While I prefer to stick to documented facts rather than anyone's anecdotal evidence, including mine, when I make absolute statements about correctness, since we're entering this realm, I'll tell you that I do have a late-2011 HP laptop, DV7-something, with no antivirus running and no extra software installed besides the ones that I actually need. Formatted after the purchase in order to get rid of the extra manufacturer-installed stuff. The last time I've posted a measured sample of its performance here on Slashdot, I was greeted with 6 responses telling me how slow it was. And to be honest it's not a machine that I personally find excessively slow to use.

Why, I'm citing specific, documented misdesigns of Windows components that cause the machine to progressively slow down until it becomes unusable, which is what this article is about. I'm picking specific ones because the post I was responding to spoke of "superstition without numbers". I'm also citing two specific ones that wouldn't be fixed by an SSD, which is another point that was being made by the same post. No amount of care would have prevented you from incurring into those bugs, unless you don't use Windows Update, which of course is not feasible today. Such slowdowns are not "apparent to me", they are measured and recognised by Microsoft, as the links that I've put in my comment show. I also was careful to choose two slowdowns that aren't related to machines with insufficient system resources: the first one would manage to freeze a Core i7 running Windows XP, the second one would hinder machines with double the amount of memory recommended by Microsoft themselves for Windows 7.

Finally, about the fact that you have to be careful about the stuff that you install, which is orthogonal to the problem that Windows systems slow down themselves even if you don't touch them: the problem is that people need to install stuff to make their computers work. Want to read PDFs (most people will)? You get one knick-knack with the relevant auto-update. Want to watch YouTube (most people will)? There goes another one. Want to be able to download stuff from the internet? If you're not an expert, and most people aren't, you're going to need an anti virus, and there goes another invasive software you'll need to install. The point is that my bathroom can be cleaned without burning down my house, whereas there's no such option to clean up Windows, which is another major design failure - in addition to the fact that the system slows down by itself.

The point is that you cannot just stick to the desktop in Windows 8. Even if you hack the OS with third party tools in order to make some fake Start menu return from the afterlife, you just can't change the fact that some functionality remains into the Metro side (both OS functions and third-party applications, because Microsoft strongly pushed third-party developers to use Metro). And some of the broken UI design still bites even on the desktop side (invisible magic areas, undocumented destructive gestures that get activated by mistake if you happen to use a touchpad, the “charms”...).

Oh come on, every Windows installation slows down with usage, to the point of requiring to be formatted. Even without anti-virus software and third party add-ons (not that it would be a justification, because one buys a computer with the intention of using it somehow, not to look at the desktop background). Buying an SSD is not an acceptable solution, because SSDs currently cost 6 times as much as spinning rust drives.

It is not a matter of HD activity, either, and it's not superstition. Just two examples: in the case of Windows XP, which is post-Windows 98, we had the catastrophic Windows Update failure to scale that caused all Windows XP machines to become unusable for hours just some months ago. Back then it was a matter of CPU usage, not disk. In the case of Windows 7, which is post-Windows 98 too, you might have noticed that on machines with 2 GB of memory or less (which is twice the minimum required amount) another Windows Update bug caused the Windows Update service to eat all the available RAM and thrash the machine, again, into the land of unusability. In this case, it was a matter of RAM usage, not disk.

Point A: Java was standardized by a consortium as well. I believe that even the APPLET tag was standardized by the w3c. Oh, and that was before the w3c had began “standardizing” DRM hooks.
Point B: When Java was added to HTML, everyone and his dog (including Microsoft) thought that Java was the future and that every software in the world would have been rewritten in Java. Proof in the fact that the "Java" branding was added to Javascript in order to increase its appeal.
Point C: the sandbox for Java applets gave the unsigned ones even fewer permissions than the current Javascript sandbox does for the most obscure of the web pages.
Point D: Compilers have been written targeting the JVM bytecode for pretty much every modern language (Python, Ruby, Scala, Lisp and, of course, Javascript), many of them actually faster than their reference C implementations, so I don't know how much lower in level you can get.
Point E: Look, DOM manipulation from an applet. And do you know what else integrated even more with the DOM? Microsoft's ActiveX.

But above all, all points, even if they were true, are but minor differences in implementation, compared to the huge fact being the very nature of a bytecode that is supposed to be run by web pages, that alters the open nature of the web by making its pages write-only, and the introduction of a compiler into the workflow of HTML development. (Who will make the better compiler, Microsoft or Mozilla? Will php scripts output bytecode or do we have to change server-side scripting? What's the failure model for browsers implementing an older subset of the bytecodes?)

In other words, it's exactly like Java but instead of being designed by a software company, it's being introduced by personal data sellers, ad designers, NSA henchmen, DRM paladins, government lobbyists and walled-garden tenders. And unlike Java, it's going to be used by every single web page and we won't be able to uninstall it. Sounds great, what could possibly go wrong.

Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?

Talk about yourselves. The world isn't UK, you know. If anything, Snowden's revelations have shown that it's the UK who performed hostile acts of espionage against their European allies, together and on behalf of their trans-atlantic big buddies, not Soviet Russia.

I think it’s the same reason why often the children of successful entrepreneurs fail to keep their fathers’ empires running. When you no longer need to practice some kind of culture, you don’t, and when a culture isn’t practiced, you lose it for good, and finally competition (from other companies, from the Barbarians, from the Chinese) does the rest. Also known as “resting on your laurels”.

To be fair, the colosseum has just been restored (not rebuilt), this year, with contribution from private sponsors. There's an approved plan from the government to rebuild the inner arena to make it walkable again in five years, for 20 mln €. Piig or not, that's not much for the fourth economy of the EU; for comparison, it's 1/6 the cost of a single F-35 fighter and Italy is going to buy 90 of them from the US. However you are right, Italians just can't be bothered to spend money for the preservation of their historic heritage, and will happily watch it crumble to nothingless (see what's happening to the houses of Pompeii) while they build campy villas around and over the ruins.

I don’t know how it works in China, but in my country that’s the job of freemasonry.

What I’d like to express is that when I use dynamically typed languages, whatever they are called, I get, depending on the particular kind of dynamically typed language, little to no introspection, function prototypes and data structures that are not self-describing, and a tendence to eat my typos and turn them into insidious bugs that are a nightmare to find and only trigger at runtime, and often not by raising a proper exception, but instead causing behaviours that appear inexplicable until you hunt the bug down.

Designing a language is a matter of trade-offs; certain languages are designed to make you code quickly (VBScript), which doesn’t mean that you can’t write robust code with them, and others are designed to make you write robust code (Java), which doesn’t mean that you can’t write buggy code with them.