I searched for VLC, 7-Zip, and Firefox on Bing and the official site was the first one in the results list each time and was labeled as such.

So should government fund Young Earth Creationism "Research" / Intelligent Design research?

Data capping isn't really relevant to that - a hundred megabytes of, say, LAPD beating up a suspect or university campus police tear-gassing non-violent protesters is no bigger a datastream than a hundred megabytes of my cat chasing his toy mouse round the floor, when it's being uploaded to the likes of YouTube; once it hits there, I don't think Google use cable modems to send it from their datacenters. A hostile power would just cut the connection, whether you have an "unlimited" connection or a pay-as-you-go one - as has happened a few times in recent disturbances (Egypt or Syria?) - they don't bother looking at individual data packages anyway.

The poster further up had it exactly, I think: it's all about killing off competition from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Any guesses why else it would be Time Warner and Comcast - i.e. the cable ISPs - pushing this, rather than AT&T and Verizon? (Not that those two would be unhappy either, of course: more money, an easier market for their FiOS and U-verse TV offerings - but it's obviously Comcast and TW who have the most to lose.)

"© 2007 Association for Comparative Economic Studies. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved" :)

Backdoor way of limiting bandwidth usage. On TCP/IP, really a "server" is just the one that sends SYN|ACK packets in response to SYN packets, rather than sending out SYNs - but ISPs latched on to "no servers" as a more marketable way to kick heavy users off without being honest about usage limits.

With cable, downstream bandwidth is more abundant and more efficient (the upstream channel is vulnerable to collisions, since there are multiple senders on a channel) so heavy upload usage can actually be a problem to some extent. On ADSL and its derivatives, though, it's only your own link you're filling up with upstream traffic: the backhaul connections are invariably symmetric, so those gigabit+ links between you and the ISP are only full up in the other direction.

I switched back in 2012 from "unlimited" (but no servers, dynamic IP, ports blocked, sending nastygrams to anyone using "too much" of the "unlimited" bandwidth) to an ISP with actual explicit usage charges (and a small routed subnet with no ports blocked). As long as it's legal I can do what I want: mail servers, web servers, the lot - I just have to pay a bit more if I download more. (It's download traffic that matters to them: upstream, there's bandwidth to spare, because the links are symmetric.) I hated the idea of usage-based charging - but I hate all the other restrictions more; at about $0.30 per Gb, it's low enough not to bother me as much as "unlimited, but use it too much and we cut you off".

I imagine 'E10' there is a reference to 10 Mbps metro Ethernet, something like the Ethernet in the First Mile approach. There's nothing inherently "consumer grade" about DSL itself: indeed, even E1 "leased lines" get delivered over HDSL or similar in some cases. Unlike cable, which is contended and prone to collisions, DSL gives you a constant bitrate (unless configured to vary to squeeze higher bitrates when line quality permits) point to point link, just like a conventional leased line - all the performance fluctuations of typical DSL Internet access come further into the network, where your 20 Mbps connection is sharing a 1 Gbps backhaul with a thousand others and gets choked up when everyone is streaming X-Brother Get Me Out Of Here or whatever. Give the DSL link dedicated or uncontended backhaul like leased lines have, you'll get the same performance too.

I can imagine them rewriting history, but in this case I doubt it; surely it would suit them better for him to have been a normal, competent employee at that point, who then went rogue later, rather than saying "oops ... yes, we saw all these warning signs, but forgot to do anything about it for a few years. Told you so - er, I mean, we would have told you so, if we'd been more alert..."

Of course, if you're really paranoid, you'd wonder if the CIA computers had been compromised by, say, some other agency with lots of expertise at breaking into high-value targets, and this report had been planted by them, maybe to divert blame for their own failed internal security...

Foxconn have the contract to assemble the Xbox 720 as well - not to mention Nintendo consoles. I remember pointing this out after a smug ex-MSFT blogger posted a link about Foxconn, bragging that Foxconn would never meet Microsoft's supplier criteria, so Apple must have lower standards...

That said, historical company towns that didn't force workers to use scrip [wikipedia.org] avoided some of these issues -- but that would mean allowing workers easily to exit the town by actually paying them real money, which they could take elsewhere.

Why am I suddenly reminded of stock options and the whole "vesting" concept, where if you leave too soon some of the paper you got as part of your remuneration becomes worthless? Not identical of course - I'm guessing even Facebook's "company stores" won't take stock options in payment - but there are more than a few parallels there.

On the other hand, it also sounds like a nice setup if it all works properly, and you'd still be free to leave if you wanted.

Where is that from?

Because if you say anything positive about Microsoft you are evil, a shill, etc....

No you deserve -42 for believing a /. headline about Microsoft. The article says the following at the bottom, "On the other hand the OS support date is reset with any never version of the OS, so a Windows Phone 8.5 or 9 update in November 2013 would bring along its own 18 month of security updates. Microsoft has already promised all current Windows Phone 8 handsets will receive the next major version of the operating system."