Agree with the self-indulgent part. It's sophisticated to like jazz so people try to like it. And then they do because one can grow to like anything.
From TFA, "... the American ears are getting lazier and lazier."
I'll agree with that, but I don't consider it a bad thing. Jazz seems to meander and is only impressive once paid close attention to. I want music to come and hit me; I don't want to have to work for payoff.
Play golf. I thought that was the whole point of starting and then selling your own company. Plus, country clubs offer socialization opportunities. Even if the people are a bit snooty.
I really liked it. I read the whole thing in one shot, which isn't like me. I actually started re-reading because I was afraid I may have missed details at the beginning when I wasn't yet aware that it deserved my attention.
You can do some programmatic drawing in Flex, but for the most part you need to load in external graphics. Flash is one tool for making (vector) graphics, but you could make them in Photoshop/GIMP.
I use Flex, and it's more intuitive than Flash if you're used to OOP and IDEs (and not used to the timeline), but it probably lacks some graphical capabilities for game programming.
Sure, they'll want to cash in on their investment in a few years, so the exit might be different from what we would do if we were on our own. But we would have already had to go get real jobs if not for them, so in that sense they've enabled us to work on good ideas.
It depends on the venture capitalists themselves. Our start-up has little to no interference from our VCs. It feels very much the same as before we got funding, now we just get to keep working. But again, that only says something about our particular VCs.
If they allow you to keep working, I don't see how you can claim that "venture capital kills great ideas."
It's a little harsh to compare Adobe to Microsoft. They were friendly to the open source community by open sourcing Flex. And as far as controlling the runtime goes, that does have some risks going forward as you say, but it also has the benefit of allowing cross-platform web development largely free of browser-compatibility issues. Which is nice.