Actually, you can certainly reduce disk I/O with more RAM by caching frequently used data. Sure, it won't help if you need all different data all the time, but that's usually not the case.

Note that I qualified my statement to both include China's perception, and "proper".

In China's case, there were the opium wars and the invasion by Japan. It doesn't help that China feels they have still never received a proper apology, and that there are Nanking deniers among Japan's right wing conservatives, including current prime minister Shinzo Abe. China has also been in place of leadership throughout most of its history (so far as Asia is concerned at least), with the last few hundred years being the exception.

False. The US would be near the top of the list. http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_status_e.htm Most other countries don't have the political might to get away with what the US is able to.

They had 75% of the smartphone market at a time when smartphones were a much smaller portion of the overall mobile phone market. Their drop has not been anywhere near as precipitous as the 96% drop you suggest.

Absolutely false. Ingress traffic is much cheaper than egress traffic. Try negotiating bandwidth pricing as an eyeball network (consumer ISP), vs as a hosting provider, and the difference in cost can be an order of magnitude. Peering is often based on equal ratios, and that applies for both egress and ingress traffic. When the traffic is balanced, the network that has more egress traffic may have to pay the other network for the difference. Therefore, ingress traffic not only costs these providers nothing, but can actually reduce their paid peering costs. As such, they will sell transit connections to eyeball networks for pennies on the Mb.

On the hosting side of things, data centers never purchase Microsoft Server licenses outright, as the actual instances of Windows Server are run by clients. Therefore, the only way to be compliant with Microsoft's terms is to offer licensing under the SPLA program, which offers licensing Microsoft Software for a monthly cost. Also, with Windows Server 2012, they have gotten rid of Windows Server Enterprise, and there is now only really Windows Server Standard and Windows Server Data Center, which is functionally identical software. The only difference is that Standard allows for up to two instances on the same hardware, whereas Data Center Edition allows for unlimited instances on the same hardware. However, you need licenses for each physical processor. You can just add on additional Standard licenses until the Data Center Edition pricing makes sense. Perhaps one of the reason they're raising prices, is that with the increases in processing power per server, unlimited instances result in far many more virtuals now than before.

Nvidia has been making a FreeBSD binary driver for at least a decade. http://www.nvidia.ca/object/freebsd_archive.html

And pretty close to a decade already with OpenOffice: http://www.freshports.org/editors/openoffice-1.1/

Just because many people use it incorrectly does not make that usage correct.

No, inbound port 80 for http was correct Although some ISP's do block outbound port 25 for smtp. I don't think any ISP would stay in business for long if they blocked outbound port 80 traffic.

What exact benefit does this supposedly 'open' laptop have over just buying something like a Thinkpad that uses Intel components that are well-supported by open source drivers on open source operating systems (Linux, *BSD, etc.)? If it's to promote the use of standardized components that can be re-used in different laptop designs, it may serve to reduce costs or to increase the useful life of some of those parts. On the other hand, the standardization would also limit designs and prevent some cutting edge innovations from being utilized. All-in-all, as great as it's been to have interchangeable components on desktop builds, there's a reason why there's been limited standardization on laptops and servers, where innovation has more benefit. And considering how inexpensive laptops have already become simply due to competition, I see there being little to gain but much to lose from this approach.

Yes, Darwin does use a MACH kernel. But the MACH kernel itself is also derived from BSD, originally developed as additional code written directly into the 4.2BSD kernel.

Hosting their Internet facing servers at the office, behind a sonicwall firewall, is also a recipe for disaster in general let alone when being attacked. If they had hosted their servers in a proper data centre with DDoS mitigation services, the 'hackers' would have had a much harder time taking their servers offline.

Not nearly enough has been presented to demonstrate whether or not the technology is truly compelling or not. Is this purely a storage enclosure, or is there some type of cpu/mainboard for which this can be used as a high density, low cost SAN? Why type of bus/connectors/interfaces are used? Does this use fiber channel or 10Gb Ethernet? Can the full potential of all the drives' IO and IOPS be realized? What is the latency involved? Also, what's so specialized that the technology can be patented, and not easily replicated by a competitor?

Martha Stewart's prosecution was highly publicized so that it would appear that white collar criminals were being cracked down. If you're going to make the argument that this goes beyond an isolated case, and was a general and significant trend, please provide a citation.