I work for a company with a lot of patents. Our products are protected partially by patents and partially by trade secret information. In other words, to recreate our product you would need to license the patents AND figure out how we did the other stuff, that is NOT patented, but is secret. There's no reason you can't mix patented and trade secret technology in one solution.

Ahhh science, where one logical theory is considered wrong but another one can be considered right.
Hypocrisy loves science too when you oversimplify like you did with religion.

Well, it hasn't actually gotten to the "girlfriend" stage yet. It's a lot harder to cut down a full grown oak tree than a new sprout. And I could have done or said something without even knowing it.

[ xxx] I already have a positive/negative entrenched opinion of Python or Ruby [xxx ] I assume Ruby == Ruby on Rails [xxx ] I program in PHP for it's robust design, consistent syntax and architectural soundness :)

We know they had poison gas. The UK and US sold it to to them.

If we wanted real proof of whether or not the Iraqis had chemical weapons, we'd just check the invoices for 1989-1991.

Science actually proves nothing by nature. It only attempts to disprove specific situations with specific conditions applied.

My point was that morality is subjective. There simply is no objective standard to measure against, and we need to accept that - quickly, because this also means that any AIs we make will have only the morality we explicitly program into them.

Of course, I'm not saying that this means you can't act against someone else breaching your morality. Of course you can; it's physically possible. As to whether it's ethical or not.. well, you'll have to be the judge of that. Me, I'd say it is so long as the reason for your action agrees with my own morality. So would most other people, though some would pretend that's not their reason.

Whatever your opinion ont he safety at airports, if we could double the guards at the exits/entrances and it *could* help with people like myself who aren't always paying attention to where their feet are taking them, then by all means lets employ some people and bring down our unemployment numbers a bit :)

Partially right. The problem is, that in many larger organisations the 'legitimate business need --> approval' process does not scale well with regard to the time required to get the approval. So even if you do have a legitimate business need, waiting for the approval might still keep you from getting your job done. Multiply this by say ... 2,000 people waiting 10 days to get an approval for something. This will cost you real money.

It seems to be difficult to balance these things. But having a good zoning concept at hand might be of great help. It keeps the wrong people from tampering with critical resources, but it also allows employees to use necessary services e.g. SFTP. Yes, I've come across a situation were I was not allowed to get a patch from a vendor using SFTP. The idea was: SFTP may be used for stealing data. Use FTP, this is far more secure, as we can scan it with deep packet inspection.

At the place were I currently work we have kind of a "feel free to use the internet as you wish" policy. This actually works out quite well. Sites are not filtered specifically. They basically say "hey, if you end up doing illegal stuff, you're screwed, otherwise we don't care as long as you get to do your work."

I used to work for a financial institution before that. And they had sort of a lockdown-mania. Filtering proxies (no checking your private web mail - could be used for stealing information), read-only USB mass storage, scanning outgoing e-mail attachments etc. I guess, these rules came in place because of management being scared to death by compliance requirements, not because of IT admins abusing their power.

And BTW: Had I wished to steal massive amounts of data, I could have still simply sent them via e-mail in a password-encrypted archive. It's a matter of trust, not only of making it difficult. So basically powerful and clueless management are equally effective as power-abusing admins.