I love getting Junk Mail, the physical kind, how else would I light my pizza oven? No, really...
http://pizzaontherocks.blogspot.com/2009/09/wednesday-sept-92009.html

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/1999/July/316enr.htm

A few years ago, Royal Caribbean cruise line was found by the US coastguard to have fitted bilge bypass valves on their ships, allowing them to dump oily bilge water at sea with being detected, or so they thought. They were fined heavily for this. They didn't just do it as an afterthought or by accident, they intentionally refitted the ship to be able to do it, meaning the corporation actively intended to pollute the waters they were making their living from. Maybe the scale is different, but the intent is the same.

Who was that person?

Although hindsight is always brilliant, I think there was a simple way to solve his dilemma. All he had to do was write the passwords on a piece of paper, put them in a manila envelope and seal it, then right "City Network Systems Passwords - Confidential" on the outside and hand them over to the city's lawyers and get a receipt. Anyone not entitled to open the envelope and read the passwords would be guilty of a stealing information, breaking into a network or similar. There are ways to use the system to your advantage.

The one America does not use is the passport. True story: I went to America to buy some building materials. I was in Home Depot and bought about $700 worth of tools. When I tried to pay with my credit card, they cashier requested identification so I handed her my British Passport. She refused to accept it as a valid form of identification so I walked out leaving them with the tools.
The idea that an easily obtainable driver's license is a reliable form of identification is ludicrous, and that the internationally accepted form of ID that gets people into the country is not good enough for a hardware store is equally ridiculous.

Don't you understand what a shill is?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"A shill is an associate of a person selling goods or services or a political group, who pretends no association to the seller/group and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer. The intention of the shill is, using crowd psychology, to encourage others unaware of the set-up to purchase said goods or services or support the political group's ideological claims. Shills are often employed by confidence artists. The term plant is also used."
Shills in marketing: See also: Astroturfing

It is subterfuge. There's a huge difference between puffery, obviously overstating your values, and pretending to be a dispassionate third party in order to trick people. We know marketing overstates the product, that's built in to our reactions, but we tend to trust impartial thrid party recommendations. Everyone in marketing knows it is wrong to cross that line.

>As far as I know, all known life on earth is left handed
Your left or my left?

Properly installed UTP does not get "old" in any real sense unless there is some environmental issue such as excessive heat or chemical attack.
However, as many other posters have mentioned, a great deal of cabling installations are not properly done. UTP should always be installed by certified installers to the latest revision of TIA/EIA-568, currently revision "C". the installation should be certified with a proper cable analyzer such as a Fluke DSP-4300 and the installer should be required to produce a test report for each cable run. Once you know the cabling has been installed to meet the performance requirements of the standard, you know you can rely on it and should not have to worry about problems with your cabling.
This is what I do for a living.

People have to trust people. Doctors, lawyers, finalcial advisors, accountants, we all have to trust experts and base our selection on reputation. Some of those experts are crooked some of the time. Unless you are also an expert, how can you always tell?

Your car mechanic installs no parts but charges you $500 for new parts. Short of having another mechanic take the engine apart, how would you know?

Everyone has been taken at some point or other. In most cases, it was not that important. For some, it was their life's savings.

Madoff was one of the elite, a previous NASDAQ chairman and a prominent public figure. People trusted him the way they trust their bank, their brokerage account, their doctor. Even accountants and auditors and others who should have known better trusted him. They are the ones I would now be looking at. They must have known it was too good to be true. The ordinary person had no clue, and you can't expect they would be able to tell something was up.

That you know of.

Often, they are not idiots, they are desperate and don't know where else to turn. Desperate people are ready to believe there is a benefactor willing to help them survive. Walk a mile in their shoes before you condemn them.
Madoff's "clients" where not idiots, they were conned by one of the most sophisticated conmen ever. ANYONE can be conned, no matter how smug and clever you are.

"Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution. "
Should be "Armed with the policy, I could point to that and refuse when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution. "

I had this situation with a company I was contracting to. Knowing that the IT guys were installing pirated software, I wrote the management of that company and recommended that the company established a policy that all software was legally obtained and licensed. At that point, management had only two choices, acknowledge the issue and agree, or document that they approved of piracy. Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution.

It must be remembered that Word and it's relatives are only word processors. If you want to combine documents and images and have proper styles and typograpic control, use a layout program. InDesign is the best of the bunch, I have used it for numerous publications and have not found anything it can't do.
As for collaboration, InDesign will use WebDAV and will auto-update linked documents.