They don't, of course.

Doctorow's EULA can't go out the door as it is for one simple reason: It doesn't have a statement about liability. The cleanest EULA I can think of would say:

1. This is copyrighted material,
2. It is subject to copyright laws,
3. The copyright went into effect on ______,
4. We hold the copyright.
5. Use it (or don't) at your own risk, because nothing that happens (or fails to happen) is our fault in any way.

Much better, though personally I think it should include a statement like

Probably the part where the defendant had already shown the kiddie porn to the border patrol. He had already testified against himself. Remember that bit in the Miranda warning about "anything you say can be held against you?"

Border patrol: Do you have any kiddie porn?
Defendant: Yep. Here it is on this scrambled partition I will now provide you access to.
Border patrol: You're under arrest for the kiddie porn.
Laptop: It is now safe to turn off your computer.
Later
Laptop: What porn?
Defendant: Yeah, what porn?
Border patrol: The porn you willingly showed us yesterday.
Defendant: I won't show you what's on that scrambled partition.
Judge: By showing it to us before you demonstrated that you were willing to let us see it. Saying yes once means yes forever. Kinda like rape.

It was a very narrow ruling.

Well, it thought about it for a little while, then it said to itself, "You know what? I'm a text editor. Let Firefox do its job and I'll do mine."

And the both lived happily ever after.

I'm a software guy and the book gave me a bit of perspective on what hardware people do.

IP is the epitome of imaginary.

Somewhat more personally satisfying is when your old boss calls you and asks in a shaky voice "We just found out nobody's been changing tapes like you used to do every morning and, um, there was this crash...Uh, how do we get all our clients' data back?" and you get to tell them that:

1. Ignoring two weeks of "insert tape 2" e-mails was a bad thing,
2. You'd documented all backup and recovery procedures in a binder in the IT bookcase, and
3. They're unambiguously screwed.

And I don't know what the schadenfreude equivalent of an orgasm would be like but surely you will, a few months later, when you see their corporate obituary in the San Jose Mercury News...

In a modern society there are plenty of professions that can make this claim. Truck drivers, farmers, plumbers, power company linesmen, and so forth.

In IT, we're plumbers. Some of us also design plumbing systems, but the only time we're called on or even noticed is when the shit gets backed up. But we're not the reason the company exists. We're there to help the business side of the house achieve its goals. So we get called when the people who make money for the company are unable to make the money because their IT ain't working.

That said there's plenty of folks who see IT as nothing more than a cost center, something that subtracts from, rather than adds to, the bottom line. When they do that, there's resentment, there's the urge to see us as a cost that can or should be cut rather than something that contributes to the company's success.

I wish I knew the source of this quote:

I think a company's non-IT staff can get that way, scorning their on-staff plumbers because what we do "isn't important." But we plumbers do the same thing, looking as the company as a host organism that exists to give us something to do. Makes us sound kinda...parasitic, don't it?

Are you building a computer that'll be used by many people, or a computer for just one person? An individual's computer has to to persist user data and configuration for months or years, which means you have to configure the OS rather robustly and defensively, because while some of the age 70+ newbies I've dealt with are super-sharp, the rest have been too trusting of the computer and the Internet it connects them to. They go online and click on every ad, every popup, every possible anything. Next thing you know they've volunteered their system into every botnet under the sun and can't figure out why their Yahoo! bridge game is crashing and there's all these naked ladies popping up out of nowhere.

For computers owned by individuals, my recommendation is to sandbox things as well as possible. Get a firewalling router, a software firewall, and aggressive virus scanning and trojan detection. Give them Firefox, install or subscribe to a phishing/scam detection system. Get them a Gmail account. If they've never been exposed to Windows, consider Ubuntu or a Mac. But please respect their ability to learn while allowing for the possibility for mistakes. Same as any newbie-friendly environment.

For computers in the rec room, you can protect them from viruses and trojan damage very simply: Every night at 2:00 AM the computer reboots and reinstalls a clean OS image from a master copy somewhere. I don't know how good Windows is at this, but under Linux it's trivial: Set up a VM (even a Windows VM!), and cron a job that kills the VM, overwrites the image file, then starts the VM (maybe in full-screen mode?). You still want a firewall etc, but the scope of most newbie-inflicted damage will be the rest of the day, not the rest of the system's operational lifetime.

The last fucking thing I needed this morning was a graphic description of infant abuse.