Here's a Ron Paul interview on NPR. Googling for "ron paul npr" returns quite a few hits. It suffices to say that I've learned quite a bit more about Ron Paul from NPR than from Slashdot (where he is possibly overrepresented, but sadly, by people who don't have many factual things to say about him).
Actually, as someone who has spent the better part of the last decade writing database applications (mostly on MySQL and Postgres), I've come around to Access. Why, you might ask? Because it allows my more technical end-users to collaborate, and it allows you to build functional mockups extremely quickly.
Anyone with experience building enterprise applications can tell you that the hard part is NOT the writing of the code. Most database-driven applications work similarly. The hard part is gathering requirements from non-technical people. What you'll find in any sizeable business is that the knowledge of the business process is distributed among many people. You have to become the expert. I like to model the activity on paper, and then interview people to walk through their jobs with them. The hardest part is trying to decide what parts of the business process are wasteful traditions, and which parts are essential. You may find many subtleties in people's work, the importance of which is not discovered until much later. Good notes are essential.
Anyway, back to Access-- with Access, I can literally have someone sit next to me as I mockup a WORKING demo. When they see it working the way they want, and they walk out, I can rip it apart and do things the right way. On a recent project, I did this, and it finally got the software off the ground. The problem was that the requirements were changing too fast. The original developer had written something in PHP, but every time he was asked to change something, the result was weeks of agonizing bugfixes. We switched the frontend to Access, keeping the data in MySQL (we used the MySQL ODBC connector). Now that the software has matured, and the pace of changes has slowed, developers can replace Access with something like Rails. Access is a great tool if you want to rapidly beta-test your application. I've tried other rapid development frameworks (Rails, CakePHP, and.NET stuff), and they simply aren't as fast, although in the end, you should plan to switch to one of them.
Microsoft put a lot of thought into the GUI design features of Access. I have yet to find something that works as well, or as quickly. You're right, it's not a "real" database, but it can be *attached* to a real database. Microsoft gets a lot of crap (rightly) for their software that sucks, but Access is not in that category.
Having done this recently for a relatively complex Rails application, I can say that it wasn't terrible. Fortunately, if you're using Rails' migration facility, you have a record of all of the SQL definitions you've done. We ran into three trouble spots: MySQL views, the TRUNCATE command, and foreign key definitions which have different syntax in MySQL and Postgres. This meant that we had to change a few things (we wrapped views in this gem and foreign keys in this gem). Turns out the TRUNCATE calls were not necessary, so we ditched them.
The hardest part, for me, was getting used to psql, which is the Postgres equivalent to the mysql command-line utility. MySQL's commands are SQL-like, whereas Postgres' are all prefixed with a backslash to distinguish them from regular SQL. Postgres, as you'll discover, is much more picky than MySQL in some SQL queries. The HAVING clause, for instance, requires you to be very specific in Postgres, whereas MySQL just chugged along and made some (correct, in my case) assumptions. I have mixed feelings about the switch, but we needed the PostGIS geographical functionality which is sorely lacking (or, I should say, implemented poorly) in MySQL. I'll probably continue to use MySQL for my own personal projects... at least until Oracle destroys the project.
Don't know if you've read this paper, but that's exactly what these researchers are doing. The researchers outfitted an entire dorm with cellphones (which they tracked through various methods). They borrow the information-theoretic concept of "entropy" to measure a person's activity level. The most interesting (and counter-intuitive) thing from the study is that, when you live in a dorm, "staying home" when you're sick appears to put you in contact with more people than if you just carried on as usual!
I think I'll reserve judgement until I see the movie. A lot of good ingredients went into The Hitchhiker's Guide, like Mos Def as Ford (risky, but possible great choice) and Sam Rockwell as Zaphod (inspired!), but what came out was total crap. Too many special effects, Ford mumbling through his lines, and Arthur's character actually being more annoying than funny. At least they kept the original Guide narrator from the radio series.
I loved the original Tron movie. I love Daft Punk. Here's to hoping this installment makes the story better, not worse.
