The first thing I thought of was the civilization in Asimov's Foundation series that took over control of neighboring economies by selling gadgets powered by little nuclear power sources.

Wouldn't it be in the best interest of someone who makes money at their blog to dissuade people from becoming competition? Perhaps by writing a blog about how difficult it is to make money at blogging, regardless of what the Wall Street Journal says?

You need to look at things, and explain things, in terms of business operations. IT exists to serve the needs of the business, not as an end in itself.

Explain what liberal policies you have in terms of how they control cost and mitigate risk. When someone insists that a request be completed immediately, explain that - as in any business - rush processing carries a cost.

People think that all IT does is spend money without returning anything to the business, and so they think that they can demand anything they like from IT on any schedule. After all, shouldn't IT be giving back to the business for all the money it spends?

Explain to management the ways that investment in technology saves money in some places (compared to not using technology at all), insures against expense in others, and provides services that allow the business to function at a higher rate of productivity. Explain to sales staff that they would not have as much time to firm up sales (or go golfing) if their sales flow weren't recorded in an easily accessible electronic medium.

When none of that works at all, change all the passwords for everything and have all the computers go on strike for a week.

Why would only staff and students be under this order? Why not everyone in the entire world who has SRJC in their email address?

What's the problem with running bulk cable between RJ45 jacks and using factory-made short patch cables at the ends?

If those GPAs are on a four-point scale, the main thing this study tells me is that college is too easy.

If the daughter has one computer and the dad the other, you should be able to restrict it so that DNS traffic is restricted outbound to OpenDNS only from the source IP of the daughter's machine, and is not restricted for the dad's machine.

Do your own snooping on company management. Find out what the executive committee does on and off hours. Any of them been troubled by financial scandal, large or small? Certainly, there are plenty of executives who have been caught up in some money game along the way somewhere, and one might think that the current economic climate might put people off working for the company if they were fully aware of the facts.

I understand the Core2Duo Typing Machine phenomenon, I think.

My first 32-bit Windows machine, in 1996, had a 1GB hard drive. One. 1024MB. Surely, hardware manufacturers could still make a standard 1GB hard drive with platters, but good luck finding one for sale. Today, it costs just about as much to make a 1GB hard drive as it does to make a 60GB or an 80GB hard drive. Who's going to buy a 1GB hard drive when they could buy an 80GB for pretty much the same price? (That's leaving the $5 1GB flash memory completely out of the equation.) Nobody. And so nobody is going to manufacture them, either.

Complete desktop virtualization using lightweight clients has been possible for a looooong time. Business hasn't been jumping on to do it yet; how does the success or failure of Windows 7 suddenly have anything to do with it?