The newer BIS versions actually permit you to search remotely in the native client and access your full email history. In your inbox go Menu -> Search By -> Advanced. There's an On Device/Remotely option. Used to be exclusively BES, but that's changed. If you don't see it delete and re-add the account in the email setup app, some of the newer features require initial (automatic) setup steps.

@Pseudonym Authority With newer devices that limit has been increased 10x. I've never had a message be truncated. That limit doesn't include external images or attachments.

You can get a hosted BES/Exchange setup for a small fee. You have to have a trusted hosting provider in a country you consider safe.

Unlike many of the custom Android solutions being suggested on here, this requires an unmodified BlackBerry in a setup that is standard for pretty much any company. Having a setup which is highly customized for evading surveillance might work well, but if you're caught with it the consequences could be severe. Having something which is standard fare among business travellers makes you far less suspicious. Many oppressive regimes will throw you in jail even without being able to decrypt your data if they think it's suspicious enough.

As other posters have pointed out, RIM only provides access to BIS data. If you're running BES (an enterprise server) there's no way RIM can hand over your data. They've had the BES server software audited by independent agencies to confirm its security. Additionally, the on-device security is excellent. Unlike certain other mobile platforms there have been no attacks that can bypass the password lock screen. Additionally there's a full set of encryption and memory cleaning options.

I don't think Obama is extreme left, not even close, and I say that with full knowledge of his policies. On the US political spectrum he's left, neither extreme or moderate, but on a global political spectrum he's quite conservative. Health care reform, as originally proposed by him, still wouldn't have created a universal health care system. The US is the only developed country without one. There's plenty more examples, but I think you get my point. It's about local vs global context.

To the rest of the world, anyone farther right than "American centre-left" is a nutcase. I describe most Republican senators as "batshit insane" without any risk of offending people in Canada. Here even our most conservative major party supports a single-payer universal health care system.

A couple European countries haven't done so well, they're the ones in the news. Greek and Irish bailouts don't change the accomplishments of the rest of the continent. I also encourage you to look at little closer to home at Canada. In many ways we're farther left than Europe, and not so coincidentally have a very stable financial sector (Europe deregulated under US pressure, Canada didn't).

Remember, the rest of the developed world is politically left of the US. Globally there's more success stories than failures, and the US economy isn't looking so great these days.

There's also more than just the economy. I'd still take living in Ireland over living in the US. Any country where more than 5% of people think Sarah Palin is anything but a complete moron scares me.

My BenQ FP241W is 16:10 and supports HDCP. I can either stretch the 16:9 video or letterbox it.

But there's the thing, MobileMe. AFAIK there is no enterprise equivalent to MobileMe where it can be centrally managed. Also, two-way push sync with your e-mail server is the whole point of BES. It syncs just about everything on your phone with the equivalent Outlook (or whatever) features. It also provides end to end AES encryption, compared to the iPhone situation where the iPhone was reporting encryption when there wasn't any. That has rightfully so shaken the faith of a lot of security-minded people in the iPhone.

Yes, of course, that's why the Homebrew channel doesn't let you play burned games. That requires a modchip, and in the case of modchips you're probably right. Though I do think that consumers should have the right to make a backup copy of their media, a right which would supersede DRM protections. If I buy the argument that I'm licensing a game, then the physical media is meaningless to my license. If however I am purchasing the physical media, then I should have the right to edit it and copy it. I know which of these two publishers would prefer.

And BTW, the Wii doesn't even have enough internal memory for 1 Wii game, much less 150. WiiWare doesn't count, they're more like minigames.

Right now the competition is better. The rate that Bell (Qwest in your example) can charge the competition is regulated by the CRTC to costs + 15% profit margin. This whole article is about the CRTC removing that regulation, creating a situation like you have with Qwest where the independent ISPs will cost significantly more.

There are still DSL wholesalers, that use Telus's or Bell's last-mile infrastructure, but have their own transit/DNS/e-mail/etc. I'm with TekSavvy, which I know services both Bell and Telus areas. Otherwise I'm not sure about Telus, I live in Bell-land so I mostly know Bell-area ISPs. I think TekSavvy is the only one that services both Bell and Telus areas (Yak does, but they just re-sell TekSavvy).

Schools and police may be local responsibilities, but I doubt they're funded entirely by local taxes. Here, in Canada, smaller governments (provincial and local) charge taxes too but it doesn't come close to their expenditures. There's a significant funds transfer from upper level governments.

ER and hospitals are private expenditures in the US (should be or not is a different debate). But everything else on that list is funded by the government.

It's also not unreasonable that in this day and age as we ask for more from our governments that spending would grow. Setting up government websites and putting massive amounts of information online costs money, and that's just one example of a new expenditure. And it's not a bad one, websites have greatly increased access to government information.

I think that's exactly it, things like adding extra repositories, installing packages for really basic stuff. I find Mandriva just has that extra bit of polish in working right out of the box.

It has its rough edges in other areas, but on the whole I quite like it for desktop use. I'm technical enough to have no issue with a much more technical distro (and use them all the time for servers), but for my desktop I really like Mandriva's polish. The polish might be comparable to Ubuntu (not a ton of first hand experience), but it's vastly superior to Kubuntu, and I'm a KDE person.

The problem with Apollo was that although the economic benefit was 10 times the expense, the people that benefited were often not the same people that invested the money. Sure the investors got some money in the form of royalties, but on the whole it made a lot of people other than NASA rich. No private company has the resources to do the Apollo project, nor would it be advisable to do so if one did. That company just wouldn't see the returns in a reasonable time frame, if ever. Probably one of the most valuable outcomes was the number of kids it inspired to study science and engineering, that doesn't benefit the original investor at all (maybe it supplied their labour in 20 years, but that's just too far out once again).

The difference is that if we as a society invest we both have the funds and we all benefit. Spending our money to inspire those young minds drives our economy, and keeps everyone employed. This includes the people that build the things the engineers design.

I would also like to point out that the GP referenced transit, not just public transit. Roads are built with public money. I don't think a network of toll roads is desirable, and it prevents an integrated planning approach. I can continue for other issues, but it's really all the same, there are advantages to working together.

As for the argument that taxes force people to give up their money, as long as people are free to move out of the country that isn't true. There are states in this world that don't tax, but I don't see a flood of people moving. These states are states that people don't want to move to, and I wonder why. Might it be that the absence of government leads to warlords and anarchy?

I think you're making a faulty assumption here. Social security/welfare provides people enough money to survive, not to avoid working. I think the number of people on welfare that do not want to work is tiny. It's not enjoyable feeling like a failure and just barely surviving. The purpose of welfare is that so those that find themselves going through a hard spot in their life don't end up on the street. It's very hard to find work when you're living on the street.

I think it's also faulty to assume that the only other place the US could be is total socialism. Look to your northern neighbor Canada (or to Europe). Up here our economy is hardly struggling, actually right now I think we're the envy of the G8. We haven't been hit by the credit crisis nearly as bad as the US. Down there you're nationalizing banks, here we haven't had (and probably wont have) any bank failures. We're also not completely socialist, we just recognize there's a role for government in moderating boom/bust cycles so they don't hit people so hard. You're working on the (I think faulty) assumption that raw capitalism is the perfect system. I don't think that's true, we've had other systems in the past and today we constantly experiment and tinker trying to find a better system. Canada's relative (not complete) absence from the current crisis combined with the fact we're still a G8 member says to me we've found a better system.