Actually, I meant in the other sense. The American public has a right to know that an agency of it's government is illegally spying on them. The public has no such overriding interest in the personal details of federal employees.

It could, of course, be that they reviewed the benefits and risks and drew their own conclusions which sometimes match the consensus and sometimes don't.

And meanwhile, Snowden's release had a strong element of public interest to it. There is no public interest in OPM's screw up.

True, but unlike all of the domestic spying going on, securing American networks and government systems from foreign attack is very much part of their charter. They blew it big time.

We are primarily a government contractor, and our main contract had a Siebel-based client management system (only a government would have the combination of money and stupidity to invest in an ancient technology like that, but oh well), and up until late last year, we had to run IE in the lowest security mode and IE7 compatibility mode just to make the ActiveX components function. The new version is by and large HTML5 compatible, and though they recommend Firefox, we've had only a few bumps running Chrome. I doubt more than a handful of our staff even use IE now.

Since we are discussing rules for the society where those links hold true, it hardly matters.

If/when society changes radically enough, we can revisit.

That will be quite a radical change though since as far back as written history goes, we find remarks about young adults being more rash and hot-headed than their elders and so in need of guidance.

See the references here.

If your claim was true, parents would instinctively tell their 5 year olds to go to bed when they feel like it and wouldn't worry about it if their 12 year old decided not to come home until morning.

Instead, they recognize that the 5 year old is developmentally advanced enough to avoid immediate threats but is nowhere near ready to plan their future.

Your knowledge is decades out of date.

It's pervasive and powerful all right. It's just that it has the Competence of the Three Stooges and the level headedness of the Queen of Hearts.

Yes, well, we often hurt the ones we love.

About the only place I still see IE is on some web-based applications from the late 90s thru the mid-00s that were built using IE 5 and 6's very insecure ActiveX architecture. Up until last year, we were forced to use such software on one of our government contracts, and it literally meant viewing the site in Compatibility Mode with security settings cranked down to nothing. They finally updated the underlying Siebel engine to the HTML5 version, and after that everyone just seemed to go to Chrome. I suppose at that point where we start rolling out Win10 desktops, Edge might end up being used, but I have a feeling that MS has missed the bus here, and Chrome is king.

I think Firefox dealt it the mortal blow, and then Chrome finished the job.

No it isn't. It is a fact of human development.

That doesn't mean helicopter parenting is in order or that they can't manage at home by themselves for a while with generally increasing autonomy, but it does mean that expecting adult thinking about longer term life choices will be hit and miss at best. It makes no more sense to hold them forever responsible for their actions than it does to teach calculus in kindergarten.

While pulling everything off the internet forever isn't really possible, we can certainly disallow use of old information from childhood when deciding on employment or credit at the very least.