Huh. Here I am thinking that the story is inspired (anthropomorphizing a computer's internal conflicts and merging them with the real world conflict... well before The Matrix did the same thing) and that the graphics are pretty cool given that most of them were not CGI. The frisbee-battle and the guy-jumps-into-MCP thing at the end are still visually unique to me. Good thing I have it on DVD so I don't have to listen when other people tell me what is "awesomely bad". It would be sufficient to say that Tron was a contributing factor in my decision to become a computer scientist:^)
The point of Theo posting the email is to raise awareness of the claim so that people can take a second look. Even if a government didn't insert information-leaking code, close scrutiny usually does good things for code. Side-channel attacks are something that programmers almost never think about; even programmers with cryptographic experience don't often think about them. As a class of vulnerabilities, they are not well-understood, although some people are working on the problem generally. Fred spoke to us a few weeks ago-- it was a fascinating look at the state of computer science's grasp on security.
Your "high salinity" in Antarctica quote made me wonder why Antarctic waters would have higher salinity than, say, tropical waters near large landmasses, where there would presumably be lots of runoff. I found this salinity map of the oceans, which is quite surprising to me. The Atlantic is quite saline. Any oceanographers out there who can explain why salinity is distributed this way? I would expect the most saline areas to be near the tropics, and the least saline to be near the poles where you find melting ice and lower dissolving capacity of water (can you tell I'm not a chemist?). Also, not surprisingly, it seems that salinity is not evenly distributed from the top of the ocean to the bottom. Given that the Titanic in on the bottom of arctic waters, one would think that you wouldn't find Halomonas there.
It's interesting that you should mention that. We recently had a speaker from Twitter do a technical talk at our CS department, and he essentially said the same thing. Even online journals are finding it hard to do "breaking news" now. Journalists, he said, should focus on what they are supposed to be good at: analysis. He used the Mumbai attack as an example-- Twitter's "trends" engine picked up the event well before the media had any idea anything had happened, essentially because the platform itself was an intelligent intermediary for people who were witnessing the event firsthand.
Strictly speaking, this is not what the court said. You're referring to the dispute over improper firing of two journalists, Wilson and Akre, that occurred in 2000. You can read the court opinion here. The irony here is that the widespread claim that "the courts have ruled that FOX News can lie" is itself disingenuous.
What the court is saying is: the FCC policy is not a law. The whistleblower statute only defends against breaches of law. Therefore, Akre is not entitled to compensation under the state's whistleblower statute. It's important to note that this is in keeping with the founding legal principle that Congress may not delegate law-making, except under very limited circumstances. Really, what the FCC's policy says is that intentional distortion of facts is discouraged, as FCC may revoke a station's license. This is in keeping with the idea that broadcast media must fulfill some public interest. But the FCC is not obligated to do this.
While I do think that there should be some tradeoff for journalists ("you get special protection from the government, so long as there is due diligence to get the facts straight"), I'm not really sure how one would enforce this. FOX, for instance, insists that Bill O'Reilly is part of their "opinion" segment, and while I do personally believe the guy is completely full of shit, and in general, damaging to the well-being of the country, I can't see a valid argument for preventing him from being on air. I think a truly free press is more important.
It's not just the leakers who don't have the know-how, it's the consumers. In an ideal situation, people would 1) have the time to read volumes of leaked information, 2) connect the dots, and 3) understand what that means. Since almost no one except journalists meet those criteria, I think, yeah, journalists still have a place in this world.
There's more information now-- if anything, we need them more. Google has hardly killed librarians. Why should Wikileaks kill journalism?
There's a HUGE difference between information and understanding.
Believe it or not, the study of incentives is a very hot topic at the moment, across a whole range of disciplines, including computer science. The reason? Large groups of people using the internet do not behave the way economists/game theorists expect, and for the first time, it is possible to measure these behaviors on a large scale. Online labor markets in particular would benefit from better models.
I have not yet read the article, but I suspect that the author is confusing 'altruism' with 'mutual benefit'.
Unfortunately, in this case, publicly-owned infrastructure removes any incentive to improve the network. If you improve the network, you also improve it for your competitor. Trusting a state or federal bureaucracy to do the improvements are probably also a non-starter. I'm usually for publicly-owned infrastructure (roads, railroad, etc), but I'm not so sure it's the best option here. At least there's an iota of incentive to innovate with broadband.
