He has a point that there is an opportunity cost. Whether it be the cost of owning the shares, or the cost of Amazon's infrastructure. Presumably Amazon cares (a lot!) about investors having confidence in the shares, or else nobody, not the shareholders, not the management, not anybody makes money.

"We're not talking about a company that is haemorrhaging money"

Well you only say that because its a 140 B company. But if investors suddenly decide this thing is never going to make money, it could suddenly be a 1B company. 126M loss in the context of a 1B company is huge. Until they actually make consistent money, who's to say how much this ship is worth? Could be worth nothing.

There's also the people who think they "need" an SUV but get upset about how much they have to pay for fuel. It's a stupid market, but that market exists.

Depends if your aim is to have the most number of people on board quicker, or to have the flight ready to go quicker. Because getting 90% of the people on board doesn't actually help much, only having 100%. It's actually less comfortable for people to be on the aircraft waiting than to be in the waiting area.

If he'd claimed to be kicked off because he was black/white/gay or whatever, there'd be outrage. But because he was only exercising his free speech rights, people don't care that much.

MSDOS also worked perfectly adequately as the centerpiece of Windows 95 and 98.

On the contrary, Win9x crashed all the damn time (and mostly due to the reasons I mentioned: lack of memory protection, etc.) and caught viruses more easily than an immune-compromised crack whore. NT was much better, if you were lucky enough that all your software and hardware was compatible with it.

Oddly enough Microsoft's stock price stopped rising about the time that NT started to replace Windows 9. And the rather widespread dislike of Microsoft started about that time. Just coincidence, I'm sure

Yeah, actually, it was! The stock quit rising and everybody started to hate Microsoft because of everything they did except Windows NT:

• Instead of targeting Windows 2000 to home users as well as business users, they released the buggy, terrible abortion that was "Windows ME" (the last DOS-based, non-NT Windows version)
• They were fucking up the entire Internet by forcing Internet Explorer on everyone (this was when the only other choice was Netscape -- Mozilla was barely starting and Firefox didn't exist yet). It was so egregious that even the US government investigated them for anti-trust violations, for crying out loud!
• They were diversifying into a whole bunch of unprofitable new areas, notably Xbox and assorted failed web stuff.

Even at the time, Windows 2000 was considered to be the greatest thing (or at least, least-terrible thing) Microsoft had ever made. If you ask people today, they'd say XP is best, mostly because fewer people used 2000 (because it didn't get marketed to home users) and because people started appreciating XP more once they had Vista to compare it to.

You're the only person I've ever heard of who liked DOS-based Windows better than NT.

All other things being equal, I would probably go with NT. But all other things don't seem to be so equal. MSDOS was simple and ran well on minimal hardware. NT isn't simple and doesn't seem to run all that well on slow CPUs.

MSDOS certainly was simple: it was 16-bit, it lacked preemptive multitasking, and each program was limited to 64kB of memory (that other processes were not prevented from overwriting)!

We have a couple of EEE PCs around the house running XT and Windows 7. They are both terminally slow.

Before, you were talking about the mid-90s (i.e., NT vs Windows 3.1 or 95). Other than compatibility with legacy DOS stuff, it's hard to argue that 3.1 or 95 was better than NT 3.5 or 4.0 in any way whatsoever.

Your problems with Windows XP or 7 on EEE PCs is not due to the NT architecture, but rather all the shit Microsoft piled on top of it. If Windows 2000 had the drivers, your EEE PCs would do better with it.

Do you really expect the average user to know about IPs, ports, TCP/UDP etc.? That's not very realistic.

No, I expect users who want to run services that listen on ports (which makes them not "average!") to know about those things.

I don't agree that a safe alternative is impossible - there's no magic power that packets have to hack a computer. Any failings are due to poorly written software.

It's even less realistic to expect software -- especially the crap software the "average user" uses by default -- to become any less poorly written in the near future.

Why should users care? How many "users" are aware of IP addresses, or view them as anything but a string of meaningless digits? The "complexity" of IPv6 falls entirely on sysadmins and on those who implement IPv6 stacks, that is on experts. It's possible some users will have a home network on the 192.168.x.x IPv4 range connected via a NAT to the IPv6 internet, but this choice will be made for them by the people who write NAT software: home users universally use first-come-first-served DHCP to assign addresses on their home network so they never see even the local IP addresses. I like to remotely SSH to my home computer, so I note the IP address assigned to my NAT by the ISP, but a typical user can't pull that off. I also like to have fixed IP addresses inside the home network so I can reliably use SSH between the machines. You might be diong the same. But the average user can't and doesn't feel the need to.

The problem with that is how many home users know how to configure the firewall? There are legitimate reasons to have incoming connections.

And if your use case includes one of those legitimate reasons, then it's your responsibility to know enough about security to configure the firewall. It is fundamentally impossible for there to be a safe alternative to this!

Even as (currently) a business web app programmer, the more mathematical/theoretical parts of my CS education come in handy from time to time for things like understanding why our decimal and/or floating-point calculations were coming out wrong or rounding funny when such things mystified my much more experienced coworkers.

Okay, I'll concede that if you have an old keyboard (like a Model M) it's possible that it could be good and not have a Windows(ish) key. However, even new Model M reproductions have one these days.

I work in a Windows-based shop where it's an important rule to lock your computer whenever you walk away from your desk, so I've gotten into the habit of using winkey + L to do it... otherwise, I only tend to hit that key on accident.

(pro-tip: not all keyboards have Windows keys!)

Actually, all decent ones do, but the key might be labeled "Meta" or "Cmd" or a funky icon something.

Don't worry, I have faith that you can get fat enough to fill a Rolls without too much effort!

This hasn't been my experience. It's hard to find qualified people - they've all got decent jobs already.

You know what that means? It means THE JOB YOU'RE OFFERING ISN'T DECENT!

Your problem is entirely due to your unwillingness or inability to make your company an attractive prospect. Fix that instead of whining about how people aren't stupid enough to accept your shit pay/conditions/etc.