[R] R licensing query

Barry Rowlingson b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk
Thu Jun 17 18:46:56 CEST 2010


On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Frank E Harrell Jr
<f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> Pardon my english but you're working for idiots.  I'd look elsewhere if
> there are other options.  IT departments should be here to help get things
> done, not to help prevent good work from being done.

 Just because the IT security guys are idiots doesn't mean you're
working for idiots. It's possible that this is just IT security being
idiots, but the OP doesn't work for them. It's highly possible that
the bosses are idiots though, and we won't know this.

 I've worked with UK NHS in the past (and still do) and they do have
some (probably justified) paranoia about networks. To get data from
the NHS to me required our NHS contact to get special permission to
have an NHS-Net socket and an Internet-Net socket in the same room.
Even then that still required one computer to be connected to each
socket. Data was taken from the NHS-Net PC on floppy disk (remember
those, kids?) and put into the adjacent Internet-Net PC, and then it
was emailed to me. We used GPG with my public key to encrypt the data
after I pointed out that zip file encryption wasn't a good idea.

 Enough anecdotes. OP Gina should just make something up, or google
for Windows/IE/Flash security problems, and then email those to the
boss.

Barry



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