I think this is why wireless communication has innovated so rapidly. You can build infrastructure without helping your competitor, and right-of-way is much easier to acquire for a tower than it is for miles and miles of cable.
Ah, but the Mac SE/30 (which I still have, and whose keyboard I still type on daily-- yes ADB-to-USB adapters can be found!) was actually supposed to be the "Mac SEx", according to Apple's model versioning scheme. Only they couldn't bring themselves to call it that. I remembered the first time I used one. Definitely sexy. I had been using a 286 at the time. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it played a major role in my now being a computer scientist.
While copy editors may argue language use ad-nauseum (and don't get me wrong, language is frequently ambiguous) the ones I know will, at the end of the day, defer to the various standards guides, i.e., the MLA and (to a lesser extent) the Chicago Manual of Style. The people I worked for published this book, which is the #1 selling college grammar textbook.
The 4th Amendment says nothing explicitly about privacy. It just says that the government needs to have a reason, backed up by due process. Privacy has been interpreted into the Constitution, but the 4th Amendment itself doesn't give the rationale as to why your possessions cannot be searched at the whims of a government official. We can only speculate. Given that the Exclusionary Rule was not an accepted legal principle until the early 20th century, we have to be careful when we assume we know what the Founders thought.
The 9th Amendment essentially says that the Consititution is not exhaustive, i.e., that the rights of people are not limited to those expounded in the document. I.e., they leave room for future expansion of rights. But, in fact, the Constitution was constructed in such a fashion as to imply that laws ought to be built in a "subtractive" fashion anyway, that written laws explicitly remove rights from people. The Bill of Rights was added after the fact (nearly ten years later) because some politicians thought that certain rights needed to be explicitly outlined. It was very controversial at the time. Anyhow, while you can assume that you have a "right" to something that isn't explicitly outlawed, courts are also required to consider the traditional handling of a matter (called the "Common Law doctrine") when considering a case.
Anyway, I do think that a privacy law should be explicitly drafted, but as a computer scientist, I am increasingly beginning to think that our belief in privacy as an unalienable right is a momentary blip on the radar of human history. In a profound sense, any collection of data is an erosion of privacy. Wikipedia has a really lame section on the mathematics of anonymity, but you might be interested in k-anonymity. This is a very active area of research, but generally speaking, things look bleak.
(IANAL, but I have a CS and a legal studies degree)
Given that X-rays are used as a part of the follow-up care when implanting pacemakers, I wouldn't worry about X-rays in particular. Google also has some academic studies if you're interested.*
What I'd be more worried about-- and this is perhaps on my mind more than most people, because the laboratory I work in studies just this-- is whether the digital components are hardened against malicious attackers. My colleagues' preliminary results suggest that the answer is no-- these things are quite hackable.
* one caveat: this was discovered by a professor here.
Fortunately for you, you don't need the Xserves to continue your services. Linux or FreeBSD (or OpenBSD... that's what I admined for 7 years) will suit you just fine. You can continue to run LDAP, Kerberos, Samba, Netatalk, and what have you and you can do it with commodity machines. You can keep parts on the shelf, and when something fails, you replace it yourself, in minutes.
With Apple's stuff, you get a slick GUI on top of software that is already out there for free, plus the additional bullshit of letting them accuse you of stealing from them* when they send you the wrong part. Any self-respecting IT person would simply pony up and learn how to do it on the CLI. Trust me, you'll be happier when you can buy 2 machines instead of 1.
* True story. A RAID card failed in our Xserve, and Apple sent me a CD-ROM drive. Wha? Both Apple's on-site technician saw this. But when I called the company to explain their mistake, the support person on the phone said that such a mistake was 1) impossible, and he accused me of 2) lying for the purpose of 3) stealing their parts. Well, fuck you very much Apple. My experiences trying to run Apple in the data center made a lifelong Apple fan (me), a person whose first computer was a Mac (SE), bought with paper route money, swear never to buy Apple again (uh... except an iPhone... guess my promises aren't very good...).
