The problem is that the IT dept is becoming less IT literate...
The industry has expanded very rapidly, and demand for skilled people has massively outpaced demand. This is then coupled with vendors who try to claim their products don't require highly skilled staff to manage them.

Also as you point out, people are becoming more IT literate but this can be dangerous, as these people often think they know a lot more than they really do and are prone to breaking things. These are also the kind of people who try to move into IT and become cheap but barely competent staff.

And a lot of problems aren't down to budget, more competent staff can do more with less resources... It is incompetent staff who will just try to throw money at a problem rather than studying the issue properly.

I long for the days when the IT dept was staffed by geeks who understood the technology and had enough of a keen interest in it to spend their free time learning about new technologies. Now you get an IT dept full of suits who learned what little they know on a few short courses and have no interest in learning anything new.

Using more resources is exactly what happens... As hardware gets faster, software gets slower. While some of the slowness can be attributed to additional features and larger data sets, much of it is down to using higher level languages. Very few people bother writing efficient code anymore, on the basis they can always throw more hardware at it.
I have personal experience with a few games that were deemed too slow and rather than try to improve the code, they were simply shelved for a couple of years until the average hardware had caught up.

Every car does have a cheap option for GPS, it's called aftermarket units like tomtom etc, or even just a stand for your phone these days.

The problem with many built in gps systems is that auto makers soon stop updating them...

What's most stupid is that these "pirating bastards" don't make anything off the work either, almost all torrents are distributed for free.

The worst problem is the branding...
iOS is branded distinctly from OSX, so that users won't mistake the two and try to run applications for one on the other. Windows RT creates a false impression of compatibility which ultimately disappoints users. The dirt cheap Windows CE laptops had the same issue.

And the bing web crawler is extremely inefficient, i had to block it from accessing several of my sites because it was bombarding them with enough requests to cause a continuous 20mbps stream of traffic.

So you make it inconvenient for your employees to do their jobs, which will make some potentially good employees walk and reduce the efficiency of those who remain. Technology is supposed to improve the efficiency of workers, otherwise why bother using it at all? It's very hard to include working exploit code on a piece of paper.

While i agree attachments are often misused, and i utterly detest companies that attach a bunch of images to every email they send out, all you can really do is avoid doing such stupid things yourself... Other people will still do it.

Postscript is a turing complete language, it has even more scope for including malicious code than pdf does.

Incidentally there are also subset versions of the pdf format which don't include stupid features like javascript.

Cracking the password is entirely different from removing the "limitations"...
If you can open the file and read it, then you can always modify, print, copy etc the file too. If you can read the file then you have already got past the encryption because either there is no encryption or you have the key.

The only option remotely useful, is the one to encrypt the file with a password for opening. The other "features" are just stupid client side security, and only appear to work if the client respects the options. All the user has to do, is open the file with a different pdf reader that ignores the options. Options like this are actually worse than having no options at all, because they create a false sense of security and encourage users to use them.

If you can read the file, you can always copy data out of it, print it, edit it etc.

Seriously, why do people still run acrobat? PDF is a standard format, there are countless programs which support it and the only reason such files are a target is because adobe reader is basically a monoculture and represents a very large and attractive target. We need diversity among PDF readers, just like diversity among web browsers. It was diversity among web browsers more than anything else that reduced browser attacks and caused hackers to concentrate on proprietary monoculture plugins instead.

Because step 1 would have been successful, and thus you would never make it to step 2. I think he just miswrote the "return to step 1" bit..