Are you suggesting there is no place in a public university for spam filters, antivirus on the firewalls, network intrusion systems, and such? These are specifically in place to protect the community members from threats.

Spam firewalls aren't perfect. But I will offer that my inbox would be a mess without one. About 80% of the mail entering our .edu domain is blocked by the spam firewals before it even hits the mail servers.

Or maybe you were talking about political threats only. But you didn't say that...

I agree in general, change.org and sites like it should not be blocked for their content. If the site was being used maliciously, perhaps the block was appropriate. I don't know. If access is a privilege, perhaps the privilege was lost through bad behavior.

I'm more concerned (as I'm a college IT administrator myself) on the question of censorship. From what I understand censorship is only a First Amendment issue when the government is doing the censorship. Is this an appropriate viewpoint? At what point am I as an IT administrator, or the system I manage, infringing on the first amendment rights of a member of the college community? Does it only apply to state schools, or to any school which accepts government funding? Some college administrators are state employees. Does it only count as government censorship if a state employee (or a system managed by said employee) blocks a specific web site?

From a technical viewpoint, IT Administrators have an obligation to protect their infrastructure and their community members from threats, both perceived and actual. Consider for a moment the viewpoint that the messages from change.org were deceptive, harrassing, or threatening in some way, either politcally or technically. If so, was it correct to block change.org?

Management traffic goes out-of-band, in part for this reason. You can't spoof a controller on our network. Active defense mechanisms mean you can't even spoof an access point. The clients you attempt to lure away will be sent disassociation messages.

Be sure to add them to the list. Their virtual cell technology is pretty slick, and works well for busy environments. Just add more access points to a busy area or for an event, and the controller will take care of balancing the clients between the radios. No, I don't work for them, but I am a happy customer. We have over 250 access points installed across our campus.

they also OEM for many other stackable Ethernet brands (Dell, IBM, HP)

I picked float...

A modern multitasking environment allows me to upload microquantities of beverage (i/o intensive but not processor intensive) while also synthesizing complex algorithms (cpu intensive) and performing visual analysis tasks (gpu intensive). Occasional requests for data mining (memory intensive) tend to hit a lower interrupt which may preempt synthesis and visual tasks, but rarely preempt i/o tasks.

Intense laboratory testing has shown that uploading integer quantities of beverage (101 beers, etc) will typically interrupt all other tasks for several megacycles.

This wouldn't be an issue if AAA (authentication, authorization, accounting) was handled as a separate function.
Root access to the application server does not automatically become root access to the password database.
The password system should be approved/denied and not just a database of the hashes.

Check out Apple's Open Directory as a good example.

But it's buzzword compliant, that's the hook. Just like virtual desktops (thin clients, dumb terminals?) virtual servers (LPARs?) the list goes on. If it's not reinvented and packaged in a new marketing term it won't make the big boys any money.

I run a mixture of stuff, Windows, MAC and Linux, both at work and at home. The last component I had fail was a G3 cpu module from an original G3 minitower. I guess I have had pretty good luck. I lost a few Viewsonic flat screens over the years, but all my old tubes are still working great (including a 15 year old Panasonic!) I just came across the purchase receipt for it this week... just over $3k for the G3, zip drive, 17" tube, and a RAM upgrade. My Mac Pro wasn't much more, but (wow) look at the performance difference!

while the NFL was created in 1920,

I do now! :-)

Yes, we do. I work for a small liberal arts college (2100 students). We support both Windows and OSX. The helpdesk is trained to help with most basic problems for either system. It took a long time to get the helpdesk to work with Windows, as we're primarily a Mac campus.

80% of our clients run Mac OSX. 70% of our helpdesk calls are for Windows help. 90% of our virus outbreaks has been from Windows computers. Over time it became easier to support them than to ignore them.

Free Software costs something to support too.

I think the end costs associated with supporting free software, in addition to supporting Windows and Mac, will raise the overall cost of attending college.

Let me ask you a question in return..

Do you think the average college helpdesk is prepared to answer random Linux questions?

Asking the tour guides is just plain silly. You might as well ask them what brand ERP the college uses.

Most colleges would allow a linux installation but are unprepared to provide support to every possible linux variation and configuration.