Just like your gas tax goes god knows where these days too.

Fuel taxes pay for the roads. They are the largest source of highway funding...

Yes, there is a charge on all telephone lines in the USA that was added as a way to subsidize access to rural areas of the nation so everyone could have affordable connectivity. Its the law already.

The Universal Service Fund pays for phone service for those who can't afford it, or pays for part of the cost for high-cost (rural/remote area) service. It also pays for Internet access for schools, libraries, and rural health care. It doesn't provide affordable Internet connectivity to rural areas and isn't supposed to.

Or are you referring to some other government program?

Yes, this is annoying.

Because in the USA higher education is for the RICH only.

Bullshit. Expensive American education is accessible to the non-rich, primarily through easy-to-get, hard-to-discharge student loans and sometimes grants and subsidies that can result in the students effectively getting paid to attend school.. Whether the non-rich can afford the loans accessible to them is another question

If it ever seems that higher education was for the rich only, it's probably because those smart enough to go to the four year universities generally had smart parents who were able to afford it anyway.

It's always been that way, and it will stay that way.

Once again, bullshit. American higher education is more inclusive than ever, with continuously lowered standards, extensive remedial classes, easy and academically dubious programs, and (for many for-profit "schools" and even some private non-profit and state schools) aggressive advertising and sales.

What's more likely is that they were running a very old system, and have passwords from those times still in the database; these are usually upgraded when the user logs in again, but some people never logged in again.

If they have stored truncated case insensitive passwords or hashes, how do they know what users' correct passwords are? Should they reset users' passwords to the first password they type that matches the hash? No, because then a typo (accidental case mismatch or extra/missing/wrong characters after the eighth) would result in the user's password just being wrong.

This is why long-time and frequent Amazon users are still affected if they've not changed their password recently.

The real fact of thew matter is that the "Enterprise features" are not driven by the handset itself, but the backend management. And in this, Blackberry are going to have a world of pain as the backend is where ActiveSync phones are making IT staff lives much MUCH easier. You look at the average BES and then at now what Exchange 2010 can do and the featureset is very similar - Exchange wins because it's much easier to work with.

Lots of those nice ActiveSync features go away when using Windows Phone 7. You have to use an old device (Windows Mobile 6.5) to get all of them. At this point, I think even the iPhone supports more features than WP7...

Blackberry OS was always a piece of garbage, but it still is widely used because of the quantity of devices that run it. There is also the fact that many users are just used to it and swear by Blackberries.

Don't you think BlackBerry got so popular for a reason?

The amount of enterprise features available is simply not surpassed by any other device. Windows Mobile was getting closer and closer to BlackBerry with WM 6.1 and 6.5, but even Microsoft's own Windows Phone 7 is missing a lot of the enterprise features from WM 6.5.

Want to install OSX on non-Apple hardware? Lots of cracks needed. The OSX DRM is to check to make sure its Apple only hardware.)

Not really. It's not so much DRM as a specific set of supported hardware and a specific (different than BIOS) way of booting. The "lots of" modifications needed to get OS X running on non-Apple hardware tend to be drivers and patches for hardware support and a special bootloader or emulated boot environment.

Apple also does some sneaky things that aren't exactly DRM, but are basically locking people in -- for instance, funny implementations of h.264 for AppleTV that won't play well with much things, and anything that you want to use with AppleTV has to be encoded that way.

It's not really sneaky. Your pirated H264 content is simply beyond the supported specification of the device, and the device is marketed to play content from Apple's and other supported stores/streaming services, not Blu-ray/HD DVD quality HD video or 1080p pirated content.

A lot of pirated content is encoded to Blu-ray supported specifications (1080p24 L.4.1 H264), as this is what Blu-ray players, many network/USB video players, and PC video cards with H.264 decoding support, but the Apple device doesn't even support 1080p output.

/Disclaimer: I actually own and read books on a Kindle. I'm part of the problem.

You may own the Kindle, but you certainly don't own the books or the software running on the Kindle that renders the books.

Using Gmail (or MobileMe) is certainly different than running a mail server on a VM, even if that VM is hosted by a third party in a remote datacenter. Gmail runs on a large geographically distributed cluster, and the service is entirely managed by Google.

In addition to the hosting costs (local or remote), having your own private mail server costs time, money, or a mix of both, and it takes a lot of time and/or money to provide the level of service that approaches something like Gmail or MobileMe can provide.

That's your own personal experience. I know a few iPhone owners, ones who tinker with their phones (non-jailbraking) as much as I'm guessing an Android owner would, who restart their phones every few days, if not every day.

What are they doing wrong? My phone is jailbroken and does not need to be rebooted at all, and I know of no one who has to reboot their iPhone with any frequency.

it would be more accurate to compare it to an iPhone, which has restarts that happen far more often than "months apart." It also takes a similiar amount of time to start up.

I haven't restarted my iPhone since applying the last software update, over a month ago.

there are lot of other solutions, people are just too lazy or not tech savvy enough to do them.

So everyone on Slashdot who doesn't run their own mail server (at significant expense either in time or buying pre-integrated software) is too lazy?

Get a life.

Yes, Oracle has done some stupid things. If you have forgotten, so had Sun. It's amazing how selective our memories have become - Sun is now seen as a candidate for canonization. Sheesh!

The comment you replied to criticized MySQL purely on technical grounds, not because they were owned by Oracle... Indeed, the technical complaints made against MySQL mostly do not apply to Oracle DB.