Keep in mind: One of the big reasons for the airline data sharing between the EU and USA is the US visa waiver program.

Basically, this means that citizens from EU countries (and a few others, like Japan and Australia) don't need to apply for a visa when traveling to the US. The EU sends over the 'relevant' data prior to their departing, and the traveler him/herself just has to fill out a piece of paper in the plane prior just prior to arrival. A few years ago the EU was questioning why they should provide all the requested info to the US in the first place after privacy watchdogs had complained about the practice. the US reponse was to threaten to discontinue the visa waiver program unless the EU would continue to send passenger information ahead of time.

So... Should the EU indeed stop sharing the info after the latest scandals, then it's quite likely that the visa waivers will be discontinued as well. That would mean that all of a sudden each and every EU traveler would have to deal with their local US embassy and apply for an actual travel visa ahead of time for any trip, instead of just being able to hop on on a last-minute plane trip...

It's hard to say whether what will happen, though: discontinueing the visa waiver program would make it a LOT less convenient to travel across the atlantic, and would in all likelyhood significantly reduce the number of people traveling from the EU to US, thanks to the major added inconvenience in doing so. Can the US airline and tourist industry cope with that loss of traffic?

Do you want to be the first to jump into the water, or see what happens to the other person when they jump in the water?

Ask Micrososft how waiting for a market to have established itself first has been working out for them lately...

The Entire point of Win8 was to try to leverage their massive desktop monopoly into saving their dismal mobile offerings.

The idea being that people got used to Win8 on their desktop PC, and when it's time to buy a phone or tablet people would pick the windows version because they would already be familiar with it. Metro had to be front and center and pretty much 'unavoidable' in order to push that agenda.

In addition to that, as an added bonus it would enable them to follow Apple's lead and position their own appstore with a 30% kick-back because 'of course' all app developers would want to be able to tap into the nifty new launch screen.

What Microsoft always seems to forget is that outside of the MS board room, Microsoft ISN'T cool or desirable. Never have been, never will be. Microsoft is the 'boring-but-it-does-everything-i-need' option, leveraging 30 years of legacy software support. By throwing that out the window and forcing such a radical change, they are alienating their entire customer base. A PC with dual 24" monitors is NOT the same as a 4" mobile device, and you absolutely can't treat them the same way.

I've ran into three different people last few month that started ranting to me about how they just bought a new PC but returned it to the store because they absolutely despised the operating system. People didn't like Vista either, but I don't know anyone who returned their computer over it.

Hell, I'm not convinced that MS is even going to EoL XP on the scheduled date in 2014. There are still a lot of big companies (and not a few governments!) stuck on XP, and I think many of them are asking MS how big a dump truck of money they have to drive up to their door to get the expiration date pushed back indefinitely.

Thing is, Microsoft has released patches for end-of-lifed software before... But the catch is that they charge through the nose for each such update.

For example, a number of years ago the daylight savings dates changed which caused some fun side-effects in Outlook (calendar times are based on server, offset for DST. Due to the changed DST dates, calendar appointments could be off by an hour all of a sudden). The DST fix for Exchange 2003, 2007 etc. were free. The fix for Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 was created as well, but MS charged $4,000 for it.

Just because they may fix problems for people with deep pockets, doesn't mean they'll have any intention of making them freely available to everyone.

never run an anti-virus, never got infected

That you know of.

Ignorance is bliss.

Same problem -- it basically runs a copy of XP in the background, and it too will become vulnerable to exploits once the critical patches stop coming.

1. It's unlikely that the version she currently uses does not run on Win7

Unlikely? Spoken like someone who has never had to support niche software on a corporate network.

One big problem is older .net applications, that are compiled explicitly against .net 1.0 or 1.1, which conveniently are not available to install on Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8. Even with dot net 2,3,4, etc. installed those apps often flat out refuse to run because .net 1.0 subrevision 23B can't be found.

Another issue us that quite a few of the really expensive niche software products still uses hardware dongles to enforce compliance. Changes to the windows driver model between XP and Windows 7 alone can keep those things from validating. Or, the software can lock itself onto other hardware components such as motherboard serial number, etc. Any re-install on a different server by itself could result in thousands of dollars mandatory 'installation support' before the vendor will authorize the new server and activate the software.

