Yeah! They were talking about a simulated one-way trip. At the end of the experiment, all of the volunteers will be suffocated or killed in a fire.

Apple is in the business of golden eggs. There aren't that many geese that will do.
If you buy the argument that Jobs is a unique asset, which many people apparently do, then his health is a perfectly valid concern to Apple shareholders. Just continuing to run after he croaks isn't good enough. They have to continue to innovate and set trends.

Hopefully that will free up testing and dev resources to focus on stability and performance in the new codebase. Supporting operating systems that MS doesn't even support any longer would have been a drain on thier resources with limited gain. If they can weather the storm of initial criticism, they'll be happy they did it now. With luck, they'll then find more problems that pop up more common systems before they hit the wild.

They're not breaking compatibility, they're dropping it. That's a big distiction. There's likely very few places where this will result in concrete code changes. However, it will remove two substantial branches from thier test plan, which should free up resources for testing Firefox on Win7 and new Linux distros. If you must continue to use XP, then carry on using FF3.0 or FF3.5. If, after Moz has dropped security enhancements to the versions that they support on your system, you still have a compelling reason to continue using the old OS, you're so far in the minority that supporting you doesn't make sense for any company to pay attention to you. You'll just have to do your computing in a clean room...