I'm going to go with narrow mindedness, or perhaps a lack of imagination. The requirements that led your IT leaders to the environment you describe could lead to far less onerous (and less costly!) setups.
Blocking "all" filesharing sites? If your company is like mine, both federal regulators and clients regularly perform third party security audits. "How do you protect our data from exfiltration?" is a stock question. I've also seen "demonstrate you block viral vectors" lead to similarly unnecessary restrictions. Hell, I could see the above two answers explaining ALL of the symptoms your leadership has created.
It doesn't have to go that way, though. Leadership at my company had the same silly knee jerk reaction. I argued against it; but we did the same thing, for a while. About 15 months. It took 12 months for me to accumulate comparative data and about a month to polish it into a pretty presentation. It took another 2 months to cross fiscal quarters and then we immediately ripped all that none sense out and replaced it with a properly architected solution. We moved the critical data and all the workflow that touched it into secured remote VM's running on in house Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. All desktops/laptops are basically dumb terminals for accessing the work VMs. You VPN in to do that, regardless of where you come from - including our "internal" office vlans, which only have access to the internet and our VPN server.
Have work to do? Use your VM. Wanna fuck around on slashdot? Use your local machine.
Problem solved, and with MONUMENTALLY fewer man hours spent managing the ridiculously complex filtering mechanisms the previous authoritarianism had required.

Mars does need women.

The role I've been in for the last 13 years requires me to wear a number of hats, including network engineer and network architect in medium sized environments.
I say that to provide some context for this statement: it is not at all clear to me what you're actually asking for.

The Universe is only about 26 Billion Light years in diameter.

Here, let me fix that for you:

The Observable Universe is only about 26 Billion Light years in diameter.

There ya go. We don't actually know if the universe is infinite or not. We do know the Universe is Euclidean, my layman's understanding of that concludes that we live in one of two universes:

• 1. A flat (infinite) universe
• 2. A torus (bounded) universe

Because, seriously, how frequently does this lesson have to be retaught?

Actually, the endorphin hit from a high capsaicin load can act as a flavor enhancer. Your mouth's overall sensitivity to the "non-heat" flavors goes up. There's a reason cayenne is considered akin to cinnamon.

Most "classic" tobasco I've had lately just tastes like vinegar and black pepper - no discernible heat. Of course, that may be because so many restaurants store their jars of tobasco for months on end and all the volatile organics degrade - the ingredient list includes cayenne, which I normally find pleasantly warm AND flavorful; but I've not been able to detect that flavor in most jars of classic tobasco. The jalapeno version is better flavored, although also completely lacking in heat. I can feel a little warmth in the chipotle flavor. I've not really had a pepper that clocked in much higher than 1,000,000 SHU, and when I've gone that high it's not been a whole fresh pepper (I've enjoyed plenty of dishes that contained a 1/4-1/2 teaspoon of powdered Bhut Jolokia) so I don't have a point of reference for the absolute top of the scale.

The map is misleading. LA's schools simply MAY teach creationism - the law allows it, but not all necessarily do. Those charter schools? They ALL do: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/creationism_in_texas_public_schools_undermining_the_charter_movement.single.html http://www.salon.com/2013/10/25/christian_textbooks_darwin_inspired_hitler/

Citation?

From skimming the same article about him I see no reason that his opinion on bitcoins should carry any more weight than mine, or anyone elses. An we all know how much my opinion on bitcoins mean, jack and shit. Which is what Charles Stross opinion means on the subject.

All I know about your opinion on bitcoins is what you've posted about it in this comment (that you think it's worthless).

Charles Stross, on the other hand, has posted more than merely his opinion: he's also posted a cogent rationale for that opinion - one that contains details (with specific citations) that many a technically qualified geek may not have yet considered.

Taken in the context of his demonstrable interest in and fondness for the idea of decentralized societies and you have a critique that's worth considering - particularly by his reasonably large fan base (many of whom are slashdot readers, as evidenced by many of the above comments).

Rather than gleaning, you should simply read some more. These questions have all been answered. If you're targeted well in advance and if you make one of a number of mistakes, it is possible to track you through TOR.
Retroactively?
No, very clearly no.

Tape MUST be sufficiently stable. Reading the reliability specs off the box in front of me and running a few calculations shows that

You didn't use sarcasm tags and sometimes the subtler jokes are a tad hard to discern in text.
You are joking, aren't you? Because if not, have I got a great deal for you - I just need your bank account to transfer the money my uncle, a Nigerian prince, is trying to export. PM me!

The socialists in Canada pay almost $4500 per capita for healthcare, or more than 11% of GDP. Because of the waste inherent in socialist systems, we should not be surprised that healthcare costs in Canada are 7th highest on the planet, yet for all this outrageous expense, they are only tied for 4th in life expectancy and something like 24th in infant mortality

I'm sorry - how is 7th highest cost for 4th highest life expetancy not a deal?
If life expectancy was less than 7th, I might see your point. Beyond that, the US already spends 17.2% of it's GDP on healthcare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States) and has an infant mortality rate around 34th in the world , so moving to an infant mortality rate of 24th in the world for a cost of 11% of GDP is a huge improvement for your southern neighbors.

This is good news, guys. By now MS is an expert in receiving and dealing with DoS.

Yeah, they're very experienced at hiring Akamai to deal with DoS attacks :)

The tapes may be stable (I'm suspicious of that claim: their temperature tolerances aren't as high as modern hard drives, they actually care about dust, and I would expect them to be more susceptible to magnetic interference); but the tape drives are not. Over time drive heads become misaligned. They continue to write fine and can read what they write; but sufficient misalignment prevents other drives of the same type from reading the tape. That tape then becomes only as useful as the drive that wrote it. Lose the drive, you lose the use of the data on the tape. Unless you test reading the tape in a different drive than it was written from (while the writing drive is still available for pulling the data out), this condition's effectively undetectable until you actually need the data.

There's a reason so many shops have moved to disk based backups. Tape simply isn't reliable. Tape is cheap; but definitely NOT reliable.