Well, most appliance type devices (and in this day in age, enterprise class and mid-tier storage arrays are appliances) contain some kind of technician login, or tech support login for vendor support. When HP shows up onsite, and needs to apply a firmware update with full customer knowledge; this is the account they use.

Generally the account IS hidden, and the password is hard to guess.

USING THIS ACCOUNT DOES NOT GIVE ACCESS TO YOUR DATA. That would require physical access, or access to a storage network to make fiber channel or SAS connections, that is assuming that the controller is not one of the controllers that supports iscsi. If someone you do not trust has physical access to your disk array; and that access is not monitored (camera) then you have bigger issues to worry about.

If you are going to comment on field service accounts on storage arrays, please have some experience supporting storage arrays first so you know what the hell you are talking about.

IANAL, but sexual abuse is handled at a state level for the most part. Many of the state laws, and feederal law follows title 18 of the US code section 2242 which states:

        Section 2242. Sexual Abus
        Whoever, in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States or in a Federal prison, knowingly -
              1. causes another person to engage in a sexual act by threatening or placing that other person in fear (other than by threatening or placing that other person in fear that any person will be subjected to death, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping); or
              2. engages in a sexual act with another person if that other person is -
                * (A) incapable of appraising the nature of the conduct; or
                * (B) physically incapable of declining participation in, or communicating unwillingness to engage in, that sexual act; or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both.

So, if the person being screened can not say "I wish to leave the airport instead of being searched" (say someone that is mute, or does not speak english and no translator is avalable). That could fall under paragraph 2, section B.

Now, the "out" for the TSA can be found in 18 USC 2246, paragraph 3:
      3 the term "sexual contact" means the intentional touching, either directly or through the clothing, of the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, degrade, or arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person;

If no one was being aroused, than it was not sexual contact, therefore not sexual assault. That is one LARGE loophole.

Am I missing something, What is the reasoning for water being moved from Alaska to Mumbai, when Mumbai does not get significantly less rain?

The average annual precipitation for Sitka, Alaska is 85.9 inches.
The average annual precipitation for Mumbai is 85.31 inches.
It sounds like Mumbai just needs to do a better job of managing resources.

The Customer Service department is just like the Human Resources department. It is not there to help YOU but it is there to support THE COMPANY.

Well, from what I can tell, this is what Brian has to worry about:
Cal code 485:
One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft.

So the questions at hand is did he find the phone under circumstances that would let him know the true owner. We know that he did identity the owner of the phone. If he would have never started searching for the apple guys facebook and linkedin profile, he could claim he did not have the technological means to determine the owner - especially if he would have waited until after the remote wipe. I think that may have started the chain of events.
1. shows the phone is stolen.
2. can therefore be claimed that stolen property was bought and sold.
3. the phone was therefore illegally obtained, and therefore the whole mess of trade secret laws come falling down.

So my question is, would the ad that just showed up on slashdot as I went in to this story be porn? It had an attractive lady in some attractive attire.

Well I would not go with 30%, but here are some numbers:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp

According to w3schools.com, 27% of IE users, are still using IE6. I can not believe that Microsoft is just abandoning 27% of there users. Thats not 27% of browser users, or 27% of people on the Internet, that's 27% of the population that uses Internet explorer as a browser. Cruel Microsoft, Truly Cruel.

How would you feel if one day your ethernet cable manufacturer came in and said "Starting in 2 months, we are no longer going to support cat-5 cable" and your networking vendor said "well, we are going to stop making packets that work with cat5, as your cable vendor no longer supports that product" The major cable provider stops supporting something, then all the little network people see the push from the big cable provider, and all the sudden your building still has 27% cat-5 and you do not know when, if or how it is going to work or stop working.

Welcome to the world of your users.

Back in the day I worked in the IT Dept for one of the top 4 US airlines (ya know, before all the airlines sucked). Every so often I would head out to the airport, and envy the people in the hangers because they got the cool jumpsuits with the reflective stripes and badges. I kind of wished that we had been supplied those for when we had to crawl around the datacenter. I think nothing would look better than a team of geeky sysadmins running around the datacenter in jumpsuits racking servers and pulling cable. Even better would be some road cones to mark off the area that we are working in!

What is even MORE ironic is the whitepapers page http://mcafee.com/us/threat_center/white_paper.html that links to the article saying that adobe reader is going to be a upcoming threat in 2010, ALSO links to adobe reader!

Well, if you bothered to RTFA, and then bothered to follow the link to the next blog entry (which is here: http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/24/mars-rover-reprieve/), you might have seen this followup:

Mars rover reprieve?
Posted: 08:00 PM ET

Just hours after we reported that NASA budget cuts would lead to the shut down of the Mars rover "Spirit," we received this from NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs:

"There is a process that has to be followed for any mission to be canceled and the cancellation of the Mars Exploration Rovers is not under consideration. There is an ongoing budget review within the agency's Mars exploration program. However, shutting down of one of the rovers is not an option."

And this from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:

"NASA will not shut down one of the Mars rovers."

But when I called rover principal investigator Steve Squyres back, he said he hadn't heard anything additional from anyone at NASA, and wonders whether the directive to cut $4 million out of his budget still stands. He says it is a question of simple math...if he has to cut $4 million, then he has to shut down a rover. It's that simple.

So questions remain.

I'll update the blog if I get more clarification.

-Kate Tobin, Sr. Producer, CNN Science & Technology