Check out Casper Suite from JAMF Software to see what tools look like now. It puts Windows enterprise tools to shame.

If that were actually true, I would have to sign a thing refusing the antibiotics when I go to the doctor's office (usually, I'm damn sick by that time.) The dr. with then say they are going to prescribe antibiotics, I ask if the antibiotics are necessary, and the dr. puts away the prescription pad. I walk out with the understanding that what I have has a very low chance of killing me, and that I am doing my body service by allowing it to fight its battles.

Yeah, you don't understand what the octets are, do you?

11000000.10101000.00000000.00000001. Now convert these into four base10 numbers. What do you end up with?

192.168.0.1

Now, if you convert to "alphanumeric" (I think you mean ascii) _every_ letter and number gets eight bits.
0011000101101000 0011001001110100 0111100101101010 0011010100110110 0110101000110000
  0110000101110011

Or, padding this with another two octet pairs of zeroes...

3274:796A:3536:6A30:6173::

And then you don't have to worry about those unwritable ascii codes either.

"what if you had data on there you didn't want
unauthorized people to see?"

That's the wrong question..

"What if you had sensitive data on their that you are contractually required to restrict access to?"

I certainly wouldn't expect datacenter company to root a box. Unilaterally turning it off if it is causing problem, sure, but that isn't accessing the data.

Your analogy is off. It's more like there is a pothole in your driveway, and your concrete contractor asks for your keys to make sure that it isn't your wheels.

I'll second this. If you didn't agree to them having root access in the contract, they are illegally accessing your hardware, which is a felony. You may just want to notify the FBI, as well as your and their state's attorneys general.

Why do you think they tell you to go buy a new, shiny one. Oh, and put lots of hd space in it too, they need to store their porn collection.

Right, but in this instance the police acted appropriately... They were alerted to a potential threat, contained it, discovered it wasn't a threat at all and left. No charges were filed, and a suggestion was given that would result in a whole lot of police and Bungie staff not having their time wasted.

To the guy that said carrying the gun was political speech. Bullshit. In this instance, an employee was carrying a piece of equipment from point a to point b. That equipment just happened to be something that the general public took as a threat. The police suggested a way to alleviate time wasted in the future.

If they were to actually carry this item as political speech, it would be wise to alert the police that you are doing so _before_ you start marching around with a fake gun. Otherwise, you are _very_ likely to be looking down the barrel of a very real gun.

So you are saying that they're happy to get their return of investment on their hardware alone in 44 years? I doubt it.

On a similar note, they claim that they will backup any one computer for $5/month. Well, my one computer happens to be the backup node for my SAN, so they're going to need about 15 TB (It's a small SAN) to have 30 day backups for me. Please note, that all of the files on my SAN are under 4GB and I have a SAN, not a NAS, so my servers see it as a native hard drive.