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"My companies websites (Insurance) have an IE share of about 40%."

I concur. W3Schools is completely unrepresentative of a normal web demographic and I never know why people take their reports seriously. I worked for 5 years at a multi-national online travel agent operating in 48 countries. I posted some stats on our browser usage about 18 months ago as part of a similar rant about some loons called StatCounter claiming that Chrome was now the majority browser in the UK. There is no way in hell that IE has declined over 40% since then:

http://webtorque.org/?p=1802

(BTW the differences between China and India on weekends is quite striking though)

Thing is (away from anything about this being government mandated or not etc) that putting an AV on every machine won't achieve much of anything at all.

Even the best AV programs have an estimated 20% hit rate(not miss rate):
http://webtorque.org/wp-content/uploads/malware_biz.pdf

The malware industry is organised and capable.
The kids who used to write viruses that made your mouse pointer into a penis and played sex noises over the speakers have grown up.
Now they're professionals who aren't going to do anything unless there's cash in it for them.

0-day exploits can be sold for fairly large sums of money.
Botnet herders have embraced outsourcing.
They employ coders who are often just as capable as anyone working for the AV companies.

If anything a mandated AV system would be worse since then they have one standardised target to attack.
(The more capable botnets also act as AV systems to clean their competitors off the machines they infect, gotta cut out the competition after all)

If you want a virus free internet you need to require everything be coded in the style of qmail which has it's own massive downsides(reduced functionality, increased dev time,massively increased cost, etc etc).

malware is here to stay.
Writing laws that say everyone has to have a copy of norton on their machine won't do much of anything to help.

read:
http://webtorque.org/wp-content/uploads/malware_biz.pdf

The organised malware business is already leagues ahead of anything script kiddies use.
it's embraced outsourcing.
The people writing viruses these days are professionals.
They're not doing it for the lulz like when we were kids, it's cold hard business.
They teenagers who used to write viruses which turned your mouse into a penis have grown up and now they're not going to do anything unless there's cash in it for them.
The rootkits that are out there are already more advanced than the rootkit detectors and even the best AV programs have perhaps a 20% hit rate. (not miss rate)

They already have countermeasures ready for security measures that we haven't even deployed yet

http://webtorque.org/wp-content/uploads/malware_biz.pdf

the really quiet well made ones you don't hear much about.

Anyone who thinks ID theft and the mechanisms used to achieve it are unsophisticated, badly needs to read this (700K PDF). Badly.

Artist? Writer? Invented something? Getting paid more for it that you'll ever be able to spend in your lifetime? Make sure your descendants get the cut that their accident of birth so rightly grants them!

It's the news rights aristocracy!.

"If the patch is critical, it will get criticized for being, in effect, mandatory degradation of capability"

What makes you think M$ cares what users think, let alone tech users?

Newsflash: Microsoft is a M O N O P O L Y. They don't give a crap about C U S T O M E R S.

They'll mark it "critical." Of course.

Finding how to format something in Word (or Excel, or PPT for that matter) is the least of my problems. What I want is for the features to WORK!

Still, after after 20 (TWENTY!) years of development of Word, I have Office 2003, and:

- Auto numbering: still a bugfest
- Document linking: bugfest leading to file corruption
- Chapter/section management: bugfest leading to other bugs
- Styles: horrendous implementation compounded by the above bugs
- The clipboard: AAAARGH!!