It's true that NoTVs seem particularly popular with white people, and that they like to brag about owning them, but I don't think the main reason for the former is the latter. Few people have enough discipline to miss something they love just so they can brag about missing it.
This comment sounds suspicious. As a long-time News.YC reader, I can't think of anything more obviously sockpuppetish than a newly created account whose first comment is a breathless puff for an obscure conference!
It's remarkable that the company whose slogan was "the network is the computer" is now taking lessons on building cloud computing services from a web retailer. Shows both how impressive Amazon is, and how lame Sun has become. The old Sun would have already been AWS.
If they won't tell you the number of authorized shares, they're either inexperienced or dishonest. And if they've raised $6.1m, they're not inexperienced. So...
The quickest way to get ahead in a lot of poor countries is to associate yourself with the crooks who are ruling it, and get a slice of the money they extract from it.