Your post also solves a symptom and not the problem - that most people don't know enough to care about their OS. "Does it facebook?" is the average user's concern.
That's a good thing and a bad thing. It's nice that they usually don't have to care but it does suck that they're oblivious to the fact that they even have options.

A (literally) mom'n'pop shop is concerned about a few thousand, yes. It's a percentage of their income and it matters - a 2 person shop will definitely miss a couple thousand. Additionally, no they can not get dev hardware with an e-mail. If that was true every 14 year old girl that wants the latest phone could whip up an e-mail pretending to be a successful dev. The only companies that get free dev hardware are large ones. Little shops (less than 20 devs) pay for every transistor.

Who except Apple cares about the behavior of little shops? Uhhh... little shops do...

I've worked for a few places that gave me their invention assignment agreements in .doc format. They wanted me to print it, sign it, give it back.
If I'd felt the terms were not reasonable I would have just edited it, signed it, and handed it in without a word. Problem solved.
In my case the terms were reasonable enough so I left them unmodified.

You still watch TV?

If it'll be used exactly the same as other 4th generation languages, then be threatened: SQL is 4th gen...

A good point. While it doesn't apply to every problem, scope-level memory management is much more reliable and high-performing than dynamic allocation. In some (very few: unbalanced binary trees, etc) situations it would be silly to use anything but dynamic allocation, but in most cases static is the best for performance and reliability by a long shot.

Juvenile tantrum? They took down Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa. That's not a juvenile tantrum, that is "hulk smash".

I think the point of contention is not what bandwidth most people need, it's the fact that what is being promised doesn't match up to what's delivered.

Taking down visa.com did two important things, in my opinion:

1. It sent the message "We saw what you did."
2. It drew massive attention in the media. NPR (National Public Radio) had covered the wikileaks situation only sparsely before, but I've heard about it at least a few times a day now.

While you no longer *can* control uptime, you also no longer *have to*, and I'm pretty sure for smaller organizations the tradeoff is worth it.