And that's aside from the problem that running medical software on a platform that it is not certified to run on can become a costly endeavor if there ever are big security problems or something and you're found to not be in compliance.

- How unusual is the username portion on the email address? There have been a lot of spammers over the years that blast random emails to commonname@yourdomain.com. Mike, John, Bob, etc. are more likely to receive spam than sdvjsdvkj@domain.com

- Is the email address in question visible to other people? e.g. registered forum members for the software in question? Sometimes people sign up for a forum just to be able to harvest the otherwise hidden addresses of other forum members

For the most part I wouldn't care about lack of Saturday delivery, except for Netflix.

...Especially since USPS also announced they are intending to close our local mail sorting center, meaning that instead of overnight delivery everything will be two day minimum. That means USPS reduces the number of Netflix DVD's I could receive in a month by more than 50%.

Of course, I'm sure that Netflix won't mind: longer mail transit times means that high usage customers may now be pushed into profitability, or get ticked off and leave altogether also saving them money.

However, with it I take a fraction of the amount of photos as the camera in my phone. Why? My DSLR doesn't fit in my pocket. I'm just happy my phone has a reasonable lens and sensor in it.

As they say: The best camera is the one you have with you.

At my repair and custom builds shop, I refuse to build a Windows 8 PC. Too much training, followup questions, and angry users. I wonder if they factored in manufacturers like me outright refusing to sell it because it's so fucking awufl. Then I guess they're half right to "blame" PC makers, lol.

I doubt it, since the number of machines sold by custom build shops like yours are nothing more than a rounding error compared to the number of pre-build PC's and laptops shifted by the big box retail stores, and OEM vendors like Dell/HP/Lenovo/Acer/Gateway/Sony/Samsung/etc.

You can make Windows 8 usable by downloading the free 'classic shell' application, which bypasses most of the Metro cruft and returns the familiar Windows 7 start menu and task bar.

Seriously though: whenever I 'let a coworker drive" my pc, they always go to full screen on each program - and since I run multiple 1920x1200 screens, it just drives me BONKERS to see that much screen wastage.

I run the majority of programs on my PC full screen, in 1920x1200.

But the keyword there is MAJORITY. Taking away the ability to run side-by-side AT ALL was still a boneheaded decision.

I'd suggest you guys quickly come out with Windows 8.1 and add an option to put the old Win 7 interface on it. In my opinion, Metro feels unrefined, inconsistent and not ready for prime time. Make it an option and all will be forgiven.

I'm sure that Microsoft's choose to make it mandatory was to force its adoption -- by having it always front and center in-your-face, they're hoping that the end user would start demanding application developers to 'upgrade' to native metro apps as well, since the desktop apps feel disjointed in a metro context. Each app switching from 'legacy' to metro would give Microsoft part of the pie through their app store kick-backs, so it's obvious what MS would get out of it. When they own 90% of the desktop market they have to do -something- else to continue to grow their revenues.

At the same time, they see apple's record profits and 30% cut of everything that happens on their platform, and are starting to drool at the thought of having that piece of the pie as well. Metro is MS's attempt of recreating the Apple app-store ecosystem, and leveraging their OS monopoly in doing so. Except it looks like they've bitten of a little more than they can chew at the moment, looking at the overwhelming user backlash. And even if some users do like it, it really does hurt them that it's so unpopular among techies, since THOSE are the people giving purchase advice to their less-technical friends and family members.

And in the end, it's suffering from the same problem that Microsoft's other "our way or the highway" decisions have gone over: for example, when vista first implemented UAC, Microsoft purposely made it very restrictive in order to try to have the application developers forced to update their apps to play 'nice' under windows because the users were supposed to keep pressuring them to fix their stuff so the nag screens would go away. Instead, people got annoyed with UAC itself and just turned off the damn thing altogether, thereby completely defeating the purpose.

But anyway, MS is pretty much stuck here. If they made Metro completely optional, it would just have turned it into another framework like silverlight: some nice features in theory, but no one would care, and generally ignored.

Except the newly released version that has apparently been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times already is a modified version that doesn't phone home for activation - meaning that it's trivial for people to hang on to the current nag-free release.