I just love how people who constantly complain about how buggy and unreliable everything is--and justifiably so, by and large--imagine that there's no way to activate a booby trap by mischance or hostility.

Speaking of arrogance, it takes quite a bit of it, that, or paranoia, to imagine that people in a data center know or care what you're doing with your equipment there. They all have jobs to do, and if you're doing something so sensitive that you think the risk of being spied on in the data center is that high, you should probably have your own data center. That, or lay off the meth^Wcoffee.

Everybody was kung-fu fighting.

Your assumption that content people might find--Facebook or elsewhere--that is more harmful to them than a censorship policy just handed down to them--is false. This is your chance to confront the people asking you to implement the policy with a couple of questions:

1. Given all the ways people get uncensored internet even under autocratic regimes where the penalties are brutal, what makes you think any censorship policy could work?

2. Which feasible projects are you willing to divert resources from in order to tilt at this windmill?

Don't let them answer 2. until they've got 1. well in hand.

Yep. Fast. Cheap. Good.

Pick two.

That's actually the optimistic perspective. Given skill, experience and good will, you could pick up to two. Frequently, the most you could have is one, or in sadly common cases, zero.

Um, excuse me, but did it escape your notice that the vast majority of terrorists in this country are white "Christians" on the extreme right?

Complaints, at least ones not issued via Ouija board, would probably decrease :P

You know someone was going to ask. It's me.

With what AGPL software did you run across this situation?

Here I thought I was fairly late to the party.

I don't think the word, "coercion" means what you think it means. Are you really in a position to force Intel to do anything? Really?

s/no thinking required/thinking actively discouraged/

Actually, this could be pretty significant if it takes some clever machine rather than a host of gigantic centrifuges to do the job.

You do realize that OP was referring to MySQL, do you not?

I suspect similar arguments were made for having gears shift without manual intervention, but people got use to the situation so thoroughly that only in niche markets is it even possible to sell a second-hand car with a manual transmission.

You must have been stoned to come up with that. Shale on you!