I agree to a point when you've reached a senior level. Jr to Mid level programmers should be slowly building up their skills in this area before being given full admin access - many companies I've worked for limit the admin privileges to installing software for Jrs, Software and Settings for Mids (minus disabling critical software like Virus protection), and Srs have full access to their local box.

As a side note - no support person can handle all the situations needed in the programming environment. That being said, you should still consult your support personnel before making any modification your not completely sure of - it's only common courtesy if they're the ones having to reinstall everything because you f'ed your machine up. If you do all your own installing then you're probably competent enough to handle it.

The whole point is to make sure the implementation can't be broken BEFORE they distribute it and have to recall/replace/handle frivolous lawsuits/etc.

I haven't personally used Confluence, but we use JIRA to store documents related to the tasks and it works pretty well. You can't search the attached documents, but typically if there is a doc associated with a task that isn't too much of a problem. And if you are only going to have a few people submitting bugs/tasks you can't beat the functionality for the price....

Recent article on BBC seems to confirm rocket hypothesis. Why do people go to the UFO hypothesis so fast?

The surest sign that there is intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't come here.

Just a side note: the LHC uses to separate beams that collide at 4 points along a single tunnel. Which is required since they're using proton-proton or larger nuclei (particularly lead) in the experiments. The Tevatron uses proton-antiproton allowing them to use the same beam equipment. Unfortunately, the cost of creating antilead nuclei is too high right now, so they opted for 2 beams instead.

Ok here goes:
    Should science undergraduates be taught Fortran? Yes
    Should it be the FIRST language, NO, not any more

So much of science, especially physics, is done on computers now - as both a software engineer and someone transitioning into Physics I ran into many people that had severe problems learning FORTRAN and applying it to problems. I really feel science students should have a couple of general courses in programming in C before moving on to other languages or even programming classes specific to their science. Here's the reasoning:
A) Science students need to learn programming basics away from the pressure of also learning within their science field at the same time - if your learning the science at the same time, the actual basic programming concepts get lost and muddied with the science being learned.

B) It can allow a science major to learn the concepts of programming in a general purpose language without muddying it with a lot of OS specific, library specific, attitude specific usage (aside from the compiler use)

C) There is a C compiler on almost every system you will most likely use in your lifetime as a scientist

D) C has enough structure to be "readable", but doesn't have so many constraints that it has problems being fast

E) C syntax is the basis for many other programming languages including Python and Java (both of which are heavily used in science as well)

and finally if a science major has a good understanding of programming concepts they can know what to look for when they're learning a new language (whatever it might be) - they will know that they have to learn the syntax for control structures in the new language (for, while, if, etc) as well know they'll have to find out more esoteric language specific concepts like how do I create functions and libraries? How do I use them?

ALL THAT being said, yes FORTRAN is a critical language to know with the sciences, because of the availability of libraries. HOWEVER, many of those libraries are now available in other languages and/or can be called from a different language via an abstraction (a concept that would be taught in a more general computing course)