But my point is, that drugging the kids is not always the solution.
Drugging kids is NEVER the solution. The proper solution is to find a creative and/or productive output for their energy.
There are a few people that are just built non-functionally. Blame society for not being broad enough to provide them purchase, or blame their metabolism for acting outside of the norm; it doesn't matter.
If they truly cannot function in today's world, offering them drugs that help them do so is humane. If they are marginally functional, the offering them the same drugs is marginally humane. Marginally humane is the same as marginally inhumane. In the gray area is where abuse runs rampant. Best to avoid drugs unless you truly have a child that can't fit society's current mold.
No, Childs was under contract to only hand over the passwords to an "authorized person". The city never documented who was authorized, and when Childs was being resigned (presumably against his will), Childs decided that the letter of the contract would save him.
The problem was that Childs acted previous to this incident in a manner that showed he believed the management to be an "authorized person", as he gave them passwords in the past (albeit incorrect ones).
Let this be a lesson, don't give out fake passwords because you believe the asker is not authorized. If you really believe the asker is unauthorized, tell them so.
The mayor thing was an attempt to retroactively justify the "not authorized" argument. Yes, it exposed a big flaw in the city's managerial competence. Basically Childs was saying that as the Mayor was the head of the entire city, by reason AT LEAST the Mayor was authorized.
The process of "being fired" doesn't even start when you are being reassigned. Sure, a punishing reassignment might feel like you're being fired, but technically he still had a job when the problems began.
If you happen to have keys to company doors on your keyring, you are required to return them. If you happen to have been given a company car, you are required to return it.
Just because you have been fired does not mean that you are free to keep whatever company property you may have in your possession. The question then becomes whether passwords are considered company property.
Also, as pointed out elsewhere... An administrator that had so little common sense as to not plan for his untimely demise (as in others already have those passwords should he suddenly die), should really be considered as nothing more than a bumbling fool by real professionals.
And yes, I believe most people would consider any code or other work-product on your computer but not yet committed to source control as company property (they already paid you for providing it) so you must help them access it. Yes, most company network admins can do this with their accounts and that can be considered good enough.
Either way, this was a case based on denial of service, not theft of property. Childs was never accused of having the routing equipment at his house, he was accused of preventing access to the equipment housed on the city property.
With that in mind, it becomes a much different case than the theoretical previously put forward.
Consider a paint locker, which contains paint needed to maintain a ship's surface. Paint lockers tend to accumulate explosive fumes, and great precautions are taken to prevent ignition of the fumes. For example, special shoes are required to prevent sparks from scuffing.
The person responsible for the paint locker refuses to hand over the keys. You can't drill the lock out, as it would present a large fire risk to the rest of the crew. Technically he will hand over the keys to the correct authorized person, but you forgot to detail who that person is when you assigned him the task.
While not a perfect analogy, at least this example is closer to the Childs case.
However even if that's not the case, you have to relinquish the passwords when you leave.
His contract said to whom he could hand over the passwords. Those were not the people who came asking for them, or threatening him, or arresting him. When they finally got the person to whom he could release the passwords (the mayor), he did.
The problem with the contract is that it didn't explicitly state who was authorized to receive the passwords. The contract literally stated they could be handed over to an "authorized user."
This was compounded by the problems of identifying an authorized user, as the city didn't have clear records or direction who was authorized and who was not. Eventually the Jury decided that the person asking was authorized by the previous emails sent and received by Childs.
I was told in jury selection that my case was one where only the guilt would be deliberated, the sentence was (due to legal reasons) not to be set by the jury. Basically if we found guilty the person was getting life imprisonment, and if we found not guilty the left the courtroom free.
Odds are the lawyers didn't like this, and the Judge may not have liked it; but, this is the state the courts are in after yet another round of overzealous legislation to "fight crime." In Jury selection questioning, I told the prosecuting attorney that I had reservations about the two extremes of the outcome. He asked me if I thought he was guilty but not deserving of a life sentence, would I be tempted to declare him not guilty, to which I replied "Yes, because the Jury shouldn't have the choice of sentencing stripped from it's duties." Naturally, I was excused from Jury duty.
So that man's trial was populated by people who were all right having the determination of degree of punishment stripped from them; in other words, they had people who selected with a bias to send him away for life before hearing the facts. Was he guilty? Who knows? But I guarantee you that nobody on that Jury was allowed to determine if extenuating circumstances meant he should only get 20 years instead of life.
