could not have possibly affected the results. That said...)
As for the dreaded hax0rz TFA details, how come during the election season Obama said, flat-out and public, that there was no interference going on and that everything was fine? Further more, he never warned the alleged affected state election officials. I mean seriously, one would think that if he were concerned about it at the time, he (or rather, his administration) would have at least informed the IT folks over the affected systems so that they could at least try and remediate and harden things?
I'm not saying that the Russians never tried (though nobody is saying if they succeeded or not), but it's damned odd that it only became a concern for the Obama administration after Clinton ended up the loser.
If she had won, would we even be hearing about any of this, or would the response from the MSM be a demand that the complainers remove their tinfoil chapeaus?
Actually, the movie industry set up shop in California for a much bigger reason: When movies first came out, New York was the movie -making capital. However, Edison held all the patents, would only rent (not sell) cameras and development gear, and demanded a *very* expensive rental fee. Early producers ran off to Los Angeles and used foreign-made cameras/equipment primarily to avoid paying Edison. Now, Edison could have chased them down and hauled them into court, but back then, the logistics were too onerous, and not all movie producers bolted for California... so the budding industry was largely left alone on the West Coast. In a couple of decades, most (if not practically all) of the creative talent wound up in California, and by then the patents expired.
Kind of funny how the MPAA of today, who screams about 'piracy', got its very start by ripping off Edison's intellectual property, no?
Let's get rid of all those pesky highways. Somebody built them and used resources, must be slavery.
So who declared highways a right? Certainly not the federal (or any state) government. If you look more closely, highways are a privilege dispensed by government (local, state, federal), upon which you must prove a level of proven compliance in order to partake of - usually by way of state-set rules, regulations, licensing (for vehicle and driver), a basic level of vehicular integrity, etc.
How is the free market to blame for a monopoly supported by government regulation (guess whose daddy is a Senator, who in turn made it a legal requirement that schools and similar institutions buy that product to the near-exclusion of any others)?...or did you mean Crony Capitalism instead of "free market"?
Most of the bloat that occurred is because for decades, Medicare/Medicaid happily paid what they were charged, without question. Same scam that universities are now partaking of with government-backed student loans, come to think of it.
Quite a few years back though, this no longer became the case with Medicare - to the point where nowadays, most doctors refuse to take on new Medicare patients.
Funny thing, though... most hospitals charge exorbitant rates because a huge chunk of their indigent ER/inpatient patients either skip the bill (with fake signatures/addresses) because they're illegals, or because of later bankruptcy dumping the debt so there's no payment to the hospital, or because of...?
So, as a result, the high costs are there to pad the budget in order to absorb the inevitable losses (for those times when Jose Illegal and/or Joe Tweaker goes to the hospital with a fake name/addy to get himself fixed-up). If you walk into any ER waiting room, you can see the second reason why... too many people treat it like normal folks treat a primary care provider - going in for sniffles, scrapes, and similar minor/non-fatal things (but complain of 'chest pains' to cut their waiting time.) ER time and resources are expensive, but ER bills are the ones most often not paid (and Medicare pays damned little as a percentage of each bill.)
This, folks, is (partially) why you have $200.00 aspirins showing up on the bill, eh?
FYI: The Veterans Administration is not a part of, any military branch. It is a separate and distinct federal agency.
And no, single-payer won't make it go away... single-payer would simply use the VAMC infrastructure as a handy pre-existing government bureaucracy from which to run (and eventually own) the whole single-payer healthcare system. Path of least resistance and all that.
Of course, there will be promises that they'll make the VA more efficient, more responsive, less hazardous to life and limb, etc... but honestly, since when has any government agency done any improvements beyond expanding their regulatory power and budget?
(Trust me, as the spouse of a disabled veteran, I can tell you right now that you do *not* want the VAMC running everyone's healthcare.)
Nah, not really. Surface-mount would have been minor - if the management had half a working neuron to share between them, they could have sold those components, as well as finer-tipped soldering irons, a cheap-but-big lighted magnifying glass, and other bits needed for basic surface-mount repair. If they were really sharp, they could have procured and sold decent not-quite-lab-grade-yet-still-quite-usable higher-end gear to go with it (e.g. Oscilloscopes, etc).
They could have also launched a usable website to sell components back in the 1990s, and if they were first, they could have kicked butt against the likes of Mouser.
Shit - if they hadn't screwed up with the Tandy Computer line, they could have went in that direction harder, and could have grown into a halfway decent PC OEM by now (or at least do what NewEgg is doing now, but would have been bigger by dint of being among the first to do it...)
Radio Shack's problems, as one sibling hinted at, boils down to this: They had a management that was both disorganized and dysfunctional as hell. They were completely blind to changes outside of their domain, never looked beyond the tip of their nose, and only reacted to changes when shit threatened to get real on their bottom line... then they reacted in the totally wrong manner to each of these crises - and did so consistently.
