Actually, if Apple had done it right, they wouldn't even have that. It would receive and validate the one-way-hash to then send another set of encrypted data it stored that the phone would have to decrypt on the phone itself. I'm not an Apple fan, but I believe this is the way it works and that they implemented it at least MOSTLY correctly.

It's not going to be no maintenance This sounds fairly similar to the market GrandCare Systems (grandcare.com) was designed.

I'm unsure of the costs, but I'm sure they'd be happy to work it out with you.

Discloure: GrandCare was started by someone I went to high school with. Though it's still a cool product.

Yes, you can get a cheap as crap bike at Walmart for that price, but that's the bottom of the barrel bike from them. A sporting goods store is barely any better than a department store. I don't know what you consider a specialty bike store, but I'd expect that they carry Trek, Giant, and Raleigh. $850 is a mid level fitness Trek (FX 7.4 to be exact). Trek's only tandem is 1$200. Raleigh's is $930. Giant doesn't even have one. Heck, look here: http://www.mtbtandems.com/

My vote is for Python. My reasons are that it'[s very good for the rapid part. There's also tons of libraries to do darn near everything under the sun (see pypi.python.org). Finally, one thing in their mantra is that readability counts. This means that you can pick up your project several months later and know what it does... maybe even someone else's! Try doing this with Perl or Ruby, and it's much harder.

Python works quite well on the UNIX like systems, decently on Windows, has good command line helper libraries (argparse or optparse), and has several really good web frameworks. Heck, you can use IronPython or Jython and mix into your .NET or Java code!

The biggest weak point is probably full GUIs. It's not that there's not any good ones, there's just not a good default one. TkInter is built-in, but it's based on Tcl/Tk, the interface isn't very Pythonic, and the end result isn't great. WxPython is good for a basic GUIs, but adding custom widgets is hard. PyQt and PySidehas a more complete collection of widgets, but it again is tough to add new widgets. PyGTK has the large collection of widgets, and widgets can be written in Python and become first class widgets even in other languages. The new kid on the block is Kivy, which is kind of like QML for Python. Kivy defines very low level functionality that builds up widgets, but it makes it easy to combine them together to make a complete widget. This sounds like a lot of work, but it turns out to not be as bad as you'd expect.

Also, PyDev, PyCharm, and WingIDE are all pretty amazing IDEs for Python.

Finally, there's a good amount of jobs asking for Python, especially in big cities.

They have Python support too. It's called PyCharm, and it's a great IDE.

I have the following IDEs: WingIDE (pretty good... I'd love to support those guys more, but the big guns are starting to come into the market); PyDev (Eclipse-based... best free Python one available), which has gotten a lot better since I first used it and is good; and PyCharm, which is great for web development (especially Django).

Mind you, I tend to just use a text editor and command line to do most of it.

Have you looked at the JetBrains IDEs? PyCharm is amazing. IntelliJ IDEA has been the IDE I keep hearing people actually like for Java. I haven't tried the others, but if they are half as good as PyCharm, they're quite good.

Eclipse isn't actually too bad, except that it was over engineered into little components (the Java way). That just tends to leave it pretty slow.

Note: I do not work for JetBrains, just use PyCharm and have really liked it.

On the other hand, support for either is dead. Maemo 5 drops support for both. Hopefully the community continues some love, but we'll see what happens when the first Maemo 5 device comes out.

There is actually 1 thing missing in your spec list.

Touch screen: Resistive vs Capacitive with multitouch support. iPhone wins big.

I don't actually know it's resistive, but most other HTC stuff is. I use a XV6900 (HTC Vogue) running Android and love it, only thing I really would love would be a capacitive screen. Wouldn't consider an iPhone, but it is a huge selling point.