Wow. So I'm modded "flamebait" for linking to the Tenaha abuses by police, in a story about police misconduct? I get the feeling some republican just ran through the entire thread dropping downmods anywhere they could.
If you really want people to understand, listen, and take you seriously about grievances you have with your local police, you need to back off of the political garbage and treat the problem for what it really is, cops that lie and cheat.
When one political party is a group of people who in the past few years have been strongly associated with Stormfront-level racism and thuggery, the political party seems to have more to do with it than you are willing to allow.
Looking at the rhetoric coming from the Republicans and the Tea Party in areas like Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, the secessionist nutwad fringe from California, and even in northern states like Wisconsin and Ohio, it's not hard to understand why the OP would consider the primary problem to be the association of so-called "law enforcement" with the Republican Party, especially if OP happens to be of one of the demographic or racial groups that the Republicans/Tea Party have been targeting recently.
Also, consider the cases we've had in political and police corruption in the past. Civil Rights legislation and investigations - some of cases going back 60 years or more - go on because the police were all in the same political party, were all members of the KKK, and were all complicit in that sort of behavior in the South. The fact that OP's home county is dominated by the one political party is not to be discounted in the ability for said party to be corrupt, through and through.
Of course, I'm assuming that OP lives in the South. But it's not a bad assumption. They're well-known for the whistle-stop sort of towns with cops who do crap like went on in Tenaha, TX, another Republican stronghold.
If you read the OP's post, the judge appears to have disallowed that line of questioning. Which, to me, would be a clear indication that the judge is trying to tilt things and just wants to get the money from the victims.
Yes, you could appeal the conviction, but you're talking about traffic court, and it's already an uphill battle to fight a judge's decision on what evidence should or shouldn't be allowable. Appeals courts regularly reject cases that small as being beneath their notice.
Remember, in Ohio (a Republican stronghold), the police don't even have to have a measurement of your speed: they can just tell the judge they "estimated" your speed and that's good enough for their Supreme Court judges. This even after the corrupt cop in the case couldn't prove he was certified to operate a radar gun, and that revelation got the radar gun reading thrown out of court.
Republicans love rigging the system it seems. In the absence of sane levels of taxation, they get their revenue by turning the cops into the Badged Highwaymen, shaking down random citizens for money.
If you ever have any question, make sure you're in view of the dashcam and ask the cop the following, verbatim:
"Officer, am I under arrest or am I free to go?"
At that point, the officer must make the determination. The two options you have given them are the only two options available to them legally, and are mutually exclusive. If they choose to arrest you, they'd better have a damn good reason. If they don't, and they simply want to ask you questions, you are well within your rights to say "As I am free to go, and I choose not to answer your questions, I will now leave."
Also consider the following regarding "traffic stops" and "minor tickets":
If you show up to "just pay it" or "take defensive driving", they give you a "break" and it costs you around $150-200 after court costs.
If you want to plead not guilty, then you have to burn: - The cost of your lawyer. - At least one half-day (if not a full one) of leave from work to show up and plead not guilty. - At least one half-day, if not full day, to "meet with the prosecutor." - A large amount of time subpoenaing whatever you need to subpoena, taking your own measurements of the area, photographing. And half the time the corrupt police won't deliver the things requested as evidence (like the officer's dashcam record, radar gun calibration records, etc) and you'll have to fight for those, which means you have to show up in court and burn MORE leave time to get the judge to issue the subpoena for discovery. - At least one half-day, if not full day, to actually be in court and empanel the jury. - At least one half-day, if not full day or even more, to be in court to actually argue your case.
And at the end of it, you have to be prepared for the possibility that if you're found guilty, the corrupt judge is going to throw the book at you and the Prosecutor is going to tack on a bunch of miscellaneous bullshit charges, whatever they can come up with, to punish you for "wasting our time" by actually asserting your constitutional right to plead innocent and have a trial by jury.
The whole system is rigged. Cops know it; they're the corrupt underpinning of it.
I'm reminded of an old Far Side cartoon with a bunch of guys in a WWII trench; their Sergeant is telling them "Ok, on the count of 3, we rush the enemy. And remember boys, your guns were made by the lowest bidder!"
Michigan J. Frog is the reference, but the way he's