IT is poorly capable of handling computers and software at the three institutes I've worked at (2x university, 1x government). We had our own private sysadmin at one of the faculties that did allow us to be productive researchers, rather than crippled ones. Scaled-up-to-whole-organization IT don't work that well in my experience, and getting anything sensible done (such as upgrading from IE6, or scaling 10mb mailboxes up to something fitting to this millenium) takes 5 years.

Now we've both vented about 'the other guy', can we get back to normal and not assume we know the quality of the IT the OP is working with, the real job description of the OP, and his psychological profile? The guy is asking a question, and a sysadmin could tell him why his IT service finds it sufficient to have an account on the server to allow it.
 

Same surprise here at the aggressive responses to the OP. Haven't seen any answers yet from a sysadmin here on why the IT department would be ok with it if they had a user account on the box, which was the OP's question. What would an IT guy do with a user account?

Why on earth do you need a carb-free bread? Unless you are allergic, just manage your eating habits in a normal way.

The point of the above sentence being: medicine is not always the best answer. Third world countries are starving because we 1. destroy their local farmers' economy by dumping free food on them (note that when the chinese are dumping textile on european / USA markets, we start adding trade taxes for a reason), and 2. destroy what food-production they still have by making it financial beneficial for individual farmers to grow cheap maize for our cattle, rather than food for their countrymen. (3. Because their governments are far from brilliant, but we're not making it easy for those governments either).

I can see that one solution is to make the few farmers these countries have be more efficient in producing grain with GM crops, but there's also the solution of 'lets stop to abuse the fcuk out of third world countries', which seems to be the higher moral ground.

I think you are muddling the analogy here somewhat, possibly mixing up the concepts of 'can be a crime' and 'is illegal'.

It is possible to legally pick up money, so money-from-the-porch regulations can be in a contract. What cannot be in a contract is that when I do something that you disapprove of, you are entitled to enslave me for 5 years. There is no way that slavery is legal, so it is meaningless in contracts.

This threw me off at first. It read like active genes have a backup stored somewhere in the inactive part. That is not the case =). We're not having and L1/2/3 cache in our genome.

I think there's a good explanation why it doesn't work both ways (one being acceptable, and the other not).

Women gained the right to vote as late as 1920 in the USA, and were seen as worth less than man for god knows how many years. That sort of leaves a mark.. and makes jokes about it a more sensitive issue than the other way around.

And I've heard and made plenty of jokes about women, but not so much the other way around. Might be because I'm a boy, and spend quite some time in a fraternity.

What I quoted is the response of a girl present at that conference. I just remembered that something like this hit the blogs a few months ago and googled for it.

Khasim was asking for examples. This is one where a girl was offended by it. Doesn't say anything about inherently offending all women.

I think a white person would be seen as a poor coder being whipped forward by the management ;-).

The difference is that white people didn't recently go through mass slavery or suppression. That context to me makes a white man a joke and the black man not.

Slavery ended in the 1860's in the USA. Woman gained voting rights as late as 1920. While slavery is far worse than not being allowed to vote, both are a quite extreme expression of inequality.

Not particularly disturbing. But I think that the current sensitivity to one thing or another isn't an objective reflection of how wrong something is.

Your statement just reminded me of an old joke about women, which touches upon slavery as well.

"What's wrong when you wife comes out of the kitchen and starts nagging you? You made the chain too long."

Noone in this thread is collecting all instances of sexism on the internet.

A lot of people are quoting the latest, most exposed cases of sexism, which sort of seems the logical thing to do. Why quote an obscure case from 1996?

Its' not about porn vs slavery, which would be a poor comparison indeed.

It is about putting offending pictures to a particular group of people in your presentation, and I picked a stronger example on purpose to try (and fail to) show Khasim that frequency of nasty comments in a mailinglist isn't all that matters.

Why do I need to be 'there', in order to name an example of sexism. Doesn't seem to be a requirement.

Why do I fail whenever I (or several others in the thread) try to explain that your defense in numbers of non-sexist posts is irrelevant.

You show all the signs of a troll. /signing out.

Good point. Either would probably make me uncomfortable. And I'm male :).

I tried to transpose the sexism to racism, as I thought that people would find it easier to pick up racism than sexism.

Lets' repeat ObsessiveMathsFreak answer again. If I don't shoot you a thousand times, and then shoot you, there is no problem?

You asked for examples, someone got you 4 examples 5 minutes after you asked, and you immediately discard that as 'not enough examples'. That doesn't bode well for any kind of rational discussion.

To answer your last sentence: Lets' rephrase (again) it to this and see if it rings some bells:

" So, if only 1.% of the developers are negroid ... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are racist ... what is the real "problem" that exists? "

Imagine that rather than having a naked chick every so many slides (as happened in a talk @ GoCaRuCo), you would have a picture of a negroid in chains animation pulling in the next slide of the presentation. Add a whip to the scene and it would make even a mostly white audience severely uncomfortable.

I think we're just far more sensitive to racism than to sexism, which makes it a bit harder to pick up acts of sexism.