Problem there, though. This happened before. IE4 was clearly better than Netscape. Once Netscape became irrelevant, IE stopped improving.

Lack of competition is a bad thing.

They are certainly hacking the law. It would be way more expensive to set up their business there, than to do so somewhere on land. Why else would they do it if they weren't exploiting a loophole in the law.

I'm not saying bad nor good, just saying that the sole reason for doing what they are doing is because our immigration laws were designed with the assumption that those outside of the US borders do not have particularly easy access to our major places of business.

I agree that they are like AOL, but don't agree that social networking will "die down" anymore than "getting online" would ever die down.

Facebook will eventually be replaced (or be made relatively irrelevant) by an open solution that works better and fosters innovation, just as the web as we know it made AOL's proprietary environment irrelevant.

...if you are allowed to have complex raw materials.

Fire self replicates. Fallen-down dominoes self-replicate. The line between "chain reaction" and "self replication" is very blurry.

Because it actually does it?

(and its a reasonable guess that it works as advertised, because Apple has a pretty good track record of waiting until the time is right, and releasing something that is not half-baked)

Well some office environments have a lot of people talking on phones, I don't see why this is so much worse, especially if it works well enough that people don't have to over-enunciate and constantly correct it.

So there are environments where it isn't appropriate to use, just as there are environments where its not appropriate to talk on a phone, use a smartphone, etc. So?