Give the guy a break, he's reversed a ton of stuff. Bush was good at getting a lot of stuff passed. History seems to show that most of the stuff was undesirable. Perhaps he'll go down as the modern day Boss Tweed.
Take the loosing of oil drilling regulation and oversight; the Obama administration basically said it was surprised by the removal of regulation and reporting of compliance. They went on to state that basically they were so busy trying to push the financial reform, the healtcare reform, the weakening of the FDA, the X, the Y, and the Z that they didn't get around to looking at drilling regulation.
When you're talking about millions, if not billions of dollars on the line, you too might think that those in charge of that much money would take greater care in what they do. I guess we have all learned that even at the most expensive projects, greed and ham-handed management can trump risk reduction and proper practice.
Unbuntu is a misspelling of Ubuntu. Kbuntu was a marketing term Ubuntu applied to their default KDE desktop version of Ubuntu. Your ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome the occasional typo or errant remark is surprisingly low.
Tank ewe, four de point of my occusanial fallt. it creates everything gooder four de Ethernet.
Too bad Slashdot hasn't figured out a post-submit edit feature. Oh wait, it's only 2010; I should be more patient.
I can't say much about the network manager, because I don't use it.
Well, NetworkManager wasn't really necessary for most people, but it is ideal for Linux laptop users. It basically does the grunt work of the wireless card configuration to detect and allow for the easy connection to WiFi networks.
So for one release cycle of Ubuntu, you had a choice. You could use the standard Gnome version and have working wireless on your laptop; or, you could use the KDE 3.x desktop and not be able to use your wireless card to access a wireless network.
It wasn't that the wireless card didn't work, and you could configure the entire system manually; however, the user facing front-end wouldn't correctly communicate with the underlying (working) wireless setup on the laptop.
Imaging telling people who love KDE, and love Ubuntu that they could shift to Gnome and have easy to use wireless connections; or, they could keep their KDE desktop and manually configure their wireless connection on the command line each time they wanted to connect to a wireless network. In short, it wasn't pretty.
Usually the most difficult people were the ones that would refuse to give up the KDE desktop and refuse to switch distros. In their mind, Ubuntu perfected the nightmarishly unusable Linux, and they couldn't image shifting to a distro that didn't have windows or supported the archaic and confusing command line.
The irony in the above paragraph was intentional (but not my own), that's how messed up some of the Linux newcomers are after being exposed to Ubuntu's marketing department.
Thank you. This is the most reasonable an intelligent post I've encountered on slashdot in a long time.
It seems that we are all suffering from arm-chair engineering / economics / science / etc. Everyone has been flooded from partial information from special interest groups which have succeeded in actually blocking people's thinking effectiveness; because, they are only equipped with misleading information.
It doesn't matter what Portugal's GDP is; because, with this infrastructure, it just went up. Portugal is now in a position to export energy to Spain, and any dollar they obtain in that manner is a dollar that they didn't have the ability to tax before the changes. It doesn't matter is Portugal is smaller than the United States; because, the United States has a whole different host of issues which promote (and thwart) their efforts to change their energy infrastructure.
Actually storing excess energy is damn hard. The only semi-successful means of doing it on a power grid scale is to use the excess energy to pump water uphill.
That works great if you have a lake with a hydroelectric dam already across it; otherwise, you need to build a water tower solution. In either event, you're losing a lot of energy in the transition from electricity to potential energy in the water. You're losing a lot of the potential energy in the water converting it back to electricity again.
Batteries store a minuscule amount of electricity compared to what your refrigerator, air conditioner, or water heater might need. When power grids miscalculate how much electricity the power generators must provide, they typically shunt the electricity into the ground. The technique is called load shedding, and millions of dollars go into the necessary monitoring and feedback systems to keep load shedding to a minimum.
That said, all power grids prefer to run with a small amount of extra "load" or excess energy, because that prevents brown outs and grid instability should they encounter a large amount of unexpected demand. Typically they use weather forecasting, historical usage patterns, and scheduling of particular high-energy events to predict the appropriate amount of load on the network; but, they like to keep a little extra in reserve (in case the forecasts are a bit lower than reality). This provides a safety buffer against the grid going down, and the game is to make the safety buffer just big enough to minimize risk yet small enough to not cost a lot.
