You make a good case for increasing upload bandwidth, but other than WAN recovery (a full restore of a 1TB disk will take 18 days), none of those requires better than a 6.5Mbit symmetric connection.

"user-settable blacklist."

user, here, is ftdi, though ;(

Yes I know, but throttling users who set poor limits is generally frowned upon and tends to hurt your fingers after a while.

Writing a program that demands admin rights when it does not need them (eg. to put a lock file in the root of the system drive instead of elsewhere for a purely arbitrary reason) is even lazier.

Sometimes it's better to go after the root cause of the problem and get the developers that have been left behind to understand that it's the 21st century and their desktop software is likely to be running in a multi-user, networked, multi-core, 64 bit environment. There are far too many that can't even get ONE of those things in the list right which is a major part of why so many MS Windows systems are drowning in a malware swamp. We need to get away from the "we've always done it this way" culture of being acceptable when the way it's "always been done" only makes sense on single user systems with no network connection.

grant a specific whitelist of additional privileges to the users who need to use said application

So what do you suggest when that is all of them? Apart from of course trying various methods to convince the developer to learn how to do his job properly?

It's a single fool with a gun, not a group.

I don't know if it ever went as far as trying to get rid of sysadmins (Redmond has made no lack of money off of MCSEs and the like over the years), but they certain encouraged an attitude that command prompts, scripting and of the more "traditional" methods of system administration had been rendered obsolete; or rather, would be with "the next version". I have been subjected to numerous issues over the years that required me manually altering the registry, registering/re-registering/de-registering COM DLLs, screwing around in the bowels of IIS, Exchange, SQL Server, and yes, in many cases, invoking the dreaded command line. It was always alright because "In the next version, this functionality will be added!"

And now, as of 2014, Microsoft has pretty much flipped everything on its head. The GUI admin tools are all but deprecated, viewed as the lesser way to administer a Windows server, and PowerShell is proper and appropriate way.

The worst part about all of this is neither Microsoft or its legion of faithful sysadmins see any irony in this. Unix, in their view, is still some antiquated operating system with dated methodologies and philosophies (despite having commands like Move-Item to *nix's mv).

Very well pointed out. Professional website themes are inexpensive these day to the point that anyone using hand-scrawls like http://www.graphviz.org/ are just asking for disdain.

Seems to be https://github.com/ellson/grap...

Also, why does the website need a machine? Throw it on the free GitHub pages and you'll be fine there.

Days after another Islamic radical mowed down two Canadian soldiers.

It's not time to panic, to be sure. It's time to deal with radical Islamist extremists.

However when you have inhouse software that only runs as admin because your VB jockeys haven't worked out that it's no longer 1995 then you are fucked - frequently - when each new wave of malware hits.
MS Windows is no longer the problem. Losers who treat it like MSDOS and write software are the problem.

Name dropping? Hasn't everyone and their dog at least read Heart of Darkness? I'll bet it's still a set school text in a lot of places. Conrad was a popular writer in his time with contemporary technology and politics featuring in his novels so I think it's fair to compare him with a popular hard SF writer. He had some science in his fiction.
Of course it would make far more sense to compare Conrad's two spy novels and Tom Clancy, but that would be cruel.

Now it appears, that we must change

It's just the people that are utterly feral about the situation that need to change. One medical example is a city where all the orthopedic surgeons had played Rugby and for some reason nobody who hadn't passed the requirements for the medical specialty. Even the woman that thought she could get around the unspoken qualification by being a match doctor at state level games didn't pass despite high scores. So no girls or weedy nerds allowed.
We've got similar shit festering in IT and it's dragging us down by creating monocultures where it manifests.
So it's not about change unless there's counterproductive unwritten rules that probably need to be changed.

Actually CS classes were what engineering boys in the 1980s enrolled in if they wanted to meet girls (also they very easy subjects for the first two years). In 1987 the introductory CS subject at the university I attended was just over 50% female. Less than 1% in engineering.
I don't know how many of that 50% ended up finding a job related to CS. I suspect it was very few of them.