Partially right. The problem is, that in many larger organisations the 'legitimate business need --> approval' process does not scale well with regard to the time required to get the approval. So even if you do have a legitimate business need, waiting for the approval might still keep you from getting your job done. Multiply this by say ... 2,000 people waiting 10 days to get an approval for something. This will cost you real money.

It seems to be difficult to balance these things. But having a good zoning concept at hand might be of great help. It keeps the wrong people from tampering with critical resources, but it also allows employees to use necessary services e.g. SFTP. Yes, I've come across a situation were I was not allowed to get a patch from a vendor using SFTP. The idea was: SFTP may be used for stealing data. Use FTP, this is far more secure, as we can scan it with deep packet inspection.

At the place were I currently work we have kind of a "feel free to use the internet as you wish" policy. This actually works out quite well. Sites are not filtered specifically. They basically say "hey, if you end up doing illegal stuff, you're screwed, otherwise we don't care as long as you get to do your work."

I used to work for a financial institution before that. And they had sort of a lockdown-mania. Filtering proxies (no checking your private web mail - could be used for stealing information), read-only USB mass storage, scanning outgoing e-mail attachments etc. I guess, these rules came in place because of management being scared to death by compliance requirements, not because of IT admins abusing their power.

And BTW: Had I wished to steal massive amounts of data, I could have still simply sent them via e-mail in a password-encrypted archive. It's a matter of trust, not only of making it difficult. So basically powerful and clueless management are equally effective as power-abusing admins.

Indeed they may have. And it made a decent communication infrastructure available to them at a fraction of the cost. So it's also a decade of giving millions of people access to a phone. TFA does not mention this, but this might actually be more disruptive than packing a bazillion-pixel-camera into a feature-packed phone-crossbreed.

I'm tempted to disagree. It might come down to a "imperative programming vs. OOP" thing, but since most people will get into some contact with OOP anyway, why not start with it in the first place? A few people have already suggested Smalltalk and I'd second that. It has extremely simple, compact syntax. It is 100% object oriented and consistent. And once you've got the "Everything is an object. Everything happens by sending messages (to objects)." idea, you've got it. Since this is a very simple idea, it should be quite easy to understand. And if you've understood that, you can just go on and write programs.

I've started out with imperative programming (Pascal) and it took me a while to get behind the OOP idea, but after I've had a look at Smalltalk, I just had that enlightening moment, when I learned object-oriented thinking.

I guess that this object-orientation is much closer to how we naturally think. It's about "making things happen" and about "interaction of things with each other", not about picking everything apart into a big list of things to do, then making smaller lists of to-do-items we call functions and so on. And even with 100% object-oriented thinking, you still have the concept of doing things one after the other. But only in those places, where it is in the nature of the problem.