Unless your sick you should not take antibiotics as it raises your resistance to them. Save them for when you need them and they will work much better.

It's about time judges start to see these campaigns as the mass extortion cases that they are. If this was being done by anyone else there would have been RICO charges filed long ago. These cases have nothing to do with preserving copyright and everything to do with extorting the public. A $7500 settlement instead of a $150,000 for a $10 movie, how on earth can this possibly be anything other than sheer extortion?

The single biggest question is whether or not they will address feedback from the masses on two things that they have been repeatedly told were very bad ideas?

Restore the start menu (not just bounce you back to TIFNAM)
Boot directly to the desktop

If they don't address these two issues with an option to allow both the enterprise is going to continue their mass boycott of Windows 8 for years to come. Microsoft has been particularly stubborn on these points, even though they are dragging the PC industry down with them by being pig headed about things. Microsoft, can your arrogance be overcome?

If you can't explain it with a straight face to a judge it shouldn't go in writing. This is a simple rule of conducting business that applies to many, many things. Perhaps Prenda never heard of this basic rule of courtroom survival?

This removes the phone from being buried in the cost of the contract and brings us in line with the rest of the world for cell phone standards. Now if only we can get unlocked cell phones and the ability to simply have our service tied to our SIM card instead of our phone and we'd be golden. This country desperately needs competition and this is a great first step in that direction and a very consumer friendly move.

I'm out of mod points or I'd would be adding another +1 insightful to your comment. Branches of the government should not be used as weapons of political parties.

This isn't the first or last time the Federal Government has used international treaties as an end run around constitutional rights. They attempted the same thing with several intellectual property rights treaties. People have to be vigilant or their rights will taken away as we all stand by complaining that we don't like the people that are being targeted and therefore it's okay never realizing that were establishing legal precedent to be used against ourselves.

All I know is if they have zombie humans, cats, wolves and other such critters than they must inevitably also have zombie planets. Now one would assume that zombie planets munch on the brains of other planets, but the unfortunate thing is that this isn't covered in any of the zombie survival guides! Locking yourself in a nice zombie proof chamber isn't going to do any good when the planet next door comes gobbling away you know.

Let's face it, your going to need a really, really big gun and how can you possibly put a planet killing gun in your back yard without having to explain things to the neighbors and or the United Nations? So many questions, so many scenarios and so few bad movies that have been made by Hollywood. Someone should get cracking on this.

I used to work for one of these consulting companies for a few years that performed migrations as part of its practice. The only person your getting from them for less than $10,000 grand a week is either an outsourced operator or a floor technician.

You sure as hell aren't going to get a consultant for less money than that. Even in the worst of the economic downturn the consulting agencies charged that because there are only a few that are qualified to do this level of work.

There is no chance on earth that a fortune 500 is going to put their migration in the hands of a fly by night operation. Bob from the corner shop might charge less to migrate Suzanne sewing shop, but than he isn't working anywhere beyond a 10 mile radius.

Your more right than you, that or you work in security for a living. You can get a degree in the process you just described with said risk analysis. You can even get specialized certifications that require years of working in risk management before your allowed to qualify for the exam. It's a black art that you just described with a touch of voodoo, a shake of science and hedge of experience against the battle of the budget and wildcard called the professional hacker. Standards like HIPAA, PCI, FERPA, SOX and the like all help because they give the IT department the bludgeon needed to say, yes I actually do need the resources do things this way, dammit. Without these standards (all ITIL variants) you would be in a world where it was hackers versus corporate accountants. /rant off.

IT departments are often forced into using things that they don't want to use. Do not confuse explaining why something is done with defending the thing. Where I have had the ability I have actually implemented Firefox or Chrome and actively discourages the use of Internet Explorer.

The problem with running in the XP mode as you suggested is that you still have the additional complexity of testing for the mode for both Windows 7 and XP. It will work as an interim bridge, but it isn't something you want to live with for any length of time if you can help it. I have very rarely ever seen any place be willing to adopt this, even though in theory you would think it should be more common. At any rate it is all a moot point as XP (and XP mode) support are going away in less than a year and this is what is finally forcing companies to spend the millions of dollars to perform the upgrades.

I was answering the question of why things were done, I was not defending the use of IE 6. I have more than once been the one advocating for IE's removal and replacement with Firefox.