This whole thing smells like a bubble right now. The value increases for mostly speculative reasons. Bitcoins could never be a viable mainstream currency, because the volume can't readily be increased to match rising demand from transactions involving them. That's the whole point of Bitcoin, isn't it? Money in essentially fixed supply that can't be "printed" at the whim of a central bank? That makes it a deflationary currency, and no one will exchange it for stuff today if the price of that stuff is likely to be dramatically lower next week. And if it's not a viable currency, what is the value based on? Scarcity by itself isn't enough.

You mean *you* have nothing more.

And there's nothing "socialist" about recognizing that markets don't stay free and competitive by themselves, when all of the incentives are working against it.

You're upside-down on this, aren't you? They already have a free market for books, and your implied criticism is that they don't want it replaced with a monopoly (and a foreign one at that).

And here we arrive at the central contradiction of what you call "free" markets. They will always tend toward monopoly (or collusion among oligopolies, which is essentially the same thing), because monopoly profits are always higher than the sum of profits in a competitive market. It's always worthwhile for the big fish to buy out the little fish, and it's equally worthwhile for the little fish to sell.

Is there a libertarian answer to this? How is an economy of free markets to be preserved when they naturally tend toward monopoly, and the society as a whole is ideologically barred from interfering with that process? Or is economic libertarianism really a crypto-philosophy promoting the interests of those few who benefit from monopoly?

I have no problem with even totally canned demos, as long as everything works as promised when the product ships. A "premature demo" can still be valuable for demonstrating product concept and eliciting user input. Interest will fall off if the lag between demo and shipping is too long, however.

There's plenty of precedent for this: It's called "feudalism". We can now discuss whether Ellison will be a good or a cruel feudal lord.

I guess it's my turn to do remedial science for the resident conservatives.
The carbon in the CO2 that you or I breathe out comes from the food we eat. That carbon is balanced by the CO2 that was removed from the atmosphere when this food was grown or raised, probably within the last year or so. When plants grow, where do you think the carbon comes from? It's not the soil - it's from CO2 drawn out of the atmosphere. Now, when we burn fossil fuels like coal or oil, that carbon had been buried for hundreds of millions of years. Or, if you're a conservative, maybe 6,000 years when God put it there. Either way, that means that when you burn it, it's not offset by CO2 that was removed from the atmosphere any time recently. So, CO2 levels rise.
Sorry if I have to talk to you like you're babies, but maybe if you'd get your heads out of the butts of Fox News and the like I wouldn't have to.

Is there a place in our solar system that's more hospitable to human life than Earth, now or in a thousand years? There's your problem right there.

I'll field this one. You could (a) sell it and get something you can do what you want with, or (b) forget about the hacking and learn to be happy with whatever Apple lets you do with what you've got.

The aesthetics and annoyances of ads are only part of the issue, and not even the most important. Ads are also vectors for information gathering and tracking across the web, which is why it is perfectly justifiable to cut them off at the ankles, right in your hosts file.

A PhD means you've been trained to do academic research, and mapping that skill set to non-academic environments can be problematical at best (especially in CS). While you might assume that someone who has earned a PhD is more able to do things like "reasonable design and architecture", many employers will assume the opposite: that you live in a world of abstract algorithmics, and the mundane skills involved in producing real software are beneath you. Both assumptions are equally bogus.

Of course I read this entire diatribe in Matt Damon's voice from Good Will Hunting...

This hits the nail right on the head. Unfortunately, it's the corporate marketers that dictate what's cool, and home-built high-performance machines with clean installs of non-proprietary operating systems and zero crapware/malware ain't it.

I wonder how much of these improvements in accuracy are due to fundamental advances, vs. the capacity of available hardware to implement larger models and (especially?) the availability of vastly larger and better training sets...

Aaaaaaaand... we've come full-circle. Look how much more productive you can be with this amazing new thing!

I didn't know that Apple made pacemakers...