This reminds me of one of the most impressive things about my Atari 800XL. I ran into this error when I first started to learn anything about computers. I was thoroughly stumped. (I was also 8 years old.)

I wrote a letter to Atari (using Atari Writer!) and I got a reply back in the mail just a few weeks later. They told me what I did wrong, included a bunch of software, an Atari BASIC book and a years subscription to Antic.

No computer company has impressed me like that since then.

Your answer, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Creative (noun, in advertising), referring to materials, imagery, or collateral prescriptively produced through creativity and the creative process

This is not specific to banner ads. This term is used in all forms of advertising.

You're missing some other details about who Ray Ozzie is - he was the creator of Lotus Notes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie He definitely has some bias towards Microsoft though.

How you got modded up as insightful is amazing.

Have you ever taken a look at your User Agent string? It sends your browser and your operating system to the server, and in many cases, it can send extensions that exist in your browser. Examples:

Mozilla/5.001 (windows; U; NT4.0; en-US; rv:1.0) Gecko/25250101

Or my current user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.17

Unless you're setting your User-Agent to something like, "ImABrowser (Some computer; Some proc; Some OS; Some language)" stop sounding the alarm.

I don't know about the "any other wireless provider" thing.

Look up UMA on T-Mobile. My BlackBerry Curve 8320 supports it, so I use my WiFi for voice calls when I'm at home.

AT&T may not want you to do that, but T-Mobile seems to be okay with it.

It helps preload the JVM so that any Java applets load faster.

It's not some evil conspiracy.

You told it to update your computer. It didn't tell you exactly what it was doing. Does Microsoft Update tell you everything it's going to touch?

If you don't like it, run Linux, install SELinux and block everything by default.

Not trying to sound like a dick, but this really is a non-issue.

Having been an engineer at Symantec for 5 1/2 years, I can tell you that what they suffer from is the inability to build new products themselves, or a management team that refuses to try (you choose).

It's a company of "buy everything you can see, who cares if you can integrate it". Very little in the way of shared components, every product looks and works different, very little interoperability, etc.

It seemed like we always bought the worst codebases we could find, then tried to fix it. It's not due to a lack of good engineering talent - there is plenty at the company.

While I think JWT is a nice guy, one only needs to look at the purchase of Veritas to find a completely failed business model, and a CEO who doesn't seem to "get it". Even after that, they continued (and still continue) to snatch up other companies with little regard to how it will really affect shareholders. Nice guys don't make CEOs.

When John Schwarz left to take the CEO spot at Business Objects and we kept Gary Bloom (CEO, Veritas) - I knew we were in trouble.

Because people like myself still have a perfectly good Pentium 4 3.0ghz with 4gb of RAM and a GeForce 9800GT at their feet, which runs Vista just fine with Aero on and will run Windows 7, that's why.

I also have a perfectly good 1st gen MacBook Pro that dual boots Mac OS X 10.5 and Vista Home Premium right now. It's 32bit only.

Alienating a large group of users who could upgrade would be stupid from a money making perspective.

That's what calling your credit card company is for. They sold you something defective and are refusing to refund your money for defective purchase.