(Seriously - anyone applying for a management position that has "Radio Shack" and "Executive" in the same job description on their resume should be summarily ignored...)
Small technical note: Comcast's DOCSIS rigging means that when world+dog gets home at night, your speeds and latency in the burbs are typically going to go to shit, so it might not quite be intentional malfeasance on Comcast's part...
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Actually, nope.
In many, many remote places, high-speed Internet is a bit, shall we say... curtailed. Most of my 'neighborhood' in the Oregon Coastal Range has exactly one option for anything faster than dial-up: Satellite Internet. Mind you, Sat Internet almost always comes with bandwidth caps, so doing all your shopping on Amazon (let alone 'cutting the cord') is either a no-go, or gets expensive as hell (best deal I've found is Exede, which costs $170/mo. for a soft 30GB cap.)
Even with slightly inflated prices (due to transport costs), the nearest stores (20 miles off from my house) are *still* cheaper than paying $170/mo + $10/mo for Prime + 2 days waiting for stuff to arrive. Don't get me wrong, Amazon is still useful out here, but not for day-to-day things.
I won't even go into heavy detail in describing the nightmare of using only Amazon for ordering stuff like lumber, bulk livestock feed/supplies, gasoline/diesel, mulch and/or topsoil (think 50 bags or more at a go), gravel (10 cubic yard was my last order), propane (hint: we use more than a puny 5 gallon tank each year), vegetables (where folks almost always want to see and touch it before buying), etc.
Well, as someone who works form home 4 days a week, I've found a couple of easy solutions to this:
* Corporate IM. Require all remote employees to keep it running. You find that you're able to reach employees *more* this way, since strolling up to a desk often ends with the employee out to lunch, in a meeting room, off to get coffee, taking a dump, etc. With IM, if they're at the desk (or in many cases such as HipChat, have their phone on them), you can reach 'em. As a bonus, many of these applications (most, really) allow for impromptu 3-way or n-way conversations as well.
* Collaboration software (e.g. webex, GoToMeeting, etc): regular mandatory standups using this software means everyone is in one virtual spot, you can interact just like you can if everyone was in one room, etc. As a bonus, you don;t have to dork around with a cranky projector (instead you just share your screen.)
--
Now as a manager, you need to get your ass into the office - daily. Politics and all that BS requires face-to-face. On my part (technical/architectural lead, non-management), I use the one day a week on-site to stack my meetings. Everyone (that I care about) knows I'm onsite that day as well, which actually makes scheduling things with me much, much easier.
Now managing remote workers is a bit different, but if you're having a hard time moving the needle on projects remotely? Well, I hate to say it, but one of these factors is the problem:
* you're not using the right tools
* your reports are slacking off and lean towards the unprofessional
* you need help running and structuring meetings
* the projects are poorly planned/executed
* you're one of those dreaded micromanagement types.
Seriously - those are the only reasons I can think of that require you to keep your reports right there where you can bug them whenever you (or circumstance) require.
What it does have that the Mac doesn't is PCIe slots which I think are better if you're only going to have one anyways.
You're comparing a 3-year-old box to one built within what, the last month? That is seriously apples-to-oranges.
I say this because Macs generally come standard with PCIe nowadays (and the internal drives are connected to it by default.) Pick any four-year-old high performance PC (if it's still operational - too many die off within 24 months) and you can likely beat that old Mac too.
This is exactly why I think patents should only be valid when the invention has a physical component that is the novelty itself, which destroys software patents, and that any patent which is not sufficiently clear should be frickin' rejected (or at least sent back for clarification). Problem with the latter is that the USPTO has become less of a patent authority and more of a rubber-stamp mill. :/
Problem is, that argument fails miserably under FRAND rules concerning certain patents.
SCO tried pulling the same stunt with Linux a decade or so back...
Not really - there's a difference between Samsung directly ripping off a design patent, and Apple being sued for buying chips for their phones from someone other than Qualcomm.
Believe it or not, I agree with you perfectly (I was being charitable.)
This is the industrial equivalent of SCO going after Linux users... and we all know how that turned out.
Yeah, but c'mon... sunk cost is sunk cost, I get that, but how much did they pitch in initially to make them throw that much money after it in 2015?
It is gambling in a way, though... for every 20 startups that you (intelligently and with forethought!) dump $1m into, one of them is fairly guaranteed to get you $25-30m back or more within five years.
Obviously Jawbone could've been one of the moneymakers - if they IPO'd or sold to a bigger company like 3 years ago. :/
Depends on how credible their claim is, really.
