It is true that Canada signed the previous WIPO treaties, what is even more true is that Canada is in compliance with those treaties right now without any additional DCMA laws. It is also true that the CRIA has been pushing for stronger laws, like c-61, it also happens to be true that the CRIA does not represent Canadian artists. The CRIA was forced a few years back to write and distribute a announcement to that fact after the Canadian artists said "screw you and your horrible ideals". The CRIA needs to expect another large fight on their hands with this tripe, and possibly a lawsuit pretending to be a grass roots organization.

This is nothing new. Most businesses want to ensure a significant number of early adopter bugs are ironed out. The others typically are on a upgrade cycle which requires them to upgrade at the start/end of the cycle. The large company I'm working for is on a three year cycle, and they are just rolling out Vista now, which means three years till windows 7. A story trying to make news out of nothing.

As someone managing a number of legacy mainframe/cobol systems (we do pl/1 too), the biggest reasons to move away from them break down like this: #1: Cost - Mainframe hardware is expensive, support is expensive, keeping or contracting programmers are expensive. #2: Availability - Finding a competent cobol programmer is much more difficult than it used to be, while you throw a rock and you'll hit 20 perl/java programmers. #3: Maintenance - Programs that have been written 30 years ago, and have been updated year after year, mostly poor documentation are hard to keep going, and require more person effort to do so. #4: Flexibility - Out business has been changing over the last 30 years, how can one expect something written that long ago to continue to last the tide. It may be working now, but when that next important change comes down, it may take significantly longer to respond.

Why on earth did you upgrade to XP then? Windows 98se, 98, 95, windows 3.11 all required significantly less memory and hardware and ran faster. As that is the case, why do you stay with XP? It is buggy, hangs while browsing networks, doesn't multitask well. I think you need your head examined.

I laugh every time I hear someone say that Windows has become so bloated, so slow, that MS needs to start from scratch and loose all the backward compatibility. Then I think of every time MS releases a new OS, and the whole world is complaining how their 15 year old apps no longer work, how their hardware manufacturers haven't created drivers, etc.. MS can, and could make New Windows, with a backward compatibility layer. Just expect everyone and their three dogs to be complaining that MS should have simply forgone the new and improved the old.