It's honestly a little embarrassing having to point out something this obvious, but the fraud is that they were promised that they would ultimately be paid, and now it looks like they're not going to get paid at all. They never agreed to work for free, only that their wages be deferred; the employer broke an agreement.

If the boss said "we want you to work for free" and they inexplicably said "OK" that would be free markets at work, sure. But that's not what happened. If you have an employer-employee agreement stating you will be paid for your labor and you don't get paid, that's fraud. If you can't see that, I'm sorry, I don't know how to make it more obvious.

Oh please. Firstly, FTS, which part of "Interzone's .. office was created with the assistance of a state government grant" sounds like free-market capitalism to you? Secondly, not paying your employees the agreed amount is already illegal under free-market capitalism, and blatantly defrauding labor is not "capitalism". The fact that your drivel got moderated +5 is testament to how widespread this rabid anti-free-market-capitalism cult has seemingly become right now.

If you believe your boss is just out to fuck you over, just quit already and do something else. Actually it's thanks to the "free-market capitalism" you criticise that it really is as simple as that; if you think it's better in other countries where they don't have that nasty "free-market capitalism" then by all means move somewhere like Cuba. The reason you have a job at all is because of your boss.

Did you read the article? It's not only memory, but also I/O and CPU:

"Both of those measurements are also higher for Windows 7 systems than for XP machines. While 85% of the former are running at peak I/O loads, only 36% of the latter do; the numbers for CPU workload are closer, as 44% of Windows 7 computers are running a computational backlog that delays processing tasks, compared to 36% of the XP systems."

A file cache alone isn't supposed to slow down your system --- if it is, "you're doing it wrong". Merely using more RAM may not slow down your computer but the article states explicitly that they are also measuring aspects that do impact on performance. Clearly there are more factors involved than just the file cache.

Hmm, it might be instructive to clear out our terminology here, to avoid confusion ... "page faults" as the term is used in Windows are a useless metric in terms of speed, as that doesn't tell you how often the system is hitting the disk. When an application allocates memory (e.g. 'char* foo = new char[65536];) the system doesn't actually allocate any memory at all until the application attempts to read from or write to those allocated pages (similarly the terminology here also gets confused as this is also called 'virtual memory' while others use the term 'virtual memory' to refer to hard disk swapping specifically) ... in Windows terminology a "page fault" is counted when this happens ... that's just normal and harmless and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the hard disk at that point. According to Wikipedia, "Note that Microsoft uses the term hard fault in its Resource Monitor to mean 'page fault' (cf. Resource View Help in Microsoft operating systems)". If you say "The metric to count is the number of page faults", I presume you mean "hard fault" (i.e. memory in disk) rather than simply memory that hasn't been allocated at all.

I don't know about Windows 7, but I can also definitely confirm that older versions of Windows do this, including XP, and not even remotely "intelligently". I used to often have to copy large amounts of files over the network via SMB, and you can do a very simple test to confirm this: (a) Load up some applications (b) Copy (with that machine as SMB server and the receiver as client) a Gb or two of files over the network (c) bam, your applications are all swapped to disk and visibly, painfully crawling along --- they will pretty much be visibly more sluggish until you restart. Windows memory management is awful, or at least it used to be --- its quite possibly they've improved it in Windows 7. Windows used to have other major deficiencies with memory management, such as over-aggressively starting to swap to disk when only around half your actual RAM was used ... again, it's possible this is improved in Win7, I haven't done work requiring testing those aspects in some years.

Japan didn't get so far ahead by "mandating" broadband speeds; they did it primarily by liberalising the market. The primary obstacle in the US is lack of real competition, and this is what both state and federal governments should focus on. In Japan, the true cost is also hidden from consumers thanks to a.o. forced subsidisation from taxpayers (taxpayers are subsidising FTTH by about 33%).