It seems like that one would be the better one for a movie

I think a movie is too short to get much out of American Gods. The story in the novel doesn't need much in the way of special effects or exotic locations so you could probably get a lot of episodes for the same price as one movie and be able to cover more than one major idea out of the book.
Sandman IMHO is easier to cut a movie sized chunk out of.
Either way, Neil Gaiman has done a lot with TV series and at least three Hollywood movies (which is why he's saying 'wait and see') so unless he gets cut out of the loop it's likely to work out well. If he gets to write the script it's likely to turn out very well, barring actors that demand more screen time with a silly "the captain's a transvestite, how interesting, can we get back to the story now please?"

And they cannot shuffle profits made in the U.S. to offshore accounts

Well in Apple's case they pretend that the US profits are made in Ireland by Apple US buying iPhones from Apple Ireland who bought them from China via Holland in some way - so the US profits are theoretically very small while in practice it's all Apple dodging tax. Google "double dutch irish sandwich apple" (safe for work even though it sounds like a rule 34 thing) if you want to read about this blatant tax evasion.

I disagree. A lot of recent software is stupidly resource hungry and workflows have changed to require it. A lot of webpages demand frankly insane amounts of resources to display, and some very popular ones (eg. Facebook) are major culprits so there is no getting away from it without banning web browsing.
A old system good enough for typing up reports is going to be seen to be inadequate the second someone sends something to it in a new format or the second someone sends an amusing cat video. Telling the user that it's good enough for work purposes and they should ask for things in an old format and tell their friends to stop sending the amusing cat videos tends to put you in Bastard Operator From Hell territory or Dilbert's denier of information services. Memory, low end systems that can take a decent amount of memory and a modern OS is so cheap now that it looks insulting if you deny them something as good as the home computer they got for a low price three years ago. If they've used a decent system they probably are used to leaving programs open so they'll bring XP to it's knees if they don't learn to only have one thing running at a time. XP isn't designed to be used like a workstation, it's a toy to run one game at a time full screen with a side benefit of being able to run a word processor so you can bring the games machine into an office.

Windows hit the maturity point with XP and now there is no reason to ever change

It's got that step backwards into a low memory ceiling which is now a very major reason to change for anyone that likes to have more than one window open at a time.

I do not know of any use a typical office worker could not do on a Windows 3.11 486

Put even simple images in a document and such a system is unusable - I know that from plenty of frustrating experience back in the day.

But HR does not utilize 4 cpu cores

If they want to burn a CDROM they need at least two unless they just want to stare at the screen until it is finished. I've still got a single core machine around that proves that point from time to time, although now it's just doing good duty as an X terminal for a guy who does all his real work on a cluster so the single core and low memory does not matter.

Now while I have some XP systems for users that don't need anything else, or on hardware that can't cope with anything newer (Dell laptop with a 1600x1200 screen and can't justify $5k to get something newer with as good a screen), it appears to me that the average user is getting up to stuff that needs more memory than XP can provide.

Also your HR strawman would be on Facebook most of the time and sharing silly cat videos a lot of the rest of the time so needs a powerful PC even if it is not for work purposes :) While they probably could do their work related tasks with "ed" on a dumb terminal connected to Xenix running on a 286 the workflow would annoy the crap out of them - the same with a less extreme suggestion of yours that they would consider as antiquated as my Xenix example. Giving a new employee a slow XP box is a way to get rid of them even if the older employees like XP.

That's one point. Another is we know buggerall about the moon and have only sent one geologist for a few days.

Russia's manned space program basically consists of announcing plans to do amazing things

Like Bush's Mars announcement followed by cuts?
OK then, almost nobody took that seriously but that idiocy did happen. Maybe it's the same story in Russia with this, an empty statement setting a goal for somebody else to do the hard work if it ever happens.

Von Braun's body is a mouldering in the ground so you aint got the moon no more.
The USA had their chance and is not showing any sign of taking another one. There's no point being a sore loser when the game has been given up on. The Russians are at least still trying even though they've had more economic problems to slow them down than the US had when Nixon sidetracked NASA into being a pork factory that could only get anywhere via skunkworks hiding between the slabs of pork.

Instead of bitching about others why not get off your arse, make some noise and make NASA funding an issue worth votes?

Just a few hours ago he said that by 2020 Russian army will be one of the most hi-tech and powerful armies in the world

If the US economy crashes again all he has to do is wait and that will come true.

All these problems you attribute to NASA are actually congressional problems

That's been obvious since Feynman threw a spanner in the works of a whitewash that tried to hide that, yet those problems have worsened. So far the current low point was some twenty something catamite of a powerful Republican being rewarded for his services by getting put in charge of a major part of NASA and forbidding any publications about climate change.

Internal doors often are like cardboard. I kicked through a door when I was a weedy ten year old.

It's very easy to see such a link if you open your eyes long enough to read about the topic from any source.

the high homicide rate among African Americans cannot be explained by poverty

Why? Because it doesn't fit the message you want to spread? It certainly fits with the data because the ones doing the killing and dying are poor.

Of course since you are the sort of person that called my simple two word reply "fabrication and lies" you are clearly not interested in the truth but instead pushing some fucking stupid white supremacy agenda.

It is a limited toy compared with Microsoft's own products available at the same time.
Your suggested workflow is also available on an Atari ST or first generation Mac, but people expect more than those or a ten year old PC can offer.

Maybe if you get a username and log in you can be like me and never see beta.

He's missing a "y" in there somewhere and describing what happens when problems reading optical media on such systems bring the things to a screeching halt :)

What can you do on a nice shiny new i5core Dell box that your XP system can not?

Anything that requires more memory than the artificial memory ceiling on XP. Something as trivial as editing a few photos from a camera on a phone can use all that up these days.
And it's not a Microsoft problem it's an XP problem - I've got an old Win2k system at work that gets fired up every year or two with more memory than XP can use. XP is a toy that got used long enough that people got used to it but it's still a toy made to run computer games at home.

Correct - it's been unsafe for many years but third party stuff helps to make it usable.