Can't use peer to peer tech without something in the middle to mediate it. That's not an assumption, it's a requirement for a reasonably secure system. Without that approach you're vulnerable to arp hijacking and all manner of related badness.

Requires the sysadmin to implement strong situational awareness. That's not an assumption, it's a requirement for a reasonably secure system.

Daily backups with quick restore. If you don't have this, your network is a time bomb no matter what else you do.

For information loss issues, you partition the network. There's no excuse for time cards bound up in monolithic accounting software where every employee needs to be able to trade packets with the server holding all the employees' SSNs. Any system you can build will leak. Better for those leaks to be droplets rather than a flood.

Or you can do things that are ineffective and crush staff productivity. It'll look good on your resume after the company goes under.

Sure.

Many of the folks you describe have company credit cards, often without fixed spending limits. The accountants even write checks on the company's behalf, often for large sums. Misuse of these privileges leads to discipline and even termination.

The firewall is there because some crap on the Internet is more problematic than other crap on the Internet. Done right, it's a speedbump - it makes the user slow down his rush to reach the problematic site and make a judgement call whether he really needs to go there. Done poorly it's a brick wall -- the user trying to do his job hits his head against it uselessly and hates the IT group with a passion.

Accountability belongs with the individual. IT's job is to facilitate and advise. That includes IT security.

There is no loop here. Your switches should be configured so that one workstation can't send packets to another. Your monitoring system should alert you to an unusual quantity of access on the file shares (a tip off that a virus is active) and your backups should be good enough to restore damaged files after you isolate the workstation that did the damage.

And when the user overrides the web filter, the override should apply to just that site and should warn the user that, "This site was blocked for a reason and your access to it will be logged. Please take care to avoid use that could compromise network security."

A reasonable IT strategy leaves the user in command. It advises when the user wants to do something dangerous and it stands ready to recover when things go sideways.

If a user then causes problems, that's a disciplinary issue for management to resolve, not IT.

If the user can infect the network, you designed the network wrong.

The subject is: class action lawsuit in the US. Just in case you forgot.

The boss's plan of allowing users to override the web page filter is absolutely the CORRECT plan. You have a rare boss who understands that the most important thing is that workers be able to work without interference from know-it-alls. Please get with the program!

Typically "when is a contractor an employee?" hinges on three primary factors:

1. Who sets the hours? Company? Employee. Worker? Contractor.

2. Paid by the task? Contractor. Paid by the hour? Employee.

3. EIN on the 1099? Contractor. Social Security Number on the 1099? Employee.

The IRS has a page describing the myriad other factors that are considered, but if answers to the three above all agree with each other, that's generally what you are.

http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't fear intelligent machines, I fear stupid ones with too much autonomy.

Were you not paying attention? I have mad cows. Plural.

http://www.sluggy.com/comics/a...

Trammel was badly implemented. Involuntary PvP systems don't mix well with non-PvP systems.

Several Freeshard Trammels which do away with PvP entirely are a blast to play. The uber-pvp freeshards that do away with Trammel also work fine.

The trick is this: they're really two very different games which attract two very different kinds of player.

One UO Freeshard I play has animal breeding. You can tame and then breed animals to get more powerful pets which you can then use to take down monsters in the dungeons.

I bred cows all the way to "max." My cows slaughter dragons with ease.

Breeding cows in UO turns out to be tricky. See, there's a bug: cows and bulls can't breed together, they're considered separate animal types. But all cows are female, so cows can't breed with cows either. You first have to magically transform some of the cows to the male gender before you can breed them. And it takes 20 to 30 generations to breed an animal like cows up to the game's max.

Thus I refer to my cows as "Daemonic Transgender Inbred Battle Cattle."

And you're going to convert those paper Euros to bitcoins how exactly? Other than, you know, mailing the bills in an envelope.

If you had your Euros in a bank outside of Greece, you could write a check, transfer money through paypal or engage in most any other transactions with them, capital controls be damned. Without having to convert the Euros to bitcoin.

Basically, all these things you can magically do by converting your Euros to bitcoin, you can do without bitcoin.