If you're really concerned about government observing your web browsing habits, use Tor (http://www.torproject.org/) for any browsing where personally identifying user information is not present and ensure you're using https over Tor for the cases where you pass user names/etc or information about you is being passed back. Tor and Firefox play quite nicely together as long as you're smart about it.

Utorrent would probably get some benefit out of Tor as well, but I don't really know how Utorrent works. If it provides some sort of "node identifier" when it downloads a file, encryption of Utorrent would be necessary to hide that node identifier. If it doesn't ship a node identifier across the network when it downloads a file, I suspect Tor by itself would be enough to mask what you are doing.

If you decide to use Tor, please fully understand how it works before trusting that you are truly anonymous. This is especially true if you're running a service over Tor that you do not fully understand (aka, Utorrent). If you don't eliminate user identifiable data, Tor can't help you.

Not on my Backflip :( Shame on you, Moto.

May I quietly suggest that you didn't really want to work there anyway?

It is less flawed than the current methods mentioned in the summary. In fact, it does MORE to measure the team effort than a metric like goals scored. This is what we might call an incremental improvement. /facepalm

Why use Open Office when the university installs Windows and MS Office on your PC for you and everyone you work with uses MS Office except for that weird guy over in IT? The reality is that short of a university wide switch to Open Office, I will continue to be that weird guy in IT running Linux and using that Open Office thingy.

Any feature that allows me to work with MS Office easier is wonderful from my perspective.

As the data warehouse guy here, I fight the export to Excel battle regularly and that has nothing to do with my comment. I was talking specifically about Word documents that OO won't open correctly with the version I'm using.

Yay! I think people were beginning to dislike me a little when I'd ask them to convert and resend an attachment that I couldn't open. Looks like I'll have to hunt around for some other subtle way to annoy my co-workers :)

It's only slightly less amusing than if it had been Fahrenheit 451 :)