-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Griffin [mailto:stephen.griffin@rcn.com]
[snip]
>What needs to be done is to balance the knee-jerk IT folks reactions
>to make life as miserable as possible for the greatest number vs.
>allowing some amount of employee usage, to increase satisfaction,
>_increase_ productivity, and basically make it worth going into the
>office.

That's an excellent point Stephen.  Killing employee morale can have longlasting repurcussions.  I had the pleasure of experiencing a good decision of this type about 3 years ago when I worked in India.  The execs decided NOT to block outbound port 80, even though it was taking up 75% of the bandwidth on a 128k link.  They paid for an upgrade to 256k (SFO -> Bangalore, not cheap!) and decided not to block port 80, as the damage to employee morale would be too severe.

-Paul.