Somehow I doubt that KDE has prior knowledge of its bugs, has the known cost to fix them, ha the estimated costs of a legal defense in wrongful death suits, and has decided to let people die because it is cheaper.
While I share you opinion that one misstep or bad release in the past doesn't ensure a bad product in the future, your example fully sucks.
Not to mention that I'm about to play with the Linux Terminal Server Project. Network booting remote dumb terminals now use the network transparency of PulseAudio to play sound at the dumb terminal. Thank you PulseAudio, as previously it was a bit of a mess to do so (to make a major understatement).
Back in KDE 3.x days, NetworkManager was just getting started, and Unbuntu shipped a very bad snapshot of it which prevented network connections.
At the time Unbuntu shipped this broken copy, the KDE NetworkManager group had already shifted dev work to the 4.x series, but Unbuntu didn't ship a 4.x KDE until much later. As a result, Unbuntu's poor QA and packing practices led most people to think that NetworkManager didn't work under KDE, rather than the correct conclusion, which is that Unbuntu didn't do proper QA with its packaging.
The end result for that Unbuntu release was that most KDE Unbuntu users either switched to Gnome, stayed on the previous release, or changed distros to see a working NetworkManager in KDE.
My experiences with this may be anecdotal; however, they are anecdotal as personally experienced at the Houston LUG with literally eight to ten people dragging in broken Kbuntu distros monthly over a period of four or five months.
While democracy isn't cheap, we shouldn't actually try to make it more expensive. The key point it that the MP is getting DDoS'd with form letters from pressure groups, and that denies YOUR access to him for any issue YOU might have that isn't the same issue the pressure group is currently pushing. If the MP fixes this by hiring more staff, YOU get to pay for it. So now that you're footing the bill, how much do you want your taxes raise to afford this not-so-cheap exercise in futility?
You have to be very careful because you don't know who wrote the NEARLY. It could have been a researcher or a journalist. Hold your judgement until you get your grubby hands on the actual research paper.
Ok, so you don't like it; but, you support the company that does it? That's like giving positive reinforcement to someone who just stepped on your toe.
Put your money where your mouth is and switch distros, if it is something that irks you enough to uninstall. That would actually give the kind of feedback Canonical will pay attention to.
Oh, but there are so many more costs than just fuel. My hybrid is averaging about 50% what I expected in repair costs, and that's equal to my projected fuel savings.
The crowd that needs to camp out in your coffee shop for free WiFi probably doesn't opt to pay their phone provider for internet to their Laptop access.
If they require you to purchase food for a limited amount of time, then it's not free. That's subsidized or possibly included in the purchase price.
The building isn't free either, it's subsidized and certainly included in the purchase price. Why do you think that the wireless was ever free? It was just being subsidized and included in the purchase price.
The problems come whenever people opt to use too much of a convenience. If you start taking 100 paper napkins each visit, expect them to be relocated behind the counter. If you start grabbing rolls of toliet paper for your home, expect the restrooms to be locked and unlocked on request.
At the point in time when the cost of providing a convenience outweighs the cost of monitoring and regulating that convenience, expect it to become monitored and regulated. WiFi access is meant to draw customers, and if you deny the customers they intend to draw seating space, it's a fool's folly to complain about having to pay for it with a subsidy, because it was subsidized all along.
Count your blessings, as at least they aren't calling the cops. Loitering is a crime in most places.
So, how much additional mass did the earth obtain? I'm guessing that most of it was hydrogen, but it would be cool to get even a ball park figure.
A few liters (at STP), a few moles, a kilogram, immeasurably small, or much more? Somebody who is more familiar with the field has to have made an estimate. Was it all energy or was mass actually transferred?
You are not legally obligated to go through one of these if you do not want to. If you refuse to go through this, which essentially amounts to a high-tech strip-search, they have to give you the old-fashioned pat-down.
Either the person operating the machine will be under-informed of this right, or will act under-informed. If you push the matter, they know how to slightly abuse their power. They will grant you the pat down just as soon as the "pat down" agent is available, after your flight has left. Remember, they need to check your tickets to see if you should be entering the boarding area, so it's not rocket science to make you wait and watch you squirm.
Slashdot Mirror
But my point is, that drugging the kids is not always the solution.
Drugging kids is NEVER the solution. The proper solution is to find a creative and/or productive output for their energy.
There are a few people that are just built non-functionally. Blame society for not being broad enough to provide them purchase, or blame their metabolism for acting outside of the norm; it doesn't matter.
