Frankly - freedom of speech at the level the US has chosen it seems pretty damn overrated right now. Half the country voted for an idiot who probably made more false claims than true ones and killed 500k Americans with incompetence. Maybe it's time to start having some laws that restrict Libel, Slander and false claims in a useful way. It's pretty awful that Fox & Friends can just say whatever the heck they want with no consequences for misleading the American people except the country going to hell. Most other western nations have some restrictions on what the media can publish given their reach and influence, what they say matters, and when they start claiming falsehoods, it has consequences to the country.

I like Warren generally, but this is just straight up BS. Amazon is 100% correct. They follow the laws that Congress makes. To the letter. Warren is part of that body, and she and the other members of the house and senate make the laws. As someone else pointed out, if those votes are for sale, and, it's legal to buy them, as a business who's fiduciary responsibility IS to make money for the shareholders, which, I might point out is a LEGAL responsibility defined by congress; then they must do everything they can, including buying those votes to further shareholder value. I you make a system that's rigged against itself, and then complain about it, then I have to say, that makes you a gaslighter. Warren is gaslighting the public into believing ANY of this is Amazon's fault or responsibility, but Congress has defined this systems, and is 100% responsible for it.

When the government stops taking responsibility for governing, why is anyone surprised when it all starts going to hell. The best bit is that Warren and Bernie have convinced many voters that large companies are responsible for their own inability to get laws passed that would responsibly tax companies! It's just as deceitful as Trump and his cronies! I'm a straight up left-wing, big government, tax and spend individual - I believe in big government that holds the social order together and provides a support-net for a society busily engaged in increasing the GDP. I want UBI and a $20/hr minimum wage. I want more regulation, but if we expect corporations to originate that - we're just being willfully stupid, and in an argument with reality. Governments make laws, not corporations. If you have corporations making laws, then something is seriously wrong with the government in the form of corruption, and as the previous poster points out - that's STILL a government problem.

I can assure you they spend millions and millions of dollars a year on these kinds of problems trying very very hard to solve them in a scalable and good way for both the customers and the sellers. The sellers are Amazon customers too; they are trying to use the marketplace to get their goods sold, and it's a delicate balance of trusting buyers and trusting sellers versus forcing them to "prove" things that are very hard to prove sometimes in a system with millions of listed products and dozens of services that's been around for decades.

Except of course when Microsoft starts shipping Windows built on the Linux Kernel. That's when we'll see linux on the desktop. How ironic is that. It took Microsoft to build a linux distro that people would actually use.

When I was in college in 1998, and RedHat was at version 5 we dreamed of a linux desktop world. When I started work in 2000, linux on the desktop was SO CLOSE. Windows was sucking wind; there were no real alternatives; the *NIX world was shitting the bed and we had a shot. Business owners were so fed up with Microsoft's BS that they were willing to look at alternatives; and the Balmer era started and we really had a good shot - the guy was plain scary.

Then Mac OS X came along, replaced X Windows, something the linux community had convinced itself was virtually impossible. ... Then Nadella came along at Microsoft.

And the Linux community kept in-fighting.

And all of that is virtually irrelevant. Mostly people go to the store to buy a computer. It's one of two stores basically; the Apple store because Apple, or a store like BestBuy where they want to spend as little money as possible as quickly as possible to get "a computer" - it's either Windows or a Chromebook. Then there are gamers who custom build a honking PC running Windows because games (or an Alienware). Then there's the last little bit of the market - enthusiasts who actually care, and a few of them run Linux. That fraction of a fraction is Linux on the desktop's share. Suzie in accounting doesn't care. Suzie's boss, she doesn't care either. IT doesn't care. They just don't. Maybe, one guy in IT does; and he makes a lot of noise, but ultimately quits in frustration, goes to the next company and does the same thing; rinse repeat for his entire career. Even IF there was a compelling case for Linux on the desktop, and there isn't; nobody actually cares enough. Even developers get handed shitty 3 year old laptops to work on at a lot of companies. Mostly corporate IT isn't a meritocracy, it's the lowest common denominator. How many cheap employees can be hired to maintain the fleet of aging hardware that the company financially has to amortize over 5 years. At the other end of the scale, you've got Google, Amazon etc., and they're shipping Macs to power-users because they're low TCO, run all the *nix stuff, and are easy to deal with in a Pandemic.

