-----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.