What I really want is digital versions of all books in my library and all books I will ever care to read. I have no use anymore for dead trees and unsearchable text. I hope someone offers a reasonable price on digital versions of all books I already own.

Quite a leap there. Out of print books are not available digitally for the vast majority at all. Someone makes them available digitally and charges a fee to some commercial users. That it no way says the fee will always be there or that it will apply to those who are merely readers. Actually I would be very suprised if they did not drop this fee and only proposed it to have something else to give away as a negotiation point. I am continually amazed when people do not see a step toward much better as good because it isn't an immediate leap to their ideal paradisical situation. They see the step in the right direction as evil. Odd lot these humans.

Google's goal is to make all the world's data accessible computationally - indexable, searchable, findable and available to any other computation that can be performed on it such as data mining, concept extraction, knowledge extraction, translation, and so on. It in no way needs to be the sole access path to the data in order to do this. So there is no logical reason it would not offer access te the digitized books through non-google channels. Its plan is much broader and not nearly so evil as trying to own all the information/data.

Why would Apple want Twitter? Is Apple a server/webapp company particularly? No. Is there any great value add in owning Twitter? No. Is the idea of twitter particularly well protected. No. So why would anyone take this random noise seriously?

If you can demonstrably code and as a sysadmin demonstrate you know your systems then that is WAY more important than a piece of paper. I have interviewed a lot of people w/ degrees that can't code and have little real interest in or knowledge about building software or infrastructure or much of anything else actually needed. Getting that first job may be a challenge. But doing well on one is the doorway to other interviews. Successful involvement in an Open Source project is a good entry for programmer types. If nothing else works then do some volunteer sysadmin stuff for some non-profit for a while.

I always and only consider the person and what they demonstrably know and/or have a passion for. The degree is nearly irrelevant to me except in the negative sense of "I can't believe they have CS degree blah-blah and can't even code up a very simply b-tree walker".