Unless Linux on the desktop is at least twice as good as something else, it won't even get a look. Didn't last year, the year before, all the way back to 2000. Unless somebody come up with a good coherent plan that's well managed and driven to market, there won't be linux on the desktop. Ever.

Meh - most business I work with now have mostly switched to Google Sheets or an equivalent falling back to MS Word only when necessary. As much as I hate linux desktop, Google Sheets is one of the biggest equalizers out there. You can use it on an iPad or a Linux desktop.

because their precious toys are pretty, and work really really well compared to all the rest. I don't want to sit at my laptop fighting with drivers and compilers most of the day; I like to actually get work done. I want to power on my computer and code; or make music. You have a 4 digit ID, so I'm assuming you remember Harmony and the furor when the Linux community tried to replace Xwindows in the 90s, with many claiming it was impossible; all whilst Apple just quietly got on with it and released OS X - an Unix based desktop OS that rocked. Apple built the OS that the FOSS community should have. But the FOSS community didn't. I don't really care to even debate why that is; but they. just. didn't. They've had more time and arguably more resources than Apple; and yet here we are today; with no really good Linux desktop (it's okay - but I wouldn't use it over MacOS except on ideological grounds). Richard Stallman was the first to point out that mostly, people don't care, show them the software. The cathedral and the bazaar. Different models; turns out one isn't really better than the other. One gives you MacOS, the other gives us Linux; and we need both, for different reasons.

Not sure what you're smoking man - my Mac laptop is 5 years old and doing just fine, something I could never say with my self-built PC back when I did that, they normally made it 12-18 months before a total upgrade was inevitable. How much business are they chasing away? They're one of the leading vendors of laptops out there, raking in money hand over fist, I don't think they're missing that business much... But sure dazzle us with some actual facts and figures if you have any...

OMG - Spot the linux nerd. "As people move to NAS for bulk storage"... what people? Zero normal home users use NAS. Zero. Anyone with a Home NAS is at least a power user, and, probably a nerd (Yes, I've owned a Home NAS), and home NAS systems have been around for 20 years and they were shit 20 years ago, and they're still shit, or expensive, or expensive and shit. Pretty much any Mac user has their valuables in the cloud; along with any Google user. And for those of use who are developers; all my source is on Github... in the cloud. I do a pile of DJing and music work, and single SSD drives are big enough and reliable enough that I don't need a NAS - which is good because every single one I've purchased in the last 20 years has failed catastrophically losing all my backups; at a far higher rate than my desktop drives. And I subscribe to splice, so all my music projects are ... yup, in the cloud.

Amazon has already started doing this - Graviton series systems are already available for general use and are cheaper and smaller than their Intel based counterparts for cloud-compute: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

Intel maybe in very serious trouble. And because of the lifecycle of silicon, it's been coming for 5 years, and they've been unable to do anything about it; and it'll take 5 years for them to catch back up if they can even manage it.

