"The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry."

Because, as you implied in your post, BlackBerry phones 'just work'. Most of the time.

Push e-mail? A BIS phone works splendidly. BIS handles the actual polling. Even OWA seems to work fo those of us without BB servers at the home office. Ask your favorite Android user how their POP/IMAP email is working. Full disclosure; I am an Android user, G-1 on Donut. iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works, but it can't be too bad or you all would have ditched... wait, nevermind.

Web browsing? Very well done, considering the platform, since your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience. BIS does this also, just not as customizable as having a BES of your own.

BIS is a good idea, though it does expose the single-point-of-failure issue. But, consider your cell service in general:

- Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower. Yep, you might have two or three that can serve you, but if the backhaul from your tower is fritzed, you might have to wait until you get paroled from that tower, and move one to one that isn't hosed.

- The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier. I don't know for sure, but I suspect redundancy here is not universal.

- God forbid your carrier is architected like T-Mobile, or your single-point-of-failure is either a GSM service that has to be responsive or your phone is doing rock imitations, or a similar CDMA. I hear CDMA doesn't have the same architecture, but if your carrier can't authenticate you to the network, u b hosed.

RIM has had more than its share of outages over the last two years, but they have been notable because of the popularity of the platform. I ditched my BB to try Android. My wife has not been affected by either outage this month - be they natiowide or global or whatever. Her BB Curve hasn't missed a beat. Lucky I guess. And she would not like my G1, or Andriod, at all. Too much fuss. She just wants mail and minimal web when she wants it.

Dump on RIM if you want, but their platform works very well. Outages aside, it is a superior corporate solution, and makes most other platforms look like pants. Wait, are there ANY other corporate platforms?

Or you can establish a VPN from your phone.

At least with Microsoft, you don't have a single point of failure !

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/16/teaching-refugees-ho.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing)

People becoming wealthier means in the long run they can buy stuff from you (not necessarily directly mind you, but is no use to have people starving to death when they could be earning a living and trading with people around the world).

A free trial costs $10/month? Free is getting expensive.

The US does deserve the honor of creating a very good form of government, way back in the late 1700s when Europe was still under the rule of monarchs. Sure, these days every decent country has some sort of Constitutional Republic, but back then it was a downright revolutionary concept. Even better, our form of government has survived ever since the ratification of the Constitution in the 1780s. Most other industrialized nations can't claim to have a form of government that's lasted as long and been so stable; they've all been interrupted by dictatorships (Spain, Germany, Italy), occupations by invaders (Poland, France, Belgium), had a complete change of government (Japan, China), etc. The closest would probably be Great Britain, which instead of some big unheaval like those others, slowly morphed from an absolute monarchy, to a monarchy with a Parliament, to a Parliamentary democracy with a monarch that's nothing but a figurehead.

Unfortunately, while what the USA's founders created was revolutionary and great, 230+ years of time and massive expansion and all kinds of social changes and upheavals have corrupted it greatly, and now it's not working so well and appears to be utterly corrupt at most levels.

Maybe for once, they can change the law to be for the better... Not likely of course, since if they do get the law change, the new law would probably end up screwing over authors. But still, one can hope.

Yeah, but to take advantage of that you have to actually be in Baltimore. Unless it's a 70Mbit connection with no filters and-- wait, what the hell am I saying - it's Baltimore. Yeah... I'll just stick with a less homicidal location.

It depends on whether bad code is better than no code. The choice of language plays a much smaller part in deciding the final speed of a program than the skill of the developer. A well-written Ruby program is often faster than a badly-written C program. The speed of the language implementation (compiler, VM, and so on) is a constant factor, while the speed of the algorithms chosen defines the complexity class. Using an O(1) algorithm in C# might be slower than using the same O(1) algorithm in C, but using an O(n) algorithm in C will quickly become a lot slower than the C# version.

Making it easier for poor developers to program increases the amount of bad code (see Python for a concrete example), but it does increase the total amount of code. In most cases, this is beneficial. Good developers are a scarce resource, and most companies would rather have something that mostly works now than something that will work well in 2-3 years.

I'm so hungry I could eat at Arby's!

Awesome! I love when somebody brings in the Bill of Rights to support their lame argument! Because almost everybody is an idiot when it comes to constitutional law. You, sir, do not disappoint either!

The idiots fail in two ways: A) That haven't actually read it themselves, or B) they cherry pick it or interpret in such a way that it comforts them instead of using a judicial eye.

The wording of the fourth amendment includes: "be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Please carefully note the inclusion of the word "unreasonable". Unlike the 2nd amendment which is absolute, the fourth amendment is conditional.

The judicial system has already decided that an arrest provides the probable cause necessary to deem search and seizure of the suspect's property REASONABLE and therefore permissible. Good job. you sunk your own argument.

So, yes, the police can take away the suspect's cell phone. I still contend that isn't a punishment; no more than taking away the suspect's watch is.

Are you ready for this bad news... Life is tough. Everything unpleasant can be described as a "punishment" using your logic. So, again, cry all you want for your blanky; you don't have a right to it as you imply.

P.S. Santa doesn't exist either.

You ogling is what's scaring them off.

No, you wouldn't work there because they didn't give you the job.

To microsofters, everything except M$ products is called "linux". That includes OS X, Oracle and, now, Haiku.

Funny that you should use "Oracle" as an example of something that is not Linux.

"Oracle Database" is obviously not an operating system at all.

"Oracle Enterprise Linux", though, clearly is a Linux distro. It's a ripoff of RHEL.