[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.