I still come across areas that isn't even 1G permeated where people live in clusters of five.

1G network would be NMT in Norway and according to wikipedia it was closed at the end 2004 there, so no wonder there is no 1G connectivity. Anyway Norway is quite challenging for good cell phone coverage, sparsely populated and those mountains...

Yes, I googled, and it's surprisingly difficult to find longer term graphs about the market share development, but this shows 2007 to 2011. And yeah I was wrong, RIM is a bit over 10% somewhere in the beginning of that time frame.

I also know where your confusion comes (or maybe mine). I thought we were talking about worldwide market share, you only about USA, where RIM really was somewhere close to 40% at some point.

They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years ...

RIM has always been a tiny phone manufacturer. Did they ever get to two digit market share even with smartphones? A random page with 2006 smartphone market shares, puts Nokia at 50.2% and RIM at 8.3%. Next year to that iPhone was released and it has been steady downward trend for both of those manufacturers...

I think many people carry some cloth with them most of the time, I think it could even be majority. In fact, I am wearing pants right now, even though I am alone at the office!

The Apple vs. Nokia patent battle began far earlier than Nokia chose the MS sockpuppet as its CEO, which then led to Nokia becoming MS subsidiary.

I own N900 and Angry Birds is pretty much the only native game available there. But frankly, I fail to see what's the point why it's so popular, there's a billion of similar flash games around the webs.

Oh, flash and iPhone, sorry...

It is quite unsurprising they will support only h.264. They are a licensor in the h.264 patent pool (just like Apple) so it does not cost them anything and they actually get money when somebody licenses it, so it makes sense to endorse its use. If something else (theora, vp8,...) will actually win the html5 video format war, they can always add the support later. Obviously I am joking about this part :)

By the way, at least here in Finland high taxes were not originally added to fuel (and new cars) because of covering externalities, but to control trade balance. All fuel and cars were imported, and there was a fear that trade deficit would follow unless imports were not kept low by keeping the prices artificially high to consumers.

Of course after having high taxes on fuel they cannot be easily decreased, because then the government would have to raise other taxes or reduce spending... But it is nice that there is now another reason to keep fuel taxes high.

I'm probably gonna use one as a swap on my new i7 Core desktop.

Didn't you notice from the review how incredibly slow flash drives are for small random writes? And that's what matters for swap, as pages in memory are 4KiB. Fastest of the tested drives was getting 0.1MB/s at that block size. Of course in practice swap writing will not be completely random, so maybe the actual performance is not that much worse than a normal harddrive...

Isn't _every_ voter undecided before he/she actually decides who to vote for?

Apart from the those who vote the party, not the candidate, of course.