What happens to the legal system if digital signatures become untrusted? I might not own my house in 20 years because the "papers" where signed with digital signature?
Note that digital signature is a norm in my country and is used extensively.

It only took them 2 years http://us.trendmicro.com/imperia/md/content/us/trendwatch/researchandanalysis/a_cybercrime_hub.pdf

> Who sets a quota describing how much rain we're allowed to have, and how will that be enforced?
The winner sets quota and will enforce it. "Many of the wars of the 20th century were about oil, but wars of the 21st century will be over water" Ismail Serageldin, World Bank Vice President

and have awfully narrow spectrum

if (true) return;

Your mileage may vary. My experience with XP has been as I stated, and I have noticed this for over 3 years now. Albeit, our PCs are stuffed with every kind of secureware (aka bloatware), so that might be a reason.

Probably MS forces you to reboot on purpose, as they know any XP machine becomes extremely slugish after 30+ days of uptime.

http://areca.sourceforge.net/