So, Linksys' OpenWRT router ships without OpenWRT firmware, apparently because there is no such firmware. You could compile such a firmware yourself, if not for Linksys withholding the wireless drivers.

I can't even begin to imagine a chain of events that resulted in shipping an OpenWRT router without any OpenWRT support.

But if the Luddites start-off by demanding building restrictions before others can move-in

That's apparently not how it's working out, though. Those moving in have money, and it costs $500,000 to build a single 800 square foot unit. Guess who gets the unit?

Because, as TFA points out, the problems San Francisco has are entirely self-inflicted. It's amusing to see karma on such a large scale.

There's that rational, open-minded tolerance San Francisco's known for.

Correlation is not causation. It's entirely possible that dying natives cause visiting Europeans. I'll admit I'm unsure as to the mechanism, but maybe Hernan Cortes was a misunderstood doctors-without-borders kind of guy.

It's also possible that a third confounding factor causes both dying natives and Europeans. Perhaps they both generate spontaneously from gold and oil, or perhaps from tectonic action within countries with hats.

You should stop giving them money. Besides the inherent silliness in paying for a product you know to be broken, you're also financing the next ACTA or TPP.

Buying DVDs is donating to the Taliban of copyright law.

Same reason anything has value: supply and demand. The supply of dollars is essentially determined by the Fed, and demand is driven by its ability to buy things (think: why do you want money?). At the intersection of supply and demand, you have the "price" of a dollar, found just like the price of a bushel of corn or a neglected Beanie Baby.

So, how does a Bitcoin come to bear the price it does? Supply and demand again--except supply is controlled by an algorithm instead of the Fed, and demand is driven mostly by speculation and its utility in sending money without having it all stolen by PayPal. Increasingly, you can also buy things with it.

No one, which is why you don't. There's no reason to keep your bitcoins in an "online wallet," or maintain a balance in an exchange, just like there's no reason to keep your life savings in PayPal.

Well, that's what makes it interesting. Nobody objects to selling a high-end model for a high price, and a low-end model for a low price. Under highly idealized circumstances, feature-keying would let us sell both models for less due to savings in manufacturing and supply chain complexity. Isn't that cost reduction a healthy sign, even if both cars are the same underneath and we've converted tangible, physical differences into pure price discrimination?

But, like you said, feature-keying implies it's still profitable to sell the high-end model at low-end prices, since the high-end model is the low-end model now. And, as you also said, we'd expect the price of the high-end model to fall if the auto industry is the least bit competitive.

However, if it now costs the same to manufacture the high- and low-end models, why manufacture the low-end model at all? Now, we've lost consumer choice: Before, if you were price sensitive, you could pick a lower-end model to save money. Now, there is no lower-end option, even if the higher-end is no longer as expensive as it once was. Sounds unhealthy, doesn't it?

To wit, the only company that made this work was IBM, and they definitely weren't charging market prices for hardware.

You mean the MTBF and AFR published by every hard drive manufacturer since the dawn of time?