They are stored as XML files. See Application Settings Overview for more information.

Here are the actual prices from MS catalogue as of today.

Visual Studio 2013 Community is intended for small teams and is $0. Even the free version is actually very feature-rich.
Visual Studio 2013 Professional is $499.
Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, the edition for big software houses, comes with MSDN subscription and a pony, and costs $13,299.

Then Thunderbird would probably fail to connect as it can't establish the encrypted connection.

Then punish that kid for setting off a false alarm, just like you would someone messing with the fire alarm system with fake cues.

How can this work? Wouldn't the client notice that the STARTTLS command did not complete successfully and/or that the session is not encrypted?

Mozilla Thunderbird already shows a big scary warning when you try to set up an account without encryption.

Of course this happens. The world is going to direction where people are rushed through some watered-down education (where they get no chance to fail a couple of times first or think things through). They learn to solve problems quickly with some high-level tools. The attention to detail and mastering things down to core essentials is slipping. The guy with the coolest TED talk wins. Others are boring nerds wasting their time with abstract concepts. And hey, quality assurance, what's that? We need to ship this thing quickly.

That is true.

There's one catch though. According to the Mozilla e10s page, for now multi-process only means separating web content from the GUI. Having separate processes for each tab is coming later down the road.

It's kind of an interesting situation. GNOME itself isn't an recursive acronym but it encompasses the recursive acronym GNU. Does that make GNOME an recursive acronym?