It's interesting that you define the "good life" in terms of economic prosperity and/or how hard one works towards that end.

Nah, they're just faking it because they don't like the taste of vomit.

Peanuts taste like vomit. I demand flavour equity.

Seriously? When your mutation gives you delicious vomit??? Ingrate.

Both of them?

What really happened at the supposed miraculous moments which support the claims of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc.

I've heard that Amazon.com is a sweatshop.

If "40 hours/week" workers work much more than that, wouldn't we expect the same for "30 hours/week" workers?

Another two imperfect things: Adolf Hitler and Mother Theresa.

So what were you doing up until now? Reading each KB article? Vetting each update on a test system? I dont' really see that based on you response, so how on earth does THIS cumulative update model really change anything for YOU exactly?!!

Yes, that is approximately what I've been doing. Specifically, I've been leaving automatic updates disabled. Periodically I look for writeups about the current list of known-evil KB's, and allow the rest to get applied.

The cumulative updates prevent me from selectively installing only the updates I want.

So, what exactly is your plan?

I'm still considering my options.

Some people have recommended backing up the entire OS using non-free backup software designed for that very task. That would reduce my exposure to the risk of Microsoft pushing a bad update, and I might actually end up going that route.

OTOH, it doesn't help with the fact that Microsoft will undoubtedly be bundling spyware together with security patches starting in October. Running Windows in a VM would give me a relatively easy and cheap way to prevent Windows from phoning home. But as I mentioned elsewhere, it means having Windows as a guest VM, and that might make my color-calibration life more difficult.

Given the option, which OS would you rather use Photoshop on? Mac, linux, or windows 10?

Linux, hands down.

However, I still need to sort out the issue of monitor color calibration. The color-correction pipeline can be surprisingly complicated, because images, Photoshop/Lightroom, and Windows / OS X / Linux(?) are all ready to specify their own transforms. And I'm looking at adding yet another wrapper (Linux as a VM host OS) around that as well.

I can probably make it all work, it's just going to take some time and effort.

On the bright side, at least the color-calibration hardware is supported on Linux.

We actually do have a pretty decent backup regimen for the photographs themselves, including online, nearline, and offsite tiers. The photographs are irreplaceable.

However, Windows is not my day-job OS, and I need to be economical with the time, energy, and number of neurons I spend babysitting that OS. I can institute such a backup policy if necessary, but the more Microsoft makes it necessary, that more likely I am to just switch to a platform that's more reliable and is easier to rebuild.

My wife's photography business currently runs on Windows 7. We can't accept the risk of Microsoft screwing up her production environment (Photoshop + Lightroom).

For now, we're going to stop installing Windows updates, and cross our fingers.

Once that starts seeming too risky, I'll look into moving Windows into a VM with limited Internet access, or we'll migrate to using a Mac for the photo editing.

Neither option is appealing. I haven't yet figured out how difficult it will be to get monitor color-calibration right if Windows is running on a VM inside Linux. And sufficiently powerful Macs are painfully expensive.

I'll be curious to see if Microsoft's overall strategy from the past year is going to pay off for them. They're literally driving previously satisfied customers into their competitors' arms.

Nah. Under that scenario, the SCOTUS votes for you.

I'm curious how many would vote for the (D) or (R) candidate out of tribalism, vs. out of the belief that the only way for their vote to count at all is to pick the lesser of those two evils.

With some of the bugs that are getting non-optionally pushed onto end-users' systems, it clear that either Microsoft's QA team, or product managers, or both, are (at best) incompetent, and should be fired.

I'll leave it to the Microsoft insiders to figure out who.