Have you asked him why he wants a shell? If not, why the hell not? And if so, why haven't you told us?

Impressive.

Shame he'll not be able to hear how wrong he is through his insulating walls of billions of dollars. In fact it's surprising moot isn't aware of this issue given his similarly vast wealth.

So daily bandwidth caps are good because someone on Slashdot talks about downloading copyrighted content. You're right; it's obvious when you put it like that.

Clearly this whole "media" thing is clouding the issue, so let's come up with a different example: my bandwidth also gets throttled every time I download a 1.8GB ultra-high res image of an ocelot's vagina, which I do in my role as an ocelot gynaecologist. Or, you know, to fap over.

I'm glad we've finally found some common ground.

How the cocking fuck is that relevant to a discussion about throttling and download caps?

I was referring to the suggestion of queueing up a torrent to download overnight. If I have to wait overnight for something to download then my connection is no better than a modem.

...which is very reasonable for all but the most hardcore bandwidth users...

No. Superficially it might seem so, but in practice it sucks. Because the caps are applied on a daily basis, it's very easy to hit the cap due to one session of heavy downloading. As an example, I'm on the 10Mbit service - at the risk of losing my geek card, I just don't need a faster download than that and so object to paying for it. This means that in the evening I get a DL cap of 1.5GB, which is roughly the size of a 720p TV show rip. So if I want to download 2 episodes, or a full length film, or Linux ISOs + associated software, I will hit the cap. Even though my daily usage only ends up being a couple of hundred MB averaged over the month.

And to the commenter suggesting we should schedule torrents:

1. I don't leave my computer on when I'm not using it; it's a waste of electricity
2. If I wanted my Linux ISOs to arrive a day after I decided I want them, I'd order a CD online. And if your 50Mbit connection takes 24 hours to download 650MB, then it is in no meaningful way 50Mbit.

That's exactly what BT Openreach was created for. Obviously they've nothing to do with Virgin, but they own most of the country's infrastructure.

The Flash text benchmark is highly suspicious. IE9 posts by far the worst score for that benchmark on one machine, then beats FF on the same test on another machine. Without any description of testing methodology, I can only assume the benchmarking procedure is totally broken (e.g. maybe they only ran each one once) and so the results are best taken with a pinch of salt, even if they're not entirely useless.

While I genuinely appreciate what the guy is trying to do, I'm not sure how actually useful it is to see some guy submitting stories/comments every month about how the RIAA is in deep trouble now because the only possible outcome of this trial is for the defendants to be found not guilty and awarded costs, only to be followed the next day by a story about how the RIAA has just successfully won the defendant's first born's soul.

It's nice to hear an expert's opinion, but honestly I think I could have called a higher hit rate, and not only am I not a lawyer but I don't even live in the US. NYCL is the legal equivalent of the Linux zealot who is genuinely shocked each time a new release of Linux From Scratch fails to topple Windows from the OS throne.

He's just spent a whole day upgrading from MSDOS 5 to Win7. He probably doesn't want to spend another week getting linux to work properly.

Lossy music compression is almost always psychoacoustic. If you devise a test to show that there's a quantitative difference between the signals then you are doing it wrong. The only interesting test is ABX - if there's no significant difference shown in an ABX test then it doesn't matter how much absolute distortion there is; it's just numbers on a page.

Though I will agree that cymbals are usually the biggest giveaway for music recorded at too low a bitrate (or more commonly, just badly encoded).

...but only the Church of Scientology has forced comments out of existence.

I could have sworn that several years back some comments were removed because they contained a threat to the US president?

Best part of a decade ago there was a Windows email virus (forget which one, sorry) that did rather well for itself. In order to avoid detection, it spread by email in a password protected zip file. In order to become infected, the user had to open the zip by typing in the randomly generated password given in the email, extract the executable within, then run it.

It was then that I realised there will never be a technical solution that makes more than a dent in malware infections.

That jumped out at me as well. And I'm not sure that it is just ambiguity over the meaning of 'several': The way he mentions it right after infants adapting to the different conditions, I think...I think he's actually implying Lamarckian evolution is the driving force.