Why is it that as soon as a Democrat is in power that "the Federal invasion of privacy is unconstitutional and unconscionable"? Where were all of you when Bush and nearly all of the House and Senate were passing liberty-eroding bills left and right? "Unreasonable" is a slippery word; I just explained in the post you replied to why I don't think it is unreasonable. Since the two of us can't agree to a common definition, let's just turn to the page of the Constitution on the reasonableness of electronic surveillance. Oh... you can't find it? Funny, I thought the Constitution had all the answers!
I don't buy it. Like everything else these days, the issue we're discussing is not the real issue. It's just another reason to throw out the people you don't like.
My opinion runs contrary to most of Slashdot on this matter, so I don't expect this post to be visible for very long, but-- what's the big deal? I don't think you could make the case that airports don't have a legitimate interest in screening passengers. I usually agree with EPIC, but I don't in this case.
Clearly, what offends people here is the invasive nature of the screening. But is it really all that invasive? They get what's essentially a contour map of your body. Big deal. The really invasive alternative is the pat down, or worse, the strip search. With these screeners, you just walk through, no clothing removal necessary.
The problem is that you have an extremely low-probability event which causes a large amount of damage. This is where most Slashdotters have their heads in the sand. You are right that the amount of physical damage is minimal, but actual physical damage is not the goal of terrorists: spreading the message is the goal, and the spreading of that message is greatly heightened by a dramatic delivery, such as the deaths of innocent people. I think it's understandable that people would want to prevent that from happening as much as they want the physical harm from happening. In that light, I think a non-invasive (as in, you just walk through it) scanner is a nice technological solution. It's not perfect, of course, but it's a heck of a lot better than hoping something won't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a Ron Paul interview on NPR. Googling for "ron paul npr" returns quite a few hits. It suffices to say that I've learned quite a bit more about Ron Paul from NPR than from Slashdot (where he is possibly overrepresented, but sadly, by people who don't have many factual things to say about him).
Actually, as someone who has spent the better part of the last decade writing database applications (mostly on MySQL and Postgres), I've come around to Access. Why, you might ask? Because it allows my more technical end-users to collaborate, and it allows you to build functional mockups extremely quickly.
.NET stuff), and they simply aren't as fast, although in the end, you should plan to switch to one of them.
Anyone with experience building enterprise applications can tell you that the hard part is NOT the writing of the code. Most database-driven applications work similarly. The hard part is gathering requirements from non-technical people. What you'll find in any sizeable business is that the knowledge of the business process is distributed among many people. You have to become the expert. I like to model the activity on paper, and then interview people to walk through their jobs with them. The hardest part is trying to decide what parts of the business process are wasteful traditions, and which parts are essential. You may find many subtleties in people's work, the importance of which is not discovered until much later. Good notes are essential.
Anyway, back to Access-- with Access, I can literally have someone sit next to me as I mockup a WORKING demo. When they see it working the way they want, and they walk out, I can rip it apart and do things the right way. On a recent project, I did this, and it finally got the software off the ground. The problem was that the requirements were changing too fast. The original developer had written something in PHP, but every time he was asked to change something, the result was weeks of agonizing bugfixes. We switched the frontend to Access, keeping the data in MySQL (we used the MySQL ODBC connector). Now that the software has matured, and the pace of changes has slowed, developers can replace Access with something like Rails. Access is a great tool if you want to rapidly beta-test your application. I've tried other rapid development frameworks (Rails, CakePHP, and
Microsoft put a lot of thought into the GUI design features of Access. I have yet to find something that works as well, or as quickly. You're right, it's not a "real" database, but it can be *attached* to a real database. Microsoft gets a lot of crap (rightly) for their software that sucks, but Access is not in that category.
Having done this recently for a relatively complex Rails application, I can say that it wasn't terrible. Fortunately, if you're using Rails' migration facility, you have a record of all of the SQL definitions you've done. We ran into three trouble spots: MySQL views, the TRUNCATE command, and foreign key definitions which have different syntax in MySQL and Postgres. This meant that we had to change a few things (we wrapped views in this gem and foreign keys in this gem). Turns out the TRUNCATE calls were not necessary, so we ditched them.
