You have to type with the tip of your thumb rather than the pad. It's not that hard.

> So, I'm thinking either face-recognition or retinal scans...

Waayyyy too complicated and expensive and Charlie's Angels-ish. If all you're trying to do is identify which user performed which step, RFID is your friend. Have an RFID sensor integrated into the workstation, and require the user to "sign" their work with their badge before they can commit.

Look at people going to work every day using RFID badges. If you want something faster than logging in with A/D credentials (which would have been my first suggestion), swiping a badge is pretty much as fast as you're going to find.

Now, if people using each other's credentials is a concern, or security in general, then you're looking at using A/D credentials plus a badge ("something you know, and something you have"). I personally wouldn't go with biometrics until they've gotten cheaper and more foolproof. Maybe never.

I agree with you in general, but feel obligated to point out, the difference (and it is a small one) is, Blackberry had at one time a superior product. Whereas, Microsoft never did.

> That's only because it had a better OS and software. It isn't actually better than the iphone.

Right.... because.... got it! Because it's not an iphone. There, I've run circles around you logically. Now it's time for the penguin on your iphone to explode.

Active Synch does fine for the things Active Sync does. I liked having transparent access to intranet shares, and that I could easily transition from any environment to any other -- in 2005 -- by rolling over the item and pressing the button. For instance, in a calendar alert, roll to the Organizer, press, send him an email saying I'll be a little late. Some of these features are now available on other platforms, but Blackberry was there first, and they still do it better.

I can't speak for your environment, but BES here was one (1) server for the entire company (approx 20K employees, admittedly not all with blackberrys). That doesn't sound particularly resource-hungry. As to the pain in the ass part, I haven't administrated BES so I can't say for certain, but before outsource we had two people doing it part time (each backing up the other) and it was rock solid. Now we have an entire silo who can't do anything that had not previously been written down as a step-by-step procedure. But that's not Blackberry's fault.

I'd have to reluctantly agree. It doesn't look ergonomic. It looks like an odd compromise between having a physical keyboard and having a smartphone-sized screen.

I'd be more interested in a Classic.

Please add, older Blackberrys had the best physical, tactile keyboard in the industry, before or since, and experienced users could very nearly touch-thumb-type on them.

I went from a Blackberry Tour to an Android phone years ago when IT was outsourced and we apparently lost the ability to keep BES alive. Several years later, I'm still not as fast on the Android virtual keyboard than I was on the old Blackberry. I really miss that keyboard.

I'd go back to a Blackberry in a second (provided it has a good physical keyboard) if our offshore admins could keep BES operational for more than 18 hours straight. The smaller screen and fewer apps were more than made up, in an Enterprise environment, by the high degree of integration with the company intranet. It was something you couldn't play on as much as other devices, but it was something you could work on.

Um, ok, I was thinking direction vector rather than Euclidean vector, but you're right, velocity has both magnitude and direction, so I was using the term incorrectly. But I couldn't bring myself to use "speed". There's probably a better way to word it. Same direction, the only difference being we'll arrive at a bad place in a different time frame.

Only once, and never ordered the milk again. (Maybe they were trying to drive us to the corporate sponsor, Coca Cola?) The cafeteria was a huge multipurpose room, and kids would buy the milk cartons to use as "hand grenades", throwing them high in the air across the room and learning important lessons about splash damage.

Similarly, had the hamburger once, didn't do that ever again. The burrito was... ok. The pizza was ghastly. (How can you ruin pizza??) The hot dog... I don't want to talk about it.

There was a McDonald's a few blocks away (original design, with the building between two giant yellow arches) and kids (including me) would break the prohibition against going off-campus during school hours to have lunch there. Not only was the food quality better, the prices were also. A regular hamburger made fresh with onion pickle ketchup and mustard was (in 1973) 20 cents, and the bone meal filler hamburger made hours earlier on a bun with nothing else at school was 25 cents.

> I think that the problem stems from the fact that it's difficult to attract "good" candidates to run for office.

Yes, although the reasons might be complex (privacy is certainly a factor) the adage "anyone truly qualified for the job wouldn't want it" would seem to apply.

Ok. I think I'm going to hang onto my old truck, thanks.

When I went to high school, (mid-seventies) CocaCola already had the drinks contract, (probably why I can't stand the stuff today) and the food was worse than anything McD's had ever produced up to that time. Recognizable bone meal in the hamburger. Looking back, I realize now that the food would be considered bargain dog food today.

> To answer your second question: Terrorists? WTF are you smoking?

Whatever I'm smoking, it doesn't appear to be working. I was referring to this line in the article:

> in response to a growing threat from criminals and terrorists

Criminals, that's a given. You had a great example. Terrorists? I'm having a hard time seeing the connection.

Yeah.... it'd be like Monsanto and the IRS teaming up to make children's lunches healthier.

I know we've talked about it in Slashdot, in the context of more and more electronics taking responsibility for control of the car, mesh car networks, Windows controlling and potentially driving your car, but really -- hyperbole aside, is car hacking a real thing? And if so, is it really an effective tool for terrorists? (Or is that -- "terrorist" -- what we're calling experimenters and hackers these days?)

I mean, if someone is being proactive about what might be a terrorist vector, I guess that's ok, but there's a feeling in the back of my head that this might be a solution looking for a problem.