I suspect this is just a negotiating chip more than anything else, to push Apple into giving them the rent they seek.
(geddit... chip? I slay me sometimes.)
They;re one of the few paywalled publications that actually do quite well online. Also, consider that the WSJ is one thick mofo of a paper, so that's gotta be costly to ship (printing it likely isn't a massive cost per copy for them due to the scale, but shipping has got to be a beast of a cost).
But when the news is something like “Mary Elizabeth is expecting a baby”....
You do know that evidence of this specific hypothesis would begin to present itself in as little as 4-5 months, and irrefutable proof generally arrives in 9, yes?
Then again, I'd wait for the proof if I were you - only a flaming dipshit would be so stupid as to ask a woman with a protruding belly, out-of-the-blue, if she is pregnant, you know?
I don't normally ask this, but if she were a dude instead of a passably cute chick, would she have even lasted this long?
Two reasons. A) it would have created confusion and panic in our voting system as to whether votes were being correctly recorded (with electronic voting we don't know, but that's another issue) and B) it would have given another excuse for the con artist to claim the election was being rigged (though you'll note he never said which way it was being rigged).
First up, seriously, ditch the name-calling. I get that you hate the guy (thanks to that), but let's keep it objective.
Trump did say that the election may be rigged, yes... but Obama's response was to totally refute it. I understand the argument of not wanting to cause panic or uncertainty, but Obama's administration specifically said nothing to the state election commissions - that part is the most troubling. Did he think it would be rigged in Clinton's favor and so didn't bother, or (Occam's argument) did he fail to do so out of ...? It's not a case of avoiding panic if you have an underling send word to various elections commissioners - that is, assuming something actually happened (or happened successfully) to imperil said voting machine infrastructures.
No it's not. It was a concern since they called Moscow directly to let them know we knew what they were doing. Similar to above, had Obama said anything about Russia interfering with the election it would have been seen as an excuse and would have given more fire to the con artist's delusions about the election being rigged.
I'm pretty certain that a simple admonition wouldn't deter any spy agency, let alone as old, subtle or as skilled as the Russian ones. And Trump was the only one complaining publicly about it (Clinton joined Obama in telling everyone that he was simply complaining for no reason).
Perhaps they (Obama and Clinton) pooh-poohed the charge due to a misguided notion that the election, if rigged, would put Clinton in the White House (or worse, that perhaps they were assured that the real hacking attempts were occurring via some Russian VPN connection from DNC-paid operatives)? I don't hypothesize that last bit without basis, mind - after all, the Democrat National Committee literally (both publicly and privately) rigged the primaries to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination, so the possibility is certainly there.
I also have a very hard time believing that there was any success in the alleged effort (if it were via Russian attempts), else we would have heard about it loudly, publicly, and with mountains of concrete evidence made public - by every elected Democrat and media source to lay eyes on said evidence.
Yes, we would have, because since Hillary would have been president, the same Republican-led House and Senate which are running interference for the con artist over the current Russia investigations, would have spared no expense to get to the bottom of what happened. They would have used it to claim her presidency wasn't legitimate or it was tainted, neither of which they are doing now. They would be digging as deep as possible to find every scrap of information regarding Russia's interference, the exact opposite of what they are doing now where many members are saying it's no big deal and the investigations should be dropped.
I disagree with part of this, and here's why: Certainly, there would be shouting from certain quarters of the Republican Party, but it would be as effective as the whole 'birther' outcry... in that it would be just a few "nutjobs" speaking about it, and I daresay that the MSM (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et al) would have quickly relegated it to the realm of Alex Jones and Jesse Ventura.
You don't hack the ballot, you use propaganda to influence voters.
You mean just like politicians do?
...and media corporations, and special interest groups, and political parties, and talk radio jocks, and co-workers, and advertisers (to an extent), and even private corporations (again, to an extent), and...
To be fair, Clinton did have an unsecured Exchange server hanging on the public Internet, and her lieutenant John Podesta fell for the world's dumbest phishing scam... I mean, c'mon.
(note: I voted Libertarian and live in the People's Republic of Oregon, so I have no dog in this fight and could not have possibly affected the results. That said...)
As for the dreaded hax0rz TFA details, how come during the election season Obama said, flat-out and public, that there was no interference going on and that everything was fine? Further more, he never warned the alleged affected state election officials. I mean seriously, one would think that if he were concerned about it at the time, he (or rather, his administration) would have at least informed the IT folks over the affected systems so that they could at least try and remediate and harden things?
I'm not saying that the Russians never tried (though nobody is saying if they succeeded or not), but it's damned odd that it only became a concern for the Obama administration after Clinton ended up the loser.
If she had won, would we even be hearing about any of this, or would the response from the MSM be a demand that the complainers remove their tinfoil chapeaus?
