If you are going to go that far back should I start mentioning slavery and some bad American management practices that demonstrate that it's sorely missed? Will that hold up enough of a mirror to show how stupid your above comments are?

The US financial system fucked up the world's economy and the Greek situation, Spanish situation, Irish situation etc is an echo of it (because they blew everything on GFC bailouts and the cupboard is now bare), yet you have the gall to blame it on some sort of racial stereotype that is the opposite of reality. Greeks are lazy? You need to get out of your gated community.

In both cases it was listed as the most recent IE for Win7 - still just one click to infect all the users network drives.

Hence my reply that witty doesn't do it anymore. Going with a group following a fad does. However not all fads are worthless and getting to max karma with dumb jokes like I did was a flaw in the previous system.

I'm not saying users are completely blameless littel angels. But I'm so sick and tired of this reflex of blaming everything on stupid users.

Some comedian said it very nicely about another topic: When a house burns down, and the firefighters put out the flames, they don't just go home and write a report saying "fire destroyed the house". They go in and sift through the debris and try to figure out what caused the fire.

In IT we largely don't do that. We treat users as mystical black boxes and root causes and once we've found the user somewhere in the chain of causality, we stop. We don't ask ourselves why the user made this mistake or why the users don't seem to want security. We say "stupidity" the same way ancient map makers put "here be dragons" on their maps.

And that, I say, is stupid. We should go in there and figure out what actually is in that white spot. Why did the user make this mistake? Why do they fall for phishing? Why do they want speed over security? And a boilerplate "because they're stupid" is not an acceptable answer.

We're so smart (or so we think), but we can't figure out how to make security desirable, unobtrusive and a positive experience. Really?

cheap excuse

Then make it not necessary to type in a password. Even I don't understand why I should type a password for every mail I send.

No, it's not. It might be technically the best tool, but if it's unusable, then in sum total, it's not. There are many factors that go into these equations, and we techies are sometimes blind to some of them.

I don't know the mechanism, but IE as of 2015 is still just a single click away from infecting entire office networks with malware such as cryptolocker. Two recent events I've had reported to me were from clicking on an email link about parcel tracking (which opened IE, which then helpfully ran the malware in some way) and another to see an invoice (once again the two usual suspects of Outlook and IE).
I don't know if Firefox is immune to such a malware attack but I've only heard of it coming in via IE.

Slashdot today - where economists tell scientists, engineers and others that don't do fortune telling for a living to get a grip on reality. Pretty funny isn't it?

A decade ago it was easy - post a pile of crappy jokes and karma is up to 50 in no time. Now there's apparently no karma for jokes, so the easy way to get mod points is to say X is shit and Wayland is not just for phones and tablets sometime soon but can now do everything X can now. The easy way to lose points and attract foes is to politely point out that neither is the case. Pick another trendy topic like bitcoin evangelism for similar results.

But it's so easy to make a good estimate, takes less than 10 seconds:

Take your instinctive estimate.
Double it.
Increase units by one (if you think "hours", make it days. If you think "weeks" make it months, etc.)

So if you think it'll take 2-3 days, tell your manager it'll be ready in 4-6 weeks. Don't forget that in management school, they teach these fuckers to under-promise and over-deliver. He understands.

The psychological issue is that you don't know, but you have a hunch, you have some insight. You know it's probably going to be a few hours.

But for non-techies, all this stuff is a total blackbox. When you say "I don't know" they panic, because for them that means anything from a day to a month or maybe infinity. Uncertainty is a horrible psychological state and people try to avoid it. It's an instinct. When you don't know if that shadow is a monkey or a lion, it's better to panic just in case.

By saying "three days", you give him certainty. Now he knows the shadow isn't a lion.

Engineers think project managers and deadlines are a waste of time and a pain in the ass

It's because project managers used to be engineers instead of children with degrees in toga parties.

I disagree - no budget is going to help with time dependant issues or bottlenecks that cannot be "bought off". The most famous and trivial example is bringing a child to term - not happening any faster with ten mothers. Seasonal conditions are another. Production capacity of suppliers is another. Availability of staff is another. I'd say it's only really a major factor when comparing with projects with inadequate budgets.
Run three shifts and some time problems go away but not all of them.

If you want to call yourselves "engineers" without everyone laughing at you there is a need to do things like be able to schedule projects and not be afraid to put in conservative estimates for unknowns instead of what you think the boss would like to hear. If what it takes is a small pilot project to get even a vague idea of how long the real project will take then that's often a more acceptable option than stumbling in the dark until whoever is funding the project runs out of patience.
So, do you guys want to be like (or actually be) engineers or do you want to "shrug" on the job you are supposed to do and leave the time estimates to people with far less of a clue than yourselves. The latter way leads to "death march" projects and nasty ambushes where dismissal for lack of performance can come at an unexpected time simply due to others having no way to measure whether the progress to date is up to expectations or not.
Don't be afraid to take so time out to plot out a timeline and list dependancies instead of giving your boss an instant guess. An answer of "I'll have an extimate by time X" is far better than an instant wild guess of "finish the project by date X" before you've even checked who is available to do the work.

USB to IDE to get to the drive, or boot off an old linux root/boot floppy like Toms rootboot disk, and ftp, or whatever the files over to something else via the ethernet connection you didn't mention (maybe because it doesn't have one), or parallel you did mention (laplink). I'm sure many others have mentioned laplink for MSDOS.
Remember you don't have to be in the native OS or even the native hardware when all you really want is the files on the disk.
Another alternative, if there is an ethernet connection, is to go full knoppix - it isn't all that hard to run knoppix on one machine as a PXE server to boot up knoppix on a machine with no cdrom.

Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.

If you can afford it, something from Ettus would better suit your application.