If they truly cannot function in today's world, offering them drugs that help them do so is humane. If they are marginally functional, the offering them the same drugs is marginally humane. Marginally humane is the same as marginally inhumane. In the gray area is where abuse runs rampant. Best to avoid drugs unless you truly have a child that can't fit society's current mold.
No, Childs was under contract to only hand over the passwords to an "authorized person". The city never documented who was authorized, and when Childs was being resigned (presumably against his will), Childs decided that the letter of the contract would save him.
The problem was that Childs acted previous to this incident in a manner that showed he believed the management to be an "authorized person", as he gave them passwords in the past (albeit incorrect ones).
Let this be a lesson, don't give out fake passwords because you believe the asker is not authorized. If you really believe the asker is unauthorized, tell them so.
The mayor thing was an attempt to retroactively justify the "not authorized" argument. Yes, it exposed a big flaw in the city's managerial competence. Basically Childs was saying that as the Mayor was the head of the entire city, by reason AT LEAST the Mayor was authorized.
The process of "being fired" doesn't even start when you are being reassigned. Sure, a punishing reassignment might feel like you're being fired, but technically he still had a job when the problems began.
Not exactly true.
If you happen to have keys to company doors on your keyring, you are required to return them. If you happen to have been given a company car, you are required to return it.
Just because you have been fired does not mean that you are free to keep whatever company property you may have in your possession. The question then becomes whether passwords are considered company property.
Also, as pointed out elsewhere... An administrator that had so little common sense as to not plan for his untimely demise (as in others already have those passwords should he suddenly die), should really be considered as nothing more than a bumbling fool by real professionals.
And yes, I believe most people would consider any code or other work-product on your computer but not yet committed to source control as company property (they already paid you for providing it) so you must help them access it. Yes, most company network admins can do this with their accounts and that can be considered good enough.
Either way, this was a case based on denial of service, not theft of property. Childs was never accused of having the routing equipment at his house, he was accused of preventing access to the equipment housed on the city property.
With that in mind, it becomes a much different case than the theoretical previously put forward.
Consider a paint locker, which contains paint needed to maintain a ship's surface. Paint lockers tend to accumulate explosive fumes, and great precautions are taken to prevent ignition of the fumes. For example, special shoes are required to prevent sparks from scuffing.
The person responsible for the paint locker refuses to hand over the keys. You can't drill the lock out, as it would present a large fire risk to the rest of the crew. Technically he will hand over the keys to the correct authorized person, but you forgot to detail who that person is when you assigned him the task.
While not a perfect analogy, at least this example is closer to the Childs case.
However even if that's not the case, you have to relinquish the passwords when you leave.
His contract said to whom he could hand over the passwords. Those were not the people who came asking for them, or threatening him, or arresting him. When they finally got the person to whom he could release the passwords (the mayor), he did.
The problem with the contract is that it didn't explicitly state who was authorized to receive the passwords. The contract literally stated they could be handed over to an "authorized user."
This was compounded by the problems of identifying an authorized user, as the city didn't have clear records or direction who was authorized and who was not. Eventually the Jury decided that the person asking was authorized by the previous emails sent and received by Childs.
I was told in jury selection that my case was one where only the guilt would be deliberated, the sentence was (due to legal reasons) not to be set by the jury. Basically if we found guilty the person was getting life imprisonment, and if we found not guilty the left the courtroom free.
Odds are the lawyers didn't like this, and the Judge may not have liked it; but, this is the state the courts are in after yet another round of overzealous legislation to "fight crime." In Jury selection questioning, I told the prosecuting attorney that I had reservations about the two extremes of the outcome. He asked me if I thought he was guilty but not deserving of a life sentence, would I be tempted to declare him not guilty, to which I replied "Yes, because the Jury shouldn't have the choice of sentencing stripped from it's duties." Naturally, I was excused from Jury duty.
So that man's trial was populated by people who were all right having the determination of degree of punishment stripped from them; in other words, they had people who selected with a bias to send him away for life before hearing the facts. Was he guilty? Who knows? But I guarantee you that nobody on that Jury was allowed to determine if extenuating circumstances meant he should only get 20 years instead of life.
Give the guy a break, he's reversed a ton of stuff. Bush was good at getting a lot of stuff passed. History seems to show that most of the stuff was undesirable. Perhaps he'll go down as the modern day Boss Tweed.
