hum ... so you don't care whether manufacturers ensure the disks they refurbish are clean of any info?

... in fact you don't care about privacy, and you consider everything you store on disks to be of no importance, and accept that they are sent out to random people when the disks are made to work again?
don't whine when your software licenses get stolen and your accounts get used by random people, then.

I say: complain about it, and try and make them so ashamed of this that they ensure they wipe out disks before sending them out in the future.

It would be nice if the "learn-in" didn't show people only info about the technical implications of the SOPA and PIPA.

I think more people should be aware that more than having this huge annoyance technically, all of the applications that people are gonna use will be, practically speaking, spying on what they're doing. And also that that "spying" won't be put up for bad reasons at first ... but hey! once the info will be readily available, why not take a look at it once in a while and come up with something new that's unacceptable that people do in their private life.

I think people should also know that those acts will in fact rob them of a fundamental right, which is the right to privacy.
Statements from politicians and big media representatives that state "if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need to have privacy" prove that they don't really understand the reason for the existence of this right. The right to privacy is there to put a barrier to avoid law enforcement from abusing of their powers by simply prying into any personal and private information that they can put their teeth on, thus to avoid having a whole bunch of people wrongly accused of things they didn't commit because they behaved in a certain way that makes law officials think that they caught a felon.
It's a law that serves to balance power between the state and the people: without things like this law, people become powerless (read: unable to defend oneself) before the state.

ouch, how much time did you stay there? I wouldn't have gone through this for too long.

they hired you as their sysadmin to get some professional advice and technical skills, but they just don't want to listen to your advice..

Sometimes, though, you just need to find the right way to explain to your bosses / clients what you're thinking of.
For example, I started working for a client some time ago who was saying "Could you have a look at our servers? We got busted (security issues) around 3 months ago, but I would think that everything is now going well." They didn't resinstall their busted server, or fix the problems in any way.. the botnet running in there was just "less active" :P
I needed the client to go from "Everything's going fine" to "Ouch, WTH is happening on my servers?" So the way I found out to prove my point that things were not OK was to setup tighter monitoring. Since the client was receiving the alerts, too, he started seeing when the ssh binary got replaced and when other problems were around. The idea to ask me to really fix things up "came from himself". heh

now for the OP: hmm... I guess I'd go with other comments: paid support can be good for situations where your team really isn't prepared to handle most situations.
but if what you're afraid of is to have that really weird quirk that brings your server down and that you don't know how to handle, you could do two things:

1. convince your CIO to have a team of consultants around that are specialized in the software you're most afraid of so that they can help you out when it busts down.
2. don't stop there, designate people who should attend formations on how to manage this software and if possible, try and have the consultants teach those people how to fix those weird quirks.
3. have the people on formation write documentation on the procedures and config twists that they learn.
4. when the designated people are starting be able to manage the previously unknown software appropriately, have them teach others so that it becomes general culture in your whole team.

Is that what they call "the end of time" ?