There are widely available numbers showing that the M1 is faster than the 10-core i9 in the previous generation MacBook. All you have to do is use Google. Apparently - too much for the poster to manage. And the poster than goes on to generate a series of very stupid strawmen. Do any of those machines represent anything but probably the top 1% of the top 1%? No. Decidedly not. Based on the very simple fact that the M1 is posting geekbench scores _significantly_ better than the Core-i9 - frankly - this claim seems pretty credible.

eGPU support - could care less; I have literally never met a single person with an eGPU - also don't know a single serious gamer with a Mac. They're all die-hard PC buyers. 16GB of RAM - yeah - that maybe a problem; particularly with such great virtualization support - it seems like the RAM limitation could be a big problem. As a developer; I'm very very keen to onboard to these new machines; the intel Macs have _so_ many problems, particularly with coming back from sleep; it's exciting to contemplate quick restoration from sleep (like the old PowerPC Macs). But the lack of memory is a serious concern. For me, I may get a new M1 Mac mini to test it out, and wait to see a 32GB RAM 16" MBP.

Some people need to take a business 101 course. There are several ways a business can make money. One of them is selling an option to do something. It doesn't entitle you to much of anything. You but a ticket to an airplane ride, but it's oversold so you get bumped. You're not buying a seat, you're buying the option to board if there is space. You buy a movie ticket; you don't have a right to be in the theatre at that time and place, just as the theatre doesn't have a right to enforce your presence there. It's an option. When you buy pay-per-view to view a live event, you don't own a copy of the recording of the event; you're just buying the option to view it at the time and place, and the company has pretty limited liability if you can't watch it for pretty much any reason whatsoever. There are hundreds of examples of this kind of "purchase" out there.

If you don't like it, you can buy your content from another provider; and just realize that none of these companies are going to offer this content in perpetuity; which, anyone in government will tell you, is a very very long time. Do you really expect Amazon and Apple to be in business 100 years from now and streaming your movie for you (if you're still alive)? Should they be held liable for doing so, and what happens when they go out of business or go bankrupt? Do you really see the courts ordering Amazon to send every one of their customers a physical copy of every piece of digital content they've ever purchased? That would be nice, but it's pretty unrealistic.

Simply put, because it's a shit language? Front-end developers have better options, if you're the kind of person who thinks Java has any place in the front-end you need to get out more. Its type system is all at once too strict and not strict enough. The improvements we're seeing just now in Java 14 and java 15 have been in other languages for over a DECADE and so are almost rendered irrelevant, not just by the age factor but also by the fact that most companies are just now getting on Java 8 (which is already EoL), so good luck getting on Java 15. Whilst javascript and typescript have gone almost pure functional, and support Reactive well; Java's native implementation of React... isn't actually even reactive (it lacks back-pressure support). The functional features in the language are crippled by the fact that the language isn't functional; and will likely never be fixed to be so. Classes like Optional were implemented _incorrectly_ and don't have logical consistency, leaving programmers scratching their heads and implementing their own versions all over the place. And then there's:

Array.of(1, 2, 3).stream().map(x => x + 1).collect(Collectors::toList).

or something akin to that. Who the heck would actively _want_ to use this construct if you had ever used any other language. It's not even arcane, it's just plain stupid. Whilst I know there are reasons for this; they are bad reasons, and make the language very clumsy, and you could so easily work around it. And then we're missing any wrapper classes from the Scala equivalent like Try and Either. The CompleteableFuture class is a Frankenstein monster of Future and Try all smooshed together into something pretty awful that make Javascript Promises look comparatively good, which is saying something because Promises are all at once the best and worst feature of javascript.

Now sprinkle on top that most Java programmers are never actually taught to program well, and so end up with the most god-awful spaghetti code that every system has to be re-written every 5 years because it collapses into a black-hole of tech-debt and you have plenty of reasons why nobody in their right-mind would touch Java on the front-end nor should they.

Java would need a significant attitude adjustment and significant features to be "good" on the front end; and with the weight of all the enterprises who refuse to keep up-to-date, the chances of that happening are slim to none, and slim left the building 10 years ago on vacation to TypeScript land never to return.

As much as I like Apple, and generally, I do; I agree wholeheartedly on this point. False advertising is a serious problem. Ads that use the pin-pulling to lure you in. Or games that claim not to be pay-to-play and literally at level 5 of 500 ask you to buy content. It's just a bad user experience.