Speed is not about features, its about whats actually running. XP, with settings adjusted for performance (right click on my computer -> properties -> advanced -> performance settings -> adjust for best performance) is just as fast as windows 2000. In fact I would not be surprised if it was faster now with SP3. That should not be a surprise XP is mostly just a refinement of 2k, leaving the default "pretty" gui enabled will of course be slower. 2k probably doesn't have as good of driver support for some of today's faster technology's as well that didn't exist back then. That point is better illustrated by NT4 which was a horrid OS, I would be very surprised if any app today on a modern system running NT4 performed better than XP. NT4's threading was inferior, the whole OS was vastly less stable, it was ridden with security problems very vulnerable to virus's, spyware, etc and was an utter bitch to fix and required a restart for nearly anything. Win2k was the first decent thing that came out of MS, day and night compared to anything they made earlier. Most of the technical anti microsoft sentiment came out of these pre 2k products. This is the case with vista as well. Most of the speed issues are rooted not in the underlying OS which with vista is likely better than XP, but with the huge, crappy, and mandatory gui they put on top of it. This is true with GNU/Linux also, the kernel is fine tuned and fast. But if your going to then run gnome or kde, its going to be much slower than if you were running something like flux or wm. (and X itself isn't all that light either).

Trying to fix the problem the government will do more of what it is doing, owning everything with funds gathered by debasing the currency (printing). This will lead to another great depression, though it will look different. Generally people aren't going to starve, and peoples overall quality of life thanks to new technology and mass production will be better than it was back then. Most likely we wont see a complete collapse of the economy, but our economic standing in the world compared to certain other countries will be in the decline over a protracted period of time held back by massive debt and weakness of the dollar. There's a large list of reasons we have come to this point. I really wish the media would pay some attention to the way the war was funded for starters. I really think we would have been much better off letting these large companies fail, yes it would have been worse in the short term. However it would allow the market to get to the bottom quickly so we can move on. One advantage we have today as opposed to during the great depression is our post ww2 infrastructure which allows quick access and fairly cheap transportation of goods across the country. Let the loosers fail, I really don't see our economy staying in the dumps for long if they got out of the way. As it is now though, I am pretty worried.