Why should Putin be afraid of the West? Everybody knows that since the 90s, the West has been busy disarrming, even as they get involved in stupid wars like Bosnia, Kosovo, as well as nationbuilding projects in Afghanistan & Iraq. If he marches troops into even a NATO member, say Latvia, NATO will be exposed for being as feckless as it is.

Real reason is that Russia has been a weakening power, and incurring huge casualties in Afghanistan and Chechnya did nothing for their confidence. If they lose thousands in a war w/ Ukraine, they'd be seriously embarrassed, and any other internal secession movements there, like Tatarstan, could erupt. Which is why they are trying to subvert Donbass into becoming a part of Russia.

Couldn't agree more w/ this one. We all know that Linux can run everywhere, from a calculator to a supercomputer, but there's really nothing impressive about this. When the original 68k was what the first Sun workstations were made of, and therefore ran SunOS. Granted, it was not Linux, but close enough (since things like X11, GNOME, et al do not apply).

In fact, why not pick a BeagleBone, or Raspberry Pi or Arduino - depending on one's attitude about Broadcom vs Atheros vs whoever else is putting a controversial part into the box, put Tiny-Core Linux or something like it on that, and run with it?

They haven't kept Samsung, LG, Sony or others from having their own stores. Not just small shops in malls, but full blown bricks & mortars stores. In case of Samsung, LG & Sony, they sell all their products there - TVs, fridges, phones, you name it. No reason to think that Google would be stopped.

Like the GP said, Google would do well to introduce differentiated products, so that you have low ends for servants & maids, & high ends for MNC executives and tax dodgers.

Rs6000-7000 may be a lot for a normal cellphone, but it's a very good price for a Smartphone. However, mom&pop stores in India probably don't expect customers who are willing to pay that sort of money for phones: they typically get the average maid or servant as customers, who use them for talking, listening to the latest Bollywood hits, taking pictures of anything and... that's it!!! One hardly needs Android or iOS or WP8 for just that!

In India, if someone is looking for a smartphone, they typically would be from the demographic that would shop at the malls. After all, if they are sinking anywhere north of Rs5000 on a phone, they're gonna be very particular about where they're getting it, the service and everything that goes supporting the phone. So usually, they go to a Samsung store and stock on the Galaxies, which are by far the leading smartphone in India. Another thing about this group - since their budget is already up there, they'd prefer a brand name like Samsung to the likes of Micromaxx or Karbonn. Oh, and did I mention - very few of the Micromaxx or Karbonn use capacitive screens: they are mainly resistive, and have very poor touch sensitivity. Which really sucks if one is receiving a call and touching the screen doesn't answer.

If Karbonn or Micromaxx wanna make inroads, that phone needs to come down to the Rs2000 or so vicinity.

GNOME2 has been replaced by MATE, and that's been the case in other BSDs as well, such as GhostBSD. Both GNOME3 and Cinnamon are now available

Version 10.1 was just released this week - had new updates to my system as late as yesterday

I too saw that touchpads didn't work, which is what delayed my migration from Windows 8 to PC-BSD. I had to buy a separate mouse and stick it into a USB port. But I like it this way - under Windows 8, touchpad constantly came in the way, and even touchfreeze didn't fix things completely. So given how buggy the touchpad support could have been, I'm actually glad that it's not supported at all.

Particularly the current generation of touchpads where a single touchpad covers both the touchpad as well as the left & right click buttons. Oh, and without any button to disable touchpads altogether.

OS-X is not microkernel based, given that their drivers for instance reside at the kernel level, as opposed to user level like a normal microkernel OS would do. NEXTSTEP used to be based on the non-microkernel Mach 2.5, which was a CMU kernel and BSD. In OS-X, all parts were upgraded - Mach 2.5 to Mach 3.0, BSD to FreeBSD. And then some changes, like Display Postscript to Quartz

Assuming that you are willing to pay 2-3x the price of a normal PC for a prettier looking, but weaker box, and think that that price is worth the cost of having OS-X on your box. Otherwise, most people would get a normal PC/laptop w/ a pretty high end configuration, and if OS-X is what they want, they'd have to see if Hackintosh supports it.

I got my laptop, which is an i7 with 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD and a pretty wide keyboard - similar to the standard PC keyboards out there - with the separate numeric keypad section. All @ $800. Show me a Mac with a similar configuration at that price range. Instead of OS-X, I have PC-BSD, and for the things I do, it's adequate.

If you are okay with violating the EULA and having a non-supported OS as far as your computer goes

The kernels used don't define what is or ain't UNIX. There have been Unix versions sitting on top of Mach 3.0, which ain't UNIX. Versions like OSF/1. In fact, on the Linux side of things, there has been L4/Linux, which is Linux sitting on top of an L4 microkernel. As others have said, what defines UNIX now is the Single User Specification, which Apple has tested OS-X to and passed.

Chances are that both Linux and *BSD would pass this as well, if someone decided to take the cash needed, pay OpenGroup and run the tests in question. However, until they have, one can't legitimately call either Linux or any of the current BSDs UNIX

On your #3 above, when Ukraine became independent, Russia too had announced its withdrawal from the USSR. So Crimea voting to be a part of a country that was on its way to dissolution made no sense: a few weeks after the meeting b/w Russia, Belarus & Ukraine, they had a follow-up meeting of all the 15 presidents in Almaty, where they announced their collective exit from the USSR and its replacement w/ the Commonwealth of independent States.

It would have made sense had Crimea & Sevastopol voted to join the Russian Federation, as opposed to the USSR.

Saudi Arabia can get to work as well, annexing everybody from Morocco to Iraq

That's what I thought. I have TWC, and they have unlimited data no matter which plan I'm on: I just have to pay depending on how fast I want my connections to be. At 15Mbps, I'm a happy camper.

I don't use Verizon's cellular data connections unless I'm flying b/w cities.

Most OSs are now 64-bit. The theoretical limit of that memory is 1.844674407×10^19 bytes. Let's say you halve that, you still have a humongous amount of memory that would cover pretty much everything. So while the OSs may have de-facto limits like 64GB or 8TB or whatever, we won't need to move to a 128-bit OS like we had to go from 16 to 32 to 64-bit OSs.

So not only is TheRaven right, but chances are that there is nothing that any of the current 64-bit OSs ain't enough for.