You know, you can write hard to read code in C as well but most C doesn't turn as hard to read as most Perl.

Unreadable code is unmaintainable code. It may not be buggy but how do you know?

Police officers, however, cannot usually be personally sued for their actions while on the job.

Right versus left is not always the spectrum to be looking at. There are people on both sides of the left/right spectrum that are for more government control and for less government control.

See the Pournelle Chart for a 2D analysis of political thought.

Government officials and organizations have immunity from lawsuits for the most part, however private corporations are not. I'm sure there are any number of potential lawsuits that could be brought against them. I'd say it would be fun to watch them try to dance around the subject but it's not, really. It's sickening.

It seems like anybody can make an Android compatible phone these days so I'll assume that Blackberry has the ability to do that. Now, will they be able to sell their hardware? They have a well-established channel. However, the Android phone market is pretty competitive so the question is will they be able to sell enough and make enough profit to sustain themselves as the large company they've become?

Spoiled? You mean they've seen non-sucky applications. That's not spoiled, that's being a discerning user.

Applets and Flash both suffer from the problem of continually downloading code over the Internet, slow startup times, and then all the handicaps of running inside a browser window and running inside a sandbox.

Browsers still suck for running applications. If the browser crashes it takes all your windows with it. The "Back" button is usually there and gives inconsistent results.

Browsers suck for running applications because they're for displaying web pages, not for running interactive UI's.

Amen! I am sick and tired of people trying to write "applications" instead of just serving up a web page that you can read.

Some sites have started going to this system where they load portions of the article as you scroll through it. Is there a benefit to me? Not that I can see. The only reason I can think of why they do it is to track what you're reading.

Well, you get to program in a paradigm that regular GUI programmers understand, that is an event loop type environment. You also get to program everything in ONE language (that isn't Javascript) and you don't need to manage the client/server communications.

Google uses it for some of their stuff and it works reasonably well. I wouldn't use it for implementing, say, a word processor in a browser, but for things like interactive forms it's quite reasonable.

So when did you first choose to be straight?

Those do exist, for example Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which spits out Javascript and HTML from Java code that you write and manages the communications between the Javascript in the web page and the Java code running on the server. There are difficulties, though, because Javascript and HTML are really kind of sucky for running GUIs and it takes tweaking to get everything looking good in every browser.

Personally, I think that running complex applications inside the browser is just plain stupid but it keeps on getting pushed at us.

In my experience the concurrency will get you but it's also the lack of memory protection that will drive you nuts. The Linux kernel has everything running in the same address space so a bug in some dippy USB driver can crash the whole system. And that is why you shouldn't let n00bs write kernel code.

But not every driver gets included into the kernel. I wanted to use an open source ISDN driver and it was broken because some yahoo had decided that the kernel logging macros all needed to be renamed.

I did kernel development back before Linus even started on Linux and I avoid Linux internals like the plague because they're in a constant state of flux.

Two out of three of those things are not benefits for the customers.

How about a publicly accessible forum where the SUPPORT STAFF answer questions?

What's wrong with peer-to-peer support? Basically the company is free-riding on the backs of its users.

Maybe it's time for "corporate jail" - the company's operations get suspended for the time it's in "jail" but it's required to continue paying employees. That might finally start getting their attention.