There seems to be both a glut and a shortage of executives, though...

Yes: with the money saved, we could afford to hire more techies.
Knock-on benefit: actually getting more done.

The reason why mainstream media is hyping Windows 7 so much is: imagine what would happen if it tanked?
Microsoft shares would start to fall in price, then there would be lots of "knock-on" effects - and maybe even panic selling of all kinds of (possibly unrelated) stocks. Microsoft share price has been one of the most reliable things on the stock exchange.
So we have to keep Microsoft share price up. Buy a new computer, if you have to.
I know it might be difficult, particularly if you have lost your job - but try to look at the bigger picture.
If share prices don't keep on rising, how will pension funds continue to make money?
Ok, so you don't have a job, so don't have a pension - but try to look at the bigger picture.
Pension Fund administrators have jobs and they could lose their pensions - or even their jobs!
And then what would we do?

BBC's sitcoms aren't great but they have loads of great "panel" shows: they're ostensibly quiz shows but participants are usually either comedians or victims.
Examples:

• Have I Got News For You: the first of this type - now has a "rotating" host since the original one had to leave after a prostitute/cocaine scandal (well, of course he had to turn up for one more show so that everyone else could make fun of him). The regular panelists are getting a bit lazy now - but the show has been running for more than 15 years. Think "The Daily Show" with less substance or heart but better insults.
• Mock The Week: a newer version of the same thing but with explicit stand-up parts because it's 100% comedians. Google "Frankie Boyle", is all I can say.
• Never Mind The Buzzcocks: music-oriented show where participants insult pop stars, frequently face-to-face. Chair seems to be rotating for this one now, too.
• Would I Lie To You: quite new, a bit better-behaved than the others - but still entertaining

I regularly watch all the above, even if they are "out-of-date"...

...and read: "Microsoft tried to torpedo the success of the Japan Linux Symposium by launching their Windows 7 product that same day".
I hope that was as much of a joke as Linus posing for a photo there.
Even so, there are too many tongues in too many cheeks - I'm a bit worried about catching something...

Oops - where did the link go?
In fact, our decisions can be affected by the temperature of things that we touch! Really, check out that link if you have time!

Check this out - particularly part 2. In fact, check out part 2 first: it makes you wonder how much we lie to ourselves and post-rationalise. We need to do it.
We get a buzz out of making decisions: therefore there is always an emotional component in "rationality".
However, there is a danger of being lazy, letting others do the thinking and just experiencing the "rational" buzz second-hand.
People can tend to accept outlandish things when they are said in a "sensible" tone-of-voice...

Now we have web services: an extra slash is the least of our problems ;-)

Is this a legal requirement?

Don't be so sure. I saw this programme and am damn sure that the horse in question knew the kind of thing that was planned for her. That's why she escaped - jumped over a fence she had not jumped over all the rest of her life.
I'm not suggesting that animals philosophise in French in terrace cafes - but I find it hard to believe that they have don't have some kind of "world view" that is based around life experiences with a few "abstractions" to fill in the gaps.

One thing that would demonstrate is that the mathematics is valid. It's a bit like like trying to run a Java program on different JVMs ;-)

Math is not reality.
Otherwise, we might be reading headlines like "Air France jet was out of 4s".
Math is always "correct"; that's why mathematical models of natural phonemona break down whan the numbers get extreme.

It's not that surprising that the Chinese government is not in favour of youth movements - and in favour of pop culture, to the extent that they allow it.
Crude summary: The Cultural Revolution was a strategy implemented by Mao Zedong, with the help of his wife Jiang Qing to get his career back on track. The Red Guards were recruited from students (I wonder if he got the idea from news reports from the US?) and went around the place with a little red book of Mao quotes. Eventually, Mao had to send in the regular army to help disband the Red Guards. Then he implemented a forced dispersal of "intellectuals" (read "students") to rural areas for the following 10 years or so (to make it harder for them to congregate/communicate).

When you say "25 2GB J2EE app VMs", are you saying that each app got its own VM (no J2EE clustering)? Or was it a sort of virtual server farm with applications deployed across multiple virtual servers?
I'm trying to get a picture of how virtualisation gets used...

All human decisions - even the most abstract or "rational" - have an emotional component; this has been experimentally measured. It's easy to imagine that the emotional component a decision will carry more weight if the decision-maker has personal interest in it. We do not expect the people who are deciding the futures of our pensions (if we have jobs to qualify for said pensions) to possess Ninja-like reflexes; in fact, we would prefer them to be able to look beyond "spikes" and "bubbles". In other words, it's hard to imagine that decision-makers haven't had time to figure out what their "gut feelings" are telling them - maybe it just was something they didn't want to hear.
It is up to "decision-makers" to implement strategies that are in keeping with available evidence; a failure to do so is evidence of incompetence at best (alternatives being fear or greed). Blaming the model is a cop-out: delegating decision-making to a mathematical model is like delegating navation to your GPS.
Your prediction that people will try to "game" the next model alludes to something interesting: people were already "gaming" the old model ("system"/"culture") . The "scandal" goes all the way down as well as up. Everybody gotta eat.