In case some people don't RTFA,

Emphasis mine. XP updates ARE ending, but MSE/Forefront will still get updated. XP will still be susceptible to any zero day until it gets detected by MSE--if it's even installed at all. This is a marginal increase in safety for XP post-EOL, at best. The apocalypse is still nigh.

My advice for fellow ITAs. Don't mention this to your boss at all if you're still trying to migrate. It's not really relevant to the threat posed by XP's end of support. If they get wind of it on their own, emphasize that XP itself is still going to be wide open. At best all MSE does is let you know you've been owned after the fact once MS gets around to updating the definitions. MSE already has a pretty poor record for detecting even older threats. It's better than nothing but you shouldn't be relying on it.

It's theoretically possible that they don't bother submitting requests unless they are highly confident it will be accepted. I don't believe that, but it's at least possible. We need to know more about the process and the types of requests--unfortunately that's difficult with a secret court.

Seriously, there is so much freely available Unix derived code available with permissive licenses, and it works better than anything they could make from scratch or by improving the NT kernel. They should fork the BSD kernel, port the Windows 7 UI to it with the necessary upgrades, and write a Win32 emulation/compatibility mode for legacy apps. It can't be that hard, WINE et al were able to do it with zero help from MS.

Apple essentially did the same exact thing with less money and manpower than MS has at their disposal.

Absolutely true, if you're willing to plan it out ahead of time and use pre-emptive force. Libertarians can't use preemptive force, it's sort of their thing. They need the desperate poor to make the first move so they can kill them in self-defense. The response will of course be disproportional, but as long as its technically a reaction and not an initiation of force, it's kosher in their religion.

They'd rather pay the, as you pointed out, much greater costs of extermination/disposal of the "undesirables" because it's the ideologically pure position in their system of thought. Libertarians don't really care about outcomes, they obsess on keeping the process pure.

The end game of these libertarian fantasies is the literal wholesale murder of millions of poor "undesirables", either directly on the small scale and justified as self defense or the defence of property, or enmasse through isolation into ghettos and systematic starvation. It would dwarf the Holocaust in numbers of dead.

If you start with the premise (itself not unreasonable) that every individual has a right to defend themselves from harm and their property from theft, and you have millions of people with no ability to survive other than the appropriation of resources by force, you're going to end up with a lot of dead humans. And when the tent cities gather enough boldness and enough desperation to march on the proper cities, then you'd have the military and police slaughtering thousands at a time to protect the property rights of the middle and upper classes.

Horrifying to imagine, but there are some people who would not only be willing to go through this conflagration, but would practically welcome it. Indeed, some are even working in earnest to bring it about. They want to see the streets run red with the blood of the poor. The worst reflection I've ever had on the human condition is that some of them don't just see this nightmare as a horrible means justified by a glorious utopian end--the process itself satisfies some dark urge inside them to cause pain on the largest scale possible. If evil exists, this is it.

This is how I know you're lying. You should have stopped at the just plausible anecdote, but you couldn't resist overreaching and throwing some stereotypical beuracratic incompetence into your yarn.

You'll be happy to find out that SNAP (aka "food stamps") is already one of the best run programs our government has ever set up in terms of efficency and lack of fraud. It is a model for effective solutions to social problems. That fraud is rampant among SNAP receipients is simply a myth--and one that has been deliberatly crafted over generations to achieve certain political goals.

There will come a time when people who are guilty of nothing more than being born of mere average intelligence will not have any "meaningful" contributions to make to the scaffolding of society. We're already there for a lot of people. What do you propose we do about them? They're going to get their means of survival one way or another. I'd rather it be a peaceful and orderly process instead of violent anarchy. They may not have the technical skills to be computer programmers or engineers, nor the artistic talent to be great painters or composers, but guns, clubs, and jars of gasoline are technologies they'll readily understand and immediately grasp the utility of in their struggle to exist. Denied the opportunity to participate in the future economy by their unexceptional intelligence, they will not simply lay down and resign themselves to starving to death.

My favorite simpleton is the one who uses MS Word as their file manager.

I actually have infinite patience for anyone willing to learn the correct way to do something. When someone just wants me to make their horribly inefficient, kludgy, jerry-rigged, workflow continue to work across OS/software versions, I become very annoyed.

It was around at the right time to capture a large percentage of normies just getting online for the first time. These people don't like change. They don't really "like" computers in general. To them they're just tools; very frustrating and obtuse tools. Changing e-mail addresses is far more trouble than it is worth--we can barely get these people to give up Windows XP.

No, not really. There isn't a viable left-wing party in the USA. The Democrats are moderately pro-business center-right and the Republicans are extremely anti-regulation, anti-tax, pro-business far right. There's more divergence on a few (mostly irrelevant) social issues, which is why people think there's a bigger difference than there really is.

I'll have the bravery--which Americans used to pride themselves on--to state that I'd rather there be another attack than live with the current NSA abuses. I'd rather die with my liberty than live without it. And it's a false choice anyway, like you said. This won't make us safer, it won't prevent another attack. We're not trading away liberty for safety. We are giving away liberty, getting no extra safety, and becoming a police state. It's lose-lose-lose. There's no trade off. There's no balance. It's the ever tightening ratchet of fascism.

There are trivial workarounds for both platforms.

Please explain how a legitimate business, which has to answer to the court of public opinion, not to mention the real courts, would be able to monetize blackmail (an illegal activity).