Re: Cynical - me?
Yep cynical, and perhaps having your thinking infected by The Register.
This is the website the claimed The Liberator is proof there is no such thing as a 3D printed gun. 4 months later, a metal Sintering 3D printer, following the trail blazed by the Liberator, produces a gun of amazing and frightening accuracy power and potential.
This is the website that put down the iPad on its' launch. How did that monumental vision of imminent product failure stand the test of time?
This is the website that claimed Apple's 64bit processor was all marketing hype. But then the very next day it's shown how they simply lacked the vision to understand how 64bits would have a very real and dramatic affect on the performance of iOS devices (And had no understanding of for example, what it meant that Apple could use part of the 64bit address to implement tagged pointers). The iPhone 5S blows the competition away on performance (but not that you would know that from reading The Register) and it's little to do with raw clock speed.
You see cynics understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Amazon is an incredibly powerful and energetic company. Their value to the US economy means they *will* get the ear of the regulator. When people do new and interesting stuff, they carry others along with them. People want to be involved.
Nothing really worth doing in life is a piece of cake. There will always be challenges. Men flew to the moon once. Which means someone at some point said, we are going to put a man on the moon, meant what he said and then took action to do it. If they had asked the Register, the project would have fallen at the first hurdle as everyone threw their arms up at the "insurmountable reliability problems."