Or, aleernatively... letting a few crimes go unsolved is part and parcel of an authoritarian police state.

Right now, we have on our 'unsolved docket' Lois Lerner, war crimes by US troops in Iraq, high treason by various top operatives violating their constitutional oaths and undermining the rule of law, thus aiding the enemies of the US, embezzlement by bankers who control the Fed, breach of fiduciary duty by BoA under the blackmail of Paulson that he would break the law... and now most recently high crimes by that French bank in criminal money laundering, in one is the biggest ever (9 billion) fine, but unfortunately, we can't find the criminal.

And that's just the US. I haven't hit one percent of the unsolved crimes yet.

Leaving a 'rule of law' nation sucks.

It's doubly a trap when those same companies, which have multiple backup systems on the emails, suddenly cannot recover anything following a series of six separate 'hard drive crashes' on RAID-7 systems, so that the IRS' evidence can no longer prove criminal intent by leaders of the government.

Leaving a 'rule of law' nation sucks.

Which, if this chain of thought is correct, leads to the conclusion that in those 9 cases, either police were NOT corrupt (and so could be foiled) or were corrupt, and wanted to be foiled.

I'm not sure that the chain of thought is correct. In some areas --Illinois for example, I would expect it to be.

and the manufacturer says "not our problem--it's old!" Then people might realize what a Pandora's Box this is...

This is exactly what Microsoft is saying about Windows XP. For IOT devices lasting dozens of years, it is better to stay as far away from Microsoft as possible.

My first and subsequent posts, and the article - are all about Microsoft's attempts to earn trust. Many millions of customers have already reposed trust and money with Microsoft for their software. Migrating to open source is not an easy option for most of them; and indeed that is not the point under debate.

If Microsoft wants their loyal trustworthy userbase to continue to trust them, they should adopt different measures than being pseudo-transparent with biggest customers such as the government. I have not written, nor intend to debate upon Microsoft's customers migrating to open source.

If you want to buy 20 machines today with a Windows OS, the only choice is Windows 8. Even though almost a billion PCs run XP, it is not possible to get a new machine with a legal licensed copy of XP without jumping through numerous hoops and shelling out loads of cash.

Microsoft wants us to trust their word that it is not feasible to offer or support XP on new machines. This is not believable. Opening up the source code is the only way to prove or disprove Microsoft's version of the facts.

Whether you agree or not is not important. Hundreds of legacy code developed for Windows platform using Windows development tools run only on XP and are not supported by 7 or 8. Customers are left with no choice but to rewrite code at great expense, often impossible since the vendors are no longer in business. In my view this represents a lock-in, whereby customers are forced to shell out large sums of money to obtain support for XP legally on new systems by investing in Enterprise Volume License Agreements and associated costs.

A pseudonym enables other posters to look at your posting history and judge for themselves based on what they see.

Be brave enough to post after logging in, or you will be thought of as a shill.

My post wasn't about the options for Microsoft's customers. It was about Microsoft's attempts at transparency to earn trust.

Don't force bloatware on hapless customers. XP was 1.2GB. XP with SP2 was about 2GB. XP with SP3 is about 7GB. And now Microsoft claims XP is so insecure it cannot be patched anymore, so customers have to buy a new OS which weighs in at 20GB.

Cut all the crap and come clean. Release the entire source code for XP if you are not going to patch it. Or keep quiet and prepare to be unbelieved even if you speak the truth.

Here in Norfolk, we had a young man that decided to just start shooting. He first killed a 17-year old kid in Norfolk, who was waiting at a traffic light.

When the police were investigating, he shot at them, and killed one, severely wounded to other.

There then was another cop who responded, and ordered the shooter to stand down; he started to shoot, and was killed.

Now, I'm going to point out that the cop who died was a really good guy, who would always tell his coworkers, 'it doesn't matter what happens here, so much as it matters what happens in heaven. That's why you need to get right with Jesus.'

Now, with an attitude like that, I suspect he would have been a little slower on the draw. It's too bad he died.

I also think he had a good effect on those around him. It's too bad he died.

If someone's going to die, I don't prefer that the cop be the first one to die. I prefer that nobody dies.

Oops.

What's to escalate? When the schedule flat out doesn't work, and your calls to customer service get handed over to a customer svc agent's voice mail, unless they want to talk to you, and they don't... that was what happened with us, I have no idea what happened with them... escalate doesn't help.

I agree. Fancy features like the OP mentioned are worthless if the app itself sucks at doing its primary function. Laggy, bloated, ad-laden, crippled, non extensible, garbage. When it is horrible at managing music, I cant see the point of giving a damn about remote ratings.