Take the loosing of oil drilling regulation and oversight; the Obama administration basically said it was surprised by the removal of regulation and reporting of compliance. They went on to state that basically they were so busy trying to push the financial reform, the healtcare reform, the weakening of the FDA, the X, the Y, and the Z that they didn't get around to looking at drilling regulation.
When you're talking about millions, if not billions of dollars on the line, you too might think that those in charge of that much money would take greater care in what they do. I guess we have all learned that even at the most expensive projects, greed and ham-handed management can trump risk reduction and proper practice.
Unbuntu is a misspelling of Ubuntu. Kbuntu was a marketing term Ubuntu applied to their default KDE desktop version of Ubuntu. Your ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome the occasional typo or errant remark is surprisingly low.
Tank ewe, four de point of my occusanial fallt. it creates everything gooder four de Ethernet.
Too bad Slashdot hasn't figured out a post-submit edit feature. Oh wait, it's only 2010; I should be more patient.
I can't say much about the network manager, because I don't use it.
Well, NetworkManager wasn't really necessary for most people, but it is ideal for Linux laptop users. It basically does the grunt work of the wireless card configuration to detect and allow for the easy connection to WiFi networks.
So for one release cycle of Ubuntu, you had a choice. You could use the standard Gnome version and have working wireless on your laptop; or, you could use the KDE 3.x desktop and not be able to use your wireless card to access a wireless network.
It wasn't that the wireless card didn't work, and you could configure the entire system manually; however, the user facing front-end wouldn't correctly communicate with the underlying (working) wireless setup on the laptop.
Imaging telling people who love KDE, and love Ubuntu that they could shift to Gnome and have easy to use wireless connections; or, they could keep their KDE desktop and manually configure their wireless connection on the command line each time they wanted to connect to a wireless network. In short, it wasn't pretty.
Usually the most difficult people were the ones that would refuse to give up the KDE desktop and refuse to switch distros. In their mind, Ubuntu perfected the nightmarishly unusable Linux, and they couldn't image shifting to a distro that didn't have windows or supported the archaic and confusing command line.
The irony in the above paragraph was intentional (but not my own), that's how messed up some of the Linux newcomers are after being exposed to Ubuntu's marketing department.
Thank you. This is the most reasonable an intelligent post I've encountered on slashdot in a long time.
It seems that we are all suffering from arm-chair engineering / economics / science / etc. Everyone has been flooded from partial information from special interest groups which have succeeded in actually blocking people's thinking effectiveness; because, they are only equipped with misleading information.
It doesn't matter what Portugal's GDP is; because, with this infrastructure, it just went up. Portugal is now in a position to export energy to Spain, and any dollar they obtain in that manner is a dollar that they didn't have the ability to tax before the changes. It doesn't matter is Portugal is smaller than the United States; because, the United States has a whole different host of issues which promote (and thwart) their efforts to change their energy infrastructure.
/.'s target audience is American. You know, the ones who are great at geography.
Slashdotter: Yep, I'm American.
European: North America or South America?
Slashdotter: South! I'm from Louisiana.
Actually storing excess energy is damn hard. The only semi-successful means of doing it on a power grid scale is to use the excess energy to pump water uphill.
That works great if you have a lake with a hydroelectric dam already across it; otherwise, you need to build a water tower solution. In either event, you're losing a lot of energy in the transition from electricity to potential energy in the water. You're losing a lot of the potential energy in the water converting it back to electricity again.
Batteries store a minuscule amount of electricity compared to what your refrigerator, air conditioner, or water heater might need. When power grids miscalculate how much electricity the power generators must provide, they typically shunt the electricity into the ground. The technique is called load shedding, and millions of dollars go into the necessary monitoring and feedback systems to keep load shedding to a minimum.
That said, all power grids prefer to run with a small amount of extra "load" or excess energy, because that prevents brown outs and grid instability should they encounter a large amount of unexpected demand. Typically they use weather forecasting, historical usage patterns, and scheduling of particular high-energy events to predict the appropriate amount of load on the network; but, they like to keep a little extra in reserve (in case the forecasts are a bit lower than reality). This provides a safety buffer against the grid going down, and the game is to make the safety buffer just big enough to minimize risk yet small enough to not cost a lot.
No he'll try to convert you to scientology, jump up and down on your couch, then try to kill you.
