There is a large difference between "user" and "customer", the problem is you may think that you are a "customer" (or at least potential customer) of every site you visit, but this is incorrect.

"Customer" implies that there is a business relationship in play, however if it is a forum or other free resource, you will never be a customer as there is nothing to purchase. Not every website on the internet is a business.

It is often seen as abuse when a user downloads or needlessly accesses a resource (files) multiple times and website administrators often have no qualms blocking abuse, it means less load on their site's server and more resources free (bandwidth, connection slots on the webserver daemon) for other users and on top of that: potentially lowering their bill.

Coming from experience, I've seen people use download managers and misconfigure them purposefully so they open 20-100+ connections to a file feeling that the website somehow owes them that file, doing so on a webpage with a browser is no different.

If the BIOSes of the machines support it, you could use PXE (netboot) which you could load the software directly over the network without the usage of any portable media.

The problem is that spectrum is up for sale, aside from governmental implementations, there really isn't "open spectrum" for specific classes of devices unless a manufacturer has a monopoly on that area of spectrum AND type of devices. Spectrum is either assigned to organizations based off of money (auctions), or it is put up as a "free-for-all", which results in either underutilized or overcrowded communications.

I bet if the FCC started allocating specific spectrum to specific industries (not organizations) the interference could drop quite quickly.

One element has me curious about how these benchmarks were prepared: Is the benchmark software compiled on the target platform/cpu combination with all available optimisations of that platform?

Many of these benchmarks have a binary/library or set thereof that is written for a single target platform (the platform the original developers of the benchmark were working on), Usually pre-compiled, usually for intel, on an intel system, by an intel compiler, with intel optimisations or at least two of the four. This same binary is then used against whatever systems on compatible architectures, this has the high potential to produce skewed results on non-intel platforms as not all manufacturers use the same optimisations.

While this specific processor may not be as great as it should have been, I feel that benchmarks in themselves are usually flawed and must be taken with a grain of salt until real-world software that isn't in a lab-style environment is attempted on it.

The privacy settings do not limit Facebook's own access to the data. Facebook can use the "magic" of the ToS to permit them to forward your data to anyone they please. As long as Facebook hosts the database, there's always the issue of them handing that data out.