Thrasymachus, is that you?

That's an awfully short summary of a pretty big field of philosophy, right there. Sure, there's a spin on it and we will always see what we want to see, but 100 years later, when people have had time to dissect leaked documents with the benefit of hindsight, things will surface. The majority may believe something at the moment, but it's not the truth.

I don't know if you know, he did actually do a bit before he was in office. They might have considered things before he became the President for his nomination.

Guantanamo Bay hasn't been closed yet because the previous administration didn't care enough about many of the prisoners there to keep proper files on why they were there in the first place, and they don't want to release everyone on the grounds that they don't quite remember what they did. Granted, a lot of them shouldn't have been there in the first place, but they don't want to accidentally release some criminals along with however many presumably innocent people are there...the point is that they don't know whether releasing them or not would be really, really dangerous, and they're trying to find places to move them while they figure it out.

Similarly, with the health care reform...well, I don't know if you've heard, but there's been somewhat of a debate on the issue holding it up a bit? Nothing huge, it'll probably blow over soon.

They probably have, you'll just have to look in the "multiverse" section because they're nonfree.

I'll give you that one, there's definitely a time when people need to have the authority shown, just like how you can't parent with a smile all the time. But if you're not a people person, their managers should be, and you can tell them they're compromising the security of the company, and they can ream ass on their employees.

This is the same problem that teachers face every day. Teachers who give up and figure most teenagers "just don't care" aren't the ones kids thank later in life. Of course people are going to react negatively when you try and take away their YouTube. Let their manager deal with their lack of productivity in whatever ways managers do it best (or worst...).

The problem is that there's a fine line between "keeping twerps from using up all the company bandwidth" and "administering draconian policies to get everyone to work your way or else". The only difference between the two is the discretion of whoever's in charge, and leaving it up to that person often has disastrous results. The answer is definitely not to fight from both sides until someone gives up, that just makes enemies out of both sides, when it's in the interest of both parties to be on the same side.

For example: a common method to limit bandwidth is to block users from installing Flash and thus block websites which use Flash to stream content (YouTube, streaming radio stations, etc.) But then you run into having to allow access to people who want to use Flash for legitimate reasons. Or people who want to stream content in the background while working more productively (like listening to music at work)?

If you're in IT, it's your job to make sure the systems work so that people can do their jobs better, not to hinder the systems so that people do their jobs worse.

This is Slashdot. I'll take the cheaper one with ads, and just run adblock. Until it's banned...

It's undoubtedly your trusting & respectful attitude that makes your workplace a wonderful place to get things done. What ever happened to educating people about what the problem is with this software? I wouldn't go so far as to say start holding classes, but if it's a continuous problem there's nothing stopping you from sending out a mass e-mail telling them that there are fake things on the internet that people need to watch out for. Mention the extreme security risk, include lots of pictures and borrow a copywriter from Marketing for a half hour to make something people will actually read, instead of dismissing like "another IT e-mail," and you just might reduce some problems. Management & people skills shouldn't be just for the guys in the suits.

Want a car analogy? What if AAA took away your keys and left you with the valet one everytime you locked your keys in the car, or your insurance company installed a camera on your dashboard to make you paranoid and start to do that check-your-mirror-every-3-to-5-seconds thing you did while taking driving lessons and then immediately stopped once you passed your test.

Sure, it's your job to take care of the company's computers - and this involves keeping them clean and virus-free - but power-tripping with technology most people don't understand properly (or understand only as deep as they need to do their jobs) doesn't help anyone. Neither does a "no mercy" policy.

You know, I think it would be better if IT were a profession, requiring a doctorate degree.

Hang on...they're thinking it's bad that people no longer look at you funny when you ask them what browser they use? They're lamenting the good old days when people put the entire e-mail in the subject line? They miss the lucrative position of explaining to someone that no, they can't just have root access? Explaining that the backup isn't supposed to be the only copy?

This is a problem?

I saw it and immediately though Hitchhiker's Guide (the version from the movie). How long do you think it'll be before someone programs one for it, probably based off of Wikipedia?

You're drawing the line, there, though? You're saying that the line which makes the picture "artificial" is when Photoshop's come in? Personally, I don't think most people spend most of their time oiled up, bent over and spread, so a picture of someone in a contrived pose with specific lighting and makeup is just as artificial as a person airbrushed. The trick isn't having a label telling people that "these pictures have been modified", it's to make it general knowledge that all magazine photos are in some way modified, just like how most semi-intelligent people realize that food pictures are mostly fake.

Oh I agree that it's like Pascal's wager, but that's more of a bad thing than you'd think. Granted, I've never raised a kid so I don't know how difficult any of this is, but the Pascal's wager logic is just weird.

Yes, Pascal's wager is a decent justification for being religious but it proposes a pretty terrible way to get into a spiritual life, as a way of basically covering your ass in case God exists. It's basically the tattoo on the ass of the "Archbishop" in Johnny English: "Jesus is coming - look busy." Sure, you end up with a lot of people going to church, but they're going 'just in case,' rather than honestly believing that God is someone who should be praised. It's a lousy excuse for showing up to mass, and you'd probably be better off concentrating on being a decent, moral, secular person than faking that you believe in God, however well you manage to halfway convince yourself.

Same thing with this watch. I mean a protection "just in case" your child gets abducted sounds great, but it's also a lousy excuse for not teaching your child to think about what they're doing when a stranger in a van offers them candy, or , or just in general. Sure, you end up with a lot of parents feeling safe about their children, but it's because they trust some strange device they're paying a monthly fee for, not because they trust their actual child, and which would you rather trust, some company called Lok8r, or your own offspring?

Plus, there's plenty of technical reasons why this is a terrible idea. Ignoring the very real possibility for someone other than you to track your kid, you're saying you can't think of a way for someone to get the watch off without "forcibly removing" it in the ways they've come up with? I can, and they're more horrifying than a simple abduction.

Personally, I'm curious to see what happens when the results become...tampered...

Look at the name, they called it exactly what it was. Digital Rights Management: a system by which the rights of a user to in any way use a digital signal are managed. Whether that signal's passing from DVD player to screen, torrent file to hard drive, .avi on a CD to your college roommate, or NAS in the basement to the laptop propped up on your knees in bed; the RIAA has made it very clear that they want to (and, to a degree, have been able to) control the way the set of bits representing a work of art, that they feel they own, is used. DRM has never been about stopping pirates because that would be too limiting of a concept. Why put all this effort into stopping pirates when they can stop other small nuisances that *IAAs have probably never quite liked - things like lending DVDs to neighbours,

This hit the nail right on the head. Users feel they have the right to do what they want with what they consider "their property," whether it's that DVD they shelled out 30 bucks for, or the .avi of a free, independant movie they legally torrented from an animation studio. For some reason, organizations representing the industry (not the artists them selves) feel that in the digital age, our concept of property has to change in order for art to continue to be produced. Any rational person would beg to differ.

The worst part is that this doesn't even "close the analog hole" in any way. Sure, it stops one portion of it - recording/viewing media through component cable - but that's putting a band-aid on a chest wound. The real analog hole is the fact that, in the end, the screen is being displayed visually - it's just photons. We happen to have a method of captuing photons spread across a period of time, the video camera. Sure, it'll look crappy at first, but people will get better at normalizing the colours or finding different capture methods, and, as has been seen before, users will adapt to the worse quality format because it's the one that's not fleecing them.

Personally, I'm keeping my older equipment until stores eventually realize that trying to redefine the legel definition of property outisde of the court system turns more customers away than pirates it keeps at bay - which, last time I checked, was virtually nil.