The weather was and continues to be better.
Actually, the movie industry set up shop in California for a much bigger reason: When movies first came out, New York was the movie -making capital. However, Edison held all the patents, would only rent (not sell) cameras and development gear, and demanded a *very* expensive rental fee. Early producers ran off to Los Angeles and used foreign-made cameras/equipment primarily to avoid paying Edison. Now, Edison could have chased them down and hauled them into court, but back then, the logistics were too onerous, and not all movie producers bolted for California... so the budding industry was largely left alone on the West Coast. In a couple of decades, most (if not practically all) of the creative talent wound up in California, and by then the patents expired.
Kind of funny how the MPAA of today, who screams about 'piracy', got its very start by ripping off Edison's intellectual property, no?
Let's get rid of all those pesky highways. Somebody built them and used resources, must be slavery.
So who declared highways a right? Certainly not the federal (or any state) government. If you look more closely, highways are a privilege dispensed by government (local, state, federal), upon which you must prove a level of proven compliance in order to partake of - usually by way of state-set rules, regulations, licensing (for vehicle and driver), a basic level of vehicular integrity, etc.
Because in the good ol' US of A good health is a privilege, not a right.
Any "right" that demands the labor/resources of others in order to provide it is not a right, but slavery.
How is the free market to blame for a monopoly supported by government regulation (guess whose daddy is a Senator, who in turn made it a legal requirement that schools and similar institutions buy that product to the near-exclusion of any others)? ...or did you mean Crony Capitalism instead of "free market"?
Most of the bloat that occurred is because for decades, Medicare/Medicaid happily paid what they were charged, without question. Same scam that universities are now partaking of with government-backed student loans, come to think of it.
Quite a few years back though, this no longer became the case with Medicare - to the point where nowadays, most doctors refuse to take on new Medicare patients.
Funny thing, though... most hospitals charge exorbitant rates because a huge chunk of their indigent ER/inpatient patients either skip the bill (with fake signatures/addresses) because they're illegals, or because of later bankruptcy dumping the debt so there's no payment to the hospital, or because of...?
So, as a result, the high costs are there to pad the budget in order to absorb the inevitable losses (for those times when Jose Illegal and/or Joe Tweaker goes to the hospital with a fake name/addy to get himself fixed-up). If you walk into any ER waiting room, you can see the second reason why... too many people treat it like normal folks treat a primary care provider - going in for sniffles, scrapes, and similar minor/non-fatal things (but complain of 'chest pains' to cut their waiting time.) ER time and resources are expensive, but ER bills are the ones most often not paid (and Medicare pays damned little as a percentage of each bill.)
This, folks, is (partially) why you have $200.00 aspirins showing up on the bill, eh?
FYI: The Veterans Administration is not a part of, any military branch. It is a separate and distinct federal agency.
And no, single-payer won't make it go away... single-payer would simply use the VAMC infrastructure as a handy pre-existing government bureaucracy from which to run (and eventually own) the whole single-payer healthcare system. Path of least resistance and all that.
Of course, there will be promises that they'll make the VA more efficient, more responsive, less hazardous to life and limb, etc... but honestly, since when has any government agency done any improvements beyond expanding their regulatory power and budget?
(Trust me, as the spouse of a disabled veteran, I can tell you right now that you do *not* want the VAMC running everyone's healthcare.)
Nah, not really. Surface-mount would have been minor - if the management had half a working neuron to share between them, they could have sold those components, as well as finer-tipped soldering irons, a cheap-but-big lighted magnifying glass, and other bits needed for basic surface-mount repair. If they were really sharp, they could have procured and sold decent not-quite-lab-grade-yet-still-quite-usable higher-end gear to go with it (e.g. Oscilloscopes, etc).
They could have also launched a usable website to sell components back in the 1990s, and if they were first, they could have kicked butt against the likes of Mouser.
Shit - if they hadn't screwed up with the Tandy Computer line, they could have went in that direction harder, and could have grown into a halfway decent PC OEM by now (or at least do what NewEgg is doing now, but would have been bigger by dint of being among the first to do it...)
Radio Shack's problems, as one sibling hinted at, boils down to this: They had a management that was both disorganized and dysfunctional as hell. They were completely blind to changes outside of their domain, never looked beyond the tip of their nose, and only reacted to changes when shit threatened to get real on their bottom line... then they reacted in the totally wrong manner to each of these crises - and did so consistently.
(Seriously - anyone applying for a management position that has "Radio Shack" and "Executive" in the same job description on their resume should be summarily ignored...)
Small technical note: Comcast's DOCSIS rigging means that when world+dog gets home at night, your speeds and latency in the burbs are typically going to go to shit, so it might not quite be intentional malfeasance on Comcast's part...