I'd rather have Arnold travel back in time from when the crime was committed and kill me now for my future transgression, it's much less scary.
Somehow I doubt that KDE has prior knowledge of its bugs, has the known cost to fix them, ha the estimated costs of a legal defense in wrongful death suits, and has decided to let people die because it is cheaper.
While I share you opinion that one misstep or bad release in the past doesn't ensure a bad product in the future, your example fully sucks.
Not to mention that I'm about to play with the Linux Terminal Server Project. Network booting remote dumb terminals now use the network transparency of PulseAudio to play sound at the dumb terminal. Thank you PulseAudio, as previously it was a bit of a mess to do so (to make a major understatement).
Back in KDE 3.x days, NetworkManager was just getting started, and Unbuntu shipped a very bad snapshot of it which prevented network connections.
At the time Unbuntu shipped this broken copy, the KDE NetworkManager group had already shifted dev work to the 4.x series, but Unbuntu didn't ship a 4.x KDE until much later. As a result, Unbuntu's poor QA and packing practices led most people to think that NetworkManager didn't work under KDE, rather than the correct conclusion, which is that Unbuntu didn't do proper QA with its packaging.
The end result for that Unbuntu release was that most KDE Unbuntu users either switched to Gnome, stayed on the previous release, or changed distros to see a working NetworkManager in KDE.
My experiences with this may be anecdotal; however, they are anecdotal as personally experienced at the Houston LUG with literally eight to ten people dragging in broken Kbuntu distros monthly over a period of four or five months.
While democracy isn't cheap, we shouldn't actually try to make it more expensive. The key point it that the MP is getting DDoS'd with form letters from pressure groups, and that denies YOUR access to him for any issue YOU might have that isn't the same issue the pressure group is currently pushing. If the MP fixes this by hiring more staff, YOU get to pay for it. So now that you're footing the bill, how much do you want your taxes raise to afford this not-so-cheap exercise in futility?
You have to be very careful because you don't know who wrote the NEARLY. It could have been a researcher or a journalist. Hold your judgement until you get your grubby hands on the actual research paper.
Ok, so you don't like it; but, you support the company that does it? That's like giving positive reinforcement to someone who just stepped on your toe.
Put your money where your mouth is and switch distros, if it is something that irks you enough to uninstall. That would actually give the kind of feedback Canonical will pay attention to.
Oh, but there are so many more costs than just fuel. My hybrid is averaging about 50% what I expected in repair costs, and that's equal to my projected fuel savings.
The crowd that needs to camp out in your coffee shop for free WiFi probably doesn't opt to pay their phone provider for internet to their Laptop access.
If they require you to purchase food for a limited amount of time, then it's not free. That's subsidized or possibly included in the purchase price.
The building isn't free either, it's subsidized and certainly included in the purchase price. Why do you think that the wireless was ever free? It was just being subsidized and included in the purchase price.
The problems come whenever people opt to use too much of a convenience. If you start taking 100 paper napkins each visit, expect them to be relocated behind the counter. If you start grabbing rolls of toliet paper for your home, expect the restrooms to be locked and unlocked on request.
At the point in time when the cost of providing a convenience outweighs the cost of monitoring and regulating that convenience, expect it to become monitored and regulated. WiFi access is meant to draw customers, and if you deny the customers they intend to draw seating space, it's a fool's folly to complain about having to pay for it with a subsidy, because it was subsidized all along.
Count your blessings, as at least they aren't calling the cops. Loitering is a crime in most places.
Windows only at launch, OS X version may eventually be released at some point in the future. No Linux version mentioned.
AKA Civ is still in the Linux Stone Age
So, how much additional mass did the earth obtain? I'm guessing that most of it was hydrogen, but it would be cool to get even a ball park figure.
A few liters (at STP), a few moles, a kilogram, immeasurably small, or much more? Somebody who is more familiar with the field has to have made an estimate. Was it all energy or was mass actually transferred?
You are not legally obligated to go through one of these if you do not want to. If you refuse to go through this, which essentially amounts to a high-tech strip-search, they have to give you the old-fashioned pat-down.
Either the person operating the machine will be under-informed of this right, or will act under-informed. If you push the matter, they know how to slightly abuse their power. They will grant you the pat down just as soon as the "pat down" agent is available, after your flight has left. Remember, they need to check your tickets to see if you should be entering the boarding area, so it's not rocket science to make you wait and watch you squirm.