Not sure where you get that the kernel is identical. It is not like they compiled exactly the same source for each, there are differences. For one the Windows Phone 8 has to run Windows Phone 7 apps, so there are some differences there. Windows RT has some differences from Windows 8, they are built for different processors. There are enough core components that and app built for any one of them can be compiled to work with the others, but it doesn't just happen if the application is more complicated and uses components outside the core set.

Windows Phone 8 will run all Windows Phone 7 apps (well, 7.1 and 7.5, though I doubt there any relevant 7.0 apps still around).

But, if you mix in a random alpha numeric with random English words, you get both, and the added entropy of location of random alpha numeric characters. "borrow 9dy sendar&sought" "bing s0me googl3 and yelp" We just need to be able to use long passwords and extended character sets.

It is more likely "it makes an awful aquarium" or "my 5 word phrase"

Also, the separator for each word (or lack of separator adds another (102+-)^(3 or 4))

You skipped Wyoming, which everyone does, but our average is closer to 150 firearms each.

This is only partially true in certain areas of the United States. In the less populated regions of the west and midwest, slavery has had little to do with economy or crime. "Racism" is just prejudice, which is rampant pretty much everywhere in the world.

though one point would be that four words is more than 8 characters and if the hacker does not know if the user used all dictionary words or threw in some random gibberish, then it would appear to the hacker as closer to 102^28 .

Too bad about the VB6 code. I'm glad I'm working in C# now and they keep more up-to-date than the last place I worked.

I love using Visual Studio for development. It is worth every penny, so I run Win7 Pro on all my machines (or dual boot Windows Dev Preview). I'll be happier when the WinXP users finally upgrade their machines (or their companies finally upgrade).

Things might get a little more sketchy out past April 2014, but your setup seems better than the businesses that are all still on XP. Keep a few XP machines to handle older hardware, or virtualize the XP machines, and move as much as you can onto new machines with Windows 7. Good solution for now.

Somethings shouldn't be combined, like nectar and ambrosia.

Not any, most likely. Windows barely reboots for its own updates and most installs don't need the reboot process as they no longer modify Windows system files.

Apple took the GUI from Xerox.

You'll see windows for various applications even after closing explorer.exe, and you can actually still open (via file->open in an application's window) an explorer file manager window. So the window manager isn't exactly explorer.exe.