On any Mac in your office, running 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or 10.9 (Mavericks) purchase (for $20 or so), download and install the OS X Server app.
Turn on the Caching service. Problem solved for Apple devices.

The server then registers itself with Apple, they see the registration coming from your IP, so when further devices from that IP address request a software update, these machines are pointed to your internal Caching server. Then, when a device (or a Mac) tries to download an update or purchase something from the App store, it will come from the persistent cache in preference to the WAN.

And how should it be decrypted?

This is a huge part of the problem. Just about all security researchers (white or black hat) will have an account with Adobe - even if it's using a throwaway email address. They know what the email address is, they know what their password is, so can begin to mount a known-plaintext attack against the data in the database.

Unless Adobe are using a different encryption key for every password in the database (unlikely as if they were this careful, they'd not encrypt them and instead hash and salt them) then discovering the key for one password will reveal the rest.

You are probably either the victim of a malware infection, or you're torrenting too much. If a machine on your network has been properly pwned (and this is a lot more likely than you being the target of a DDOS) then running AV on top of the OS most likely won't find the malware...
Download and burn the Kaspersky Rescue CD, boot off that (a known-good OS) and scan your machines. Report back how much malware it found that everything else missed.
If you're participating in a DDOS (or otherwise maxing out your upstream bandwidth - eg torrents) then uploading at the maximum throughput will have the side effect of dropping your download speed to the same as your upload speed.

There's one area where renewables can win out, and the space they take up doesn't make any difference.
If a law were to be passed where every new house had to have, say, a 5kW photovoltaic system on the roof, it would take up zero additional space, would be cheaper to implement at the design stage of a new house and all new houses would be largely self-sufficient for power, with the ability to feed extra power into the grid.
As a bonus, on those really hot (and, coincidentally, sunny) days where everyone has their AC on, they are the kinds of days where a distributed power generation system like this will easily be able to cope with the additional load.

Whilst the execution engine in an x86 chip may be RISC (or RISC-like) code running on the chip is well and truly CISC - programs running on x86 have no access to the low-level RISC features.

I can't verify the reasons you've given, but I can back up those failure rates.
When SSDs were still crazy expensive, OCZ were at the more affordable end of the range. It got to be that they failed so much whenever I put in an RMA for one with my supplier they wouldn't even ask for details or attempt to troubleshoot to verify the fault.
Me: "Hi, I've got an SSD for a warranty return"
Them: "OK, have you got the serial number or the original invoice?"
Me: "It's an OCZ"
Them: "Oh, no worries, we'll courier a new one out to you"

Since prices have dropped, I now only use Intel and have had a grand total of one failure, in a 4 year old 80GB disk.

No consumer ISP in Australia caps your speed. You get an ADSL2 connection and it's as fast as the line can go, depending on your distance to the exchange etc. Up to 24Mbs. You get a DOCSIS2 cable connection and it's up to 30Mbs. You get a DOCSIS3 cable connection and it's up to 100Mbs.

With respect to your download quota however, you want to download more, either you pay more or you move to a cheaper tier 2 or 3 ISP with some kind of "unlimited" plan.

If it's not possible for you to hit your cap during the billing period, then why would you have a cap in the first place?
I'm on 100Mbs cable. I get 200GB/month. I'd much rather this than be limited to 0.6Mbs which would would render me physically incapable of hitting my cap in a month. If I want to download more (remember that this data transfer isn't free to my ISP) then I can pay more. Simple economics. My speed however is completely uncapped - it's as fast as the DOCSIS3 network equipment is capable of going.

You can generally pay some amount and get an ISO document - for the JBIG2 standard document I think it was something like 180 CHF.

According to JPEG (the standards group, not the file format)

There is a difference between the (patented) arithmetic coders used in JBIG and the later JBIG2 standards. JBIG uses the QM-Coder and JBIG2 uses MQ-Coder. They are not technically the same. It is believed that patents for the QM-Coder are owned by three organaizations (IBM, Mitsubishi, and Lucent) and patents for the MQ-Coder are owned by two organizations (IBM and Mitsubishi) .

Free licenses should be available for MQ-Coder (used in JBIG2 and JPEG2000) although a license should still be requested, but one-time payments to three organizations are necessary for QM-Coder (used in JBIG and JPEG-Arithmetic). At one stage these were of the order of a single one time license fee of 5000 US$, but the relevant companies should be contacted for their current pricing. If these have changed substantially, we would appreciate it if you could inform the webmaster so that the site can be updated accordingly.

Our understanding is that the license conditions of these coders are limited to the case where products are fully compatible to the standards. However, if it looks like you are within the academic sector and if you implement the coder for purely academic purposes (not for commercial use), you may be able to get free licenses.

Yes, the mistake was mine. I did mean to say JBIG2 which is, as you say, lossy. It's also been an ISO standard since 2001.

Re: their lossless mode - if they can mathematically guarantee that the output == the input under all input conditions, then we're safe with it. If it uses pattern matching and substitution (like the lossy mode does) then all bets are off.

I wonder why ImageMagick doesn't support JBIG2 - from the wikipedia article, Patents for JBIG2 are owned by IBM and Mitsubishi. Free licenses should be available after a request. JBIG and JBIG2 patents are not the same.

Yes, faxes? Remember them?
They're still widely used in many industries today. In fact, I applied for an Apple Developer account in a company name not too long ago and, unlike with an individual account, there is some paperwork involved that Apple insist must be faxed to them. Apparently it's more secure. Anyway, I'm not ranting about that issue today, but more the widespread use of faxes in the area of Law.

Lawyers love faxes. They fax everything they can. A lot of them are using email more and more these days, but faxes are still a critical part of their business.

Most faxes can use JBIG compression. High-end faxes use JBIG2 compression. This compression is what's been blamed in this Xerox issue. How many faxes have been received over the years that have been subject to silent modification of the information?

It's not hard to imagine a legal situation where just one number modified on a page could prove to be very expensive...

You only need to look at a modern photocopier to see that this is a highly plausible method of operation.
There is no direct optical path between the glass on the top of the copier and the drum that is used to print the image.

Or, see what happens when you put a document in the feeder and ask for 10 copies. You get them all nicely collated.

Older analogue copiers can not do this, without a collating output tray, as they can only directly make a copy of whatever's on the glass.
In a digital copier (just about every copier you're likely to see today) it scans the entire document into memory (often compressing it so that you can fit bigger documents in the limited memory) and then prints the multiple copies with all the pages in the right order.

Yes, I used to work for a copier company and I have direct technical knowledge of how this stuff works.

Invent some half-assed lossy compressor, such as JBIG which is an ISO standard that was ratified so long ago that the patents applying to it have all expired?

One thing of note is that JBIG is very commonly used in higher-end faxes as it's significantly quicker than previous lossless compression algorithms. I wonder how many faxes have been silently modified in transit by this compression?

And, before you ask, there are many industries where faxes are still heavily used, such as in law - where silent modification of numbers in a table could prove to be very expensive...

I'm pretty sure that Sun have done all the layoffs that they're ever going to do...