That's because SemiAccurate never found an actual bug. Charlie was just concerned about the capabilities of the ME, and that there could be a bug one day. He tried for years to get Intel to just get rid of the ME not to fix any specific bug. You can decide if he was right or not based on this bug.

It is important to note that based on what has been released so far, you had to opt into to using ME in its full mode to be affected. If you just bought a random PC your system isn't vulnerable.

Dark matter is invisible to our current detection methods. That is not the same as being truly invisible.

I used to run a couple of the distributed computing programs years back, but I don't anymore. The main reason is that computers have advanced. 10 years ago, a computer sitting idle and a computer under a heavy work load used almost the same amount of power. Therefore, as long as your were going to leave the computer on anyway, it didn't hurt to run one of these programs. However, newer CPUs use much less power when they are idle compared to running a heavy work load. I wish CERN the best of luck, but it seems like the whole distributed computing idea is starting to come to a close due to increased power efficiency.

The company I work for is begrudgingly moving to IE8 starting a couple weeks from now. The only reason they are moving to it is because they are also starting to role out Windows 7, and IE6 isn't available for Windows 7.

Therefore they have had no choice but to go through all of the internal sites and fix the numerous ones that only support IE6. Which was the only thing holding them back from pushing IE7/8 onto the XP machines. The good side effect of this is that for the most part all of the internal sites that have been upgraded to support IE8 also support Firefox now.

You are missing one important fact. The usage stats you quoted are only for visitors to w3cshools.com. At the bottom of the page they even admit that the actual market share for IE is close to 80%.

That said, I agree with your main points about the EU being completely ridiculous.