The hardest part, for me, was getting used to psql, which is the Postgres equivalent to the mysql command-line utility. MySQL's commands are SQL-like, whereas Postgres' are all prefixed with a backslash to distinguish them from regular SQL. Postgres, as you'll discover, is much more picky than MySQL in some SQL queries. The HAVING clause, for instance, requires you to be very specific in Postgres, whereas MySQL just chugged along and made some (correct, in my case) assumptions. I have mixed feelings about the switch, but we needed the PostGIS geographical functionality which is sorely lacking (or, I should say, implemented poorly) in MySQL. I'll probably continue to use MySQL for my own personal projects... at least until Oracle destroys the project.
Skip forward to 2:04:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuLrBLxbLxw
Apologies in advance if this offends you. My parents were horrified that I thought this was funny.
Don't know if you've read this paper, but that's exactly what these researchers are doing. The researchers outfitted an entire dorm with cellphones (which they tracked through various methods). They borrow the information-theoretic concept of "entropy" to measure a person's activity level. The most interesting (and counter-intuitive) thing from the study is that, when you live in a dorm, "staying home" when you're sick appears to put you in contact with more people than if you just carried on as usual!
I think I'll reserve judgement until I see the movie. A lot of good ingredients went into The Hitchhiker's Guide, like Mos Def as Ford (risky, but possible great choice) and Sam Rockwell as Zaphod (inspired!), but what came out was total crap. Too many special effects, Ford mumbling through his lines, and Arthur's character actually being more annoying than funny. At least they kept the original Guide narrator from the radio series.
I loved the original Tron movie. I love Daft Punk. Here's to hoping this installment makes the story better, not worse.
Huh. Here I am thinking that the story is inspired (anthropomorphizing a computer's internal conflicts and merging them with the real world conflict... well before The Matrix did the same thing) and that the graphics are pretty cool given that most of them were not CGI. The frisbee-battle and the guy-jumps-into-MCP thing at the end are still visually unique to me. Good thing I have it on DVD so I don't have to listen when other people tell me what is "awesomely bad". It would be sufficient to say that Tron was a contributing factor in my decision to become a computer scientist :^)
The point of Theo posting the email is to raise awareness of the claim so that people can take a second look. Even if a government didn't insert information-leaking code, close scrutiny usually does good things for code. Side-channel attacks are something that programmers almost never think about; even programmers with cryptographic experience don't often think about them. As a class of vulnerabilities, they are not well-understood, although some people are working on the problem generally. Fred spoke to us a few weeks ago-- it was a fascinating look at the state of computer science's grasp on security.
Your "high salinity" in Antarctica quote made me wonder why Antarctic waters would have higher salinity than, say, tropical waters near large landmasses, where there would presumably be lots of runoff. I found this salinity map of the oceans, which is quite surprising to me. The Atlantic is quite saline. Any oceanographers out there who can explain why salinity is distributed this way? I would expect the most saline areas to be near the tropics, and the least saline to be near the poles where you find melting ice and lower dissolving capacity of water (can you tell I'm not a chemist?). Also, not surprisingly, it seems that salinity is not evenly distributed from the top of the ocean to the bottom. Given that the Titanic in on the bottom of arctic waters, one would think that you wouldn't find Halomonas there.
It's interesting that you should mention that. We recently had a speaker from Twitter do a technical talk at our CS department, and he essentially said the same thing. Even online journals are finding it hard to do "breaking news" now. Journalists, he said, should focus on what they are supposed to be good at: analysis. He used the Mumbai attack as an example-- Twitter's "trends" engine picked up the event well before the media had any idea anything had happened, essentially because the platform itself was an intelligent intermediary for people who were witnessing the event firsthand.
Strictly speaking, this is not what the court said. You're referring to the dispute over improper firing of two journalists, Wilson and Akre, that occurred in 2000. You can read the court opinion here. The irony here is that the widespread claim that "the courts have ruled that FOX News can lie" is itself disingenuous.
