My company, as far as I know, has no restrictions on either internet or computer use. I'm pretty certain I could use the pirate bay while at work if I wanted to

My company, as far as I know, has no restrictions on either internet or computer use. I'm pretty certain I could use the pirate bay while at work if I wanted to (though I've never wanted to at home either, so that's unlikely to happen). But, and this is a big but, I'm a computer guy. I understand how to keep my computer secure and running well. The chances of my computer getting messed up by anything but a hardware failure are slim to none. This is simply not true for most employees in most companies. People click on pop-up ads and install fake virus scanning spyware all the time. I'm sure you can think of other examples. To simply say "give them training" is ignoring the fact that it takes YEARS to gain this kind of computer proficiency. It's also ignoring the fact that most users just don't care. They just want to use their computers and have someone else (either a person or a software package) watch out for them. It's amazing how often people fail to think like an owner when writing things like this. If I have to give 500 employees 50 hours of computer training, that's 25000 hours of training. If my average employee earns $50,000 a year (about $24/hr with a 40 hour work week), that's $600,000 of lost time, not to mention the cost of training. And I'm giving a very conservative estimate of 50 hours of training. To get to the average proficiency of the average HN reader would probably take much, much longer. Since most large companies need an IT department anyway, the additional cost of having them administer content blocking and virus scanning software is much less.