So let me see if I get the general drift of most of your comments right: Without societies, censors or authority over us, we're all immoral and unethical? What happened to individual choice? All you guys out there (used in a non-sexist way) are telling me that stealing is okay, provided you, taking the best suggestion I read before I stopped in horror, that you document your going along with it to simply CYA? If I found myself in this position, I would take part of that same suggestion to document the whole problem. I'd make a list of all the software which should be bought to make the company legal. Present it to the boss. And if he doesn't instantly implement a plan to acquire it, look for another job if you need the paycheck - else resign immediately. Morals, ethics and honesty - you have them or you don't and there's almost no ambiguity about it (you may be forgiven for stealing a slice of bread to feed your hungry child). This philosophy still seems to me to be the best going: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

When we speak of "Science" in a general sense, it's about using the Scientific Method to pursue a goal or enhance our knowledge. This has nothing to do with the size of the data accumulated to perform the task. These days, all of us are learning to think at "Internet Scale." Join Facebook and "befriend" 200 million people. Enroll in LinkedIn and you have 40 million possible connections. National debts are measured in numbers with more zeros than ever used before to describe money. In other words, every field of human endeavour these days, presents its own data management problem. If I may introduce the crass topic of business into such a rarified air of Science; in today's Inbound Marketing arena, the volume of data being accumulated about Visitors to one's website, some of whom become Prospects and then Clients, is literally Internet sized. So what's a person to do? Same thing we've always done - automate to handle it. We have used technology and tools to overcome human limitations since the first ape used a bone as a hammer (if you liked the movie 2001's analogy). So marketers today can use Sales and Marketing Automation to reduce huge data sets to usable and understandable sizes, in the same way that any other field will employ computer methods to do the same. Data management problems, in other words, are a field unto themselves, requiring specialists such as DBAs, Hardware and Software Engineers. Not Scientists in the general sense, but specialists. There's more on these ideas at http://www.inbound-marketing-automation.ca/blog/