The US managed to get over an area of fear from foreigners without the use of guns or a revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
In the mid- and late 1950s, the attitudes and institutions of McCarthyism slowly weakened. Changing public sentiments heavily contributed to the decline of McCarthyism. Its decline may also be charted through a series of court decisions.
From a homegroup perspective w7 may be better but in my point of view, the routing, port forwarding, nat, firewall features available from netsh that have been removed after XP are a big loss.
It was not linux iptables but for a windows machine it was impressive.
Last time I checked (because I wanted to do an upgrade from vista to W8) I found that I have to reinstall everything because upgrades are supported only from the previous version.
I can buy an upgrade from vista to 7 then I can upgrade to w8. This makes the upgrade much more expensive and there is no guarantee that the software I have been running on vista will actually work. Since windows provides only limited backup capabilities I need to throw in a few bucks more for a backup program the may or may not work in the given case. Since you are referring to a full blown installation I suppose you do have solved these obstacles for yourself. For me it is time and money, not a simple upgrade from XP to W8.
And it does no harm at all if you are an install kiddy that reinstalls everything on a daily basis because windows runs faster everytime.
But you can always buy an upgrade from XP to vista, to w7 and to w8 if you really believe that your installed software will continue to work afterwards.
Lots of companies decide to buy advertising services from google.
The price for their goods increases by that amount.
The decision is complete before I get a chance to choose from what is offered.
I cannot escape the price increase that googles advertising machinery creates.
While I am using any device capable of receiving for example my company emails (google mail) lots of scripts embedded in webpages track my information hunting and my IP address (known from receiving google mail) comes together with the information from the scripts at googles servers and is added to my profile which in turn increases in value and is sold to more remote advertising committed companies. This happens regardless of me activating any advertising trap on any webpages. In my opinion this situation has developed into an internet tax.
The big players in this game are fighting about who is in control of that tax.
Since my choice is removed from that game I cannot see any good players.