Almost 300 comments on slashdot in a handful of hours, I'm pretty sure this guy got exactly what he wanted to get out of his statements.

Microsoft could contribute 3 engineers to every open source project on the internet and /. would still call it a dirty scheme. Face it, there's not a single thing Microsoft could do that wouldn't have 80% of this site's users up in arms.

So MIT is smart enough to speak for the thousands of Americans living near natural gas operations that have flammable tap water from natural gas leaking into their watershed?

I believe it's Microsoft's policy to support a product for 10 years, so that could happen in a year anyways. However, with the number of customers who still use XP, they may bend that rule in this case and extend support.

Certainly the evidence for AWG is not conclusive, and it seems possible (even likely) that no matter what we do, temperatures may rise. However, in light of the fact that there IS some evidence for AWG, and that the long term effects could be downright apocalyptic, some people (myself included) think it's worth it to cut down on resource usage just in case the worst is true. Not only that, but there is plenty of damning evidence that our species' enormous resource usage is having a negative effect on other aspects of the ecosystem through water scarcity, deforestation, overfishing, and the like.

I have yet to see an email signature that says "Don't print this message under any circumstances no matter what!"

They say "Think before you print" to discourage just the sort of wasteful and unnecessary printing we can all agree is an environmental negative.