What the court is saying is: the FCC policy is not a law. The whistleblower statute only defends against breaches of law. Therefore, Akre is not entitled to compensation under the state's whistleblower statute. It's important to note that this is in keeping with the founding legal principle that Congress may not delegate law-making, except under very limited circumstances. Really, what the FCC's policy says is that intentional distortion of facts is discouraged, as FCC may revoke a station's license. This is in keeping with the idea that broadcast media must fulfill some public interest. But the FCC is not obligated to do this.
While I do think that there should be some tradeoff for journalists ("you get special protection from the government, so long as there is due diligence to get the facts straight"), I'm not really sure how one would enforce this. FOX, for instance, insists that Bill O'Reilly is part of their "opinion" segment, and while I do personally believe the guy is completely full of shit, and in general, damaging to the well-being of the country, I can't see a valid argument for preventing him from being on air. I think a truly free press is more important.
It's not just the leakers who don't have the know-how, it's the consumers. In an ideal situation, people would 1) have the time to read volumes of leaked information, 2) connect the dots, and 3) understand what that means. Since almost no one except journalists meet those criteria, I think, yeah, journalists still have a place in this world.
There's more information now-- if anything, we need them more. Google has hardly killed librarians. Why should Wikileaks kill journalism?
There's a HUGE difference between information and understanding.
Believe it or not, the study of incentives is a very hot topic at the moment, across a whole range of disciplines, including computer science. The reason? Large groups of people using the internet do not behave the way economists/game theorists expect, and for the first time, it is possible to measure these behaviors on a large scale. Online labor markets in particular would benefit from better models.
I have not yet read the article, but I suspect that the author is confusing 'altruism' with 'mutual benefit'.
Unfortunately, in this case, publicly-owned infrastructure removes any incentive to improve the network. If you improve the network, you also improve it for your competitor. Trusting a state or federal bureaucracy to do the improvements are probably also a non-starter. I'm usually for publicly-owned infrastructure (roads, railroad, etc), but I'm not so sure it's the best option here. At least there's an iota of incentive to innovate with broadband.
I think this is why wireless communication has innovated so rapidly. You can build infrastructure without helping your competitor, and right-of-way is much easier to acquire for a tower than it is for miles and miles of cable.
*ugh* giving up mod points here, because I am sick to death of hearing this "activist judge" crap.
Go ahead: please tell us how you would enforce the 4th Amendment without "interpreting" the meaning of "unreasonable".
Especially if you're running the Mac OS. Or any software written in Berkeley for that matter.
Ah, but the Mac SE/30 (which I still have, and whose keyboard I still type on daily-- yes ADB-to-USB adapters can be found!) was actually supposed to be the "Mac SEx", according to Apple's model versioning scheme. Only they couldn't bring themselves to call it that. I remembered the first time I used one. Definitely sexy. I had been using a 286 at the time. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it played a major role in my now being a computer scientist.
While copy editors may argue language use ad-nauseum (and don't get me wrong, language is frequently ambiguous) the ones I know will, at the end of the day, defer to the various standards guides, i.e., the MLA and (to a lesser extent) the Chicago Manual of Style. The people I worked for published this book, which is the #1 selling college grammar textbook.
Is the world so impoverished that we can't spare a few Backspace keys? Who needs ^H anymore? vi users who can't afford vim?
The 4th Amendment says nothing explicitly about privacy. It just says that the government needs to have a reason, backed up by due process. Privacy has been
interpreted into the Constitution, but the 4th Amendment itself doesn't give the rationale as to why your possessions cannot be searched at the whims of a government official. We can only speculate. Given that the Exclusionary Rule was not an accepted legal principle until the early 20th century, we have to be careful when we assume we know what the Founders thought.
The 9th Amendment essentially says that the Consititution is not exhaustive, i.e., that the rights of people are not limited to those expounded in the document. I.e., they leave room for future expansion of rights. But, in fact, the Constitution was constructed in such a fashion as to imply that laws ought to be built in a "subtractive" fashion anyway, that written laws explicitly remove rights from people. The Bill of Rights was added after the fact (nearly ten years later) because some politicians thought that certain rights needed to be explicitly outlined. It was very controversial at the time. Anyhow, while you can assume that you have a "right" to something that isn't explicitly outlawed, courts are also required to consider the traditional handling of a matter (called the "Common Law doctrine") when considering a case.
