Or vice versa

I like my to keep my issues on-top of the list.

Polar bears don't eat penguins. Presumably because penguins live at the south pole and polar bears live at the north pole.

I just opened that site in Both IE8 and Firefox on my laptop.

The animations are exactly the same and the performance is the same.
The only difference is a minor difference in the fonts displayed, but that's just standard browser difference.

How can they possibly justify forcing me to reset all my settings in all applications, for no other reason than excluding their browser from the OS?
It doesn't make any sense that installing Windows without IE is that much different than doing it with IE as part of the package; why does it change all sorts of unrelated settings?
At least I'm glad I don't have to pay for Windows 7 (no I'm not pirating it, I'm getting it legally from MSDNAA).

I don't even use IE for crying out loud...

Someone should mod this guy up.

It's very easy for all of us armchair doctors to make a hindsight diagnosis of the illness.
She most likely visited a number of skilled professionals but was very unfortunate with their diagnosis. This stuff happens now and then, people make mistakes.

It's just unfortunate that no one cares about a story on doctors who diagnose their patients correctly.

Every time an email has been "lost" for me, it has been a user error (or mail filter problem).
Either the address was wrong, the intended recipient wasn't on the mailing list, the spam filter caught the message, other filtering obstructed the email, or the recipient accidentally deleted the mail. And sometimes the sender forgot to send the mail (i.e. it is still in the outbox) or the mail server had a problem of which the sender was informed but he/she ignored it.
I don't believe I have ever experienced an email that simply vanished.

Why are they blocking online poker/betting sites as well? How can that possibly be legal?

I saw fulltiltpoker in that list and afaik it's a perfectly legit poker service.

That is completely besides the point. Hiding behind "good" intentions usually does not give you the right to break a law on purpose.

The blogs might be giving the albums free advertisement, but maybe the record labels don't want that. What if you have a paedophiliac nazi site giving "free" advertisement to the latest Disney movie. I doubt Disney want that.

Ask the owner before using their material. It's that simple.

This part
'She went home and searched on Google for it and thought she found the website, filled typical registration information, and downloaded OpenOffice.org 3.0.'
is what I'm worried about.

If you go to google.de (or google.com) and search for OpenOffice, how in the hell do you get to a scam site without trying any of the numerous download links on the first page (where most of them point to openoffice.org)?

As a poster above has already said, Microsoft never sold Windows with the declared intention of stopping criminals.
They've added various features which help protect the average user, but that is not the same.

I suppose people buy doors for different reasons, but it isn't the responsibility of the average door maker to ensure that every door is burglar-proof.
You buy special doors or extra locks for that. Similar to an OS where you either get a special OS or buy extra anti-malware software if you worry about security.

No, what is amazing is that you didn't even try to use the built-in search functionality (which you knew existed) before flaming Vista.

The article would also be true if every instance of MS Word were replaced with OpenOffice.
Or the name of an OS. Or a console. Or anything else in the world.

In other words, the report is garbage.