Anyway, I do think that a privacy law should be explicitly drafted, but as a computer scientist, I am increasingly beginning to think that our belief in privacy as an unalienable right is a momentary blip on the radar of human history. In a profound sense, any collection of data is an erosion of privacy. Wikipedia has a really lame section on the mathematics of anonymity, but you might be interested in k-anonymity. This is a very active area of research, but generally speaking, things look bleak.
(IANAL, but I have a CS and a legal studies degree)
Given that X-rays are used as a part of the follow-up care when implanting pacemakers, I wouldn't worry about X-rays in particular. Google also has some academic studies if you're interested.*
What I'd be more worried about-- and this is perhaps on my mind more than most people, because the laboratory I work in studies just this-- is whether the digital components are hardened against malicious attackers. My colleagues' preliminary results suggest that the answer is no-- these things are quite hackable.
* one caveat: this was discovered by a professor here.
Fortunately for you, you don't need the Xserves to continue your services. Linux or FreeBSD (or OpenBSD... that's what I admined for 7 years) will suit you just fine. You can continue to run LDAP, Kerberos, Samba, Netatalk, and what have you and you can do it with commodity machines. You can keep parts on the shelf, and when something fails, you replace it yourself, in minutes.
With Apple's stuff, you get a slick GUI on top of software that is already out there for free, plus the additional bullshit of letting them accuse you of stealing from them* when they send you the wrong part. Any self-respecting IT person would simply pony up and learn how to do it on the CLI. Trust me, you'll be happier when you can buy 2 machines instead of 1.
* True story. A RAID card failed in our Xserve, and Apple sent me a CD-ROM drive. Wha? Both Apple's on-site technician saw this. But when I called the company to explain their mistake, the support person on the phone said that such a mistake was 1) impossible, and he accused me of 2) lying for the purpose of 3) stealing their parts. Well, fuck you very much Apple. My experiences trying to run Apple in the data center made a lifelong Apple fan (me), a person whose first computer was a Mac (SE), bought with paper route money, swear never to buy Apple again (uh... except an iPhone... guess my promises aren't very good...).
SYNTAX BOT 9001 thinks that updating GRAMMAR BOT 9001's lexical database won't help very much.
Why is it that as soon as a Democrat is in power that "the Federal invasion of privacy is unconstitutional and unconscionable"? Where were all of you when Bush and nearly all of the House and Senate were passing liberty-eroding bills left and right? "Unreasonable" is a slippery word; I just explained in the post you replied to why I don't think it is unreasonable. Since the two of us can't agree to a common definition, let's just turn to the page of the Constitution on the reasonableness of electronic surveillance. Oh... you can't find it? Funny, I thought the Constitution had all the answers!
I don't buy it. Like everything else these days, the issue we're discussing is not the real issue. It's just another reason to throw out the people you don't like.
My opinion runs contrary to most of Slashdot on this matter, so I don't expect this post to be visible for very long, but-- what's the big deal? I don't think you could make the case that airports don't have a legitimate interest in screening passengers. I usually agree with EPIC, but I don't in this case.
Clearly, what offends people here is the invasive nature of the screening. But is it really all that invasive? They get what's essentially a contour map of your body. Big deal. The really invasive alternative is the pat down, or worse, the strip search. With these screeners, you just walk through, no clothing removal necessary.
The problem is that you have an extremely low-probability event which causes a large amount of damage. This is where most Slashdotters have their heads in the sand. You are right that the amount of physical damage is minimal, but actual physical damage is not the goal of terrorists: spreading the message is the goal, and the spreading of that message is greatly heightened by a dramatic delivery, such as the deaths of innocent people. I think it's understandable that people would want to prevent that from happening as much as they want the physical harm from happening. In that light, I think a non-invasive (as in, you just walk through it) scanner is a nice technological solution. It's not perfect, of course, but it's a heck of a lot better than hoping something won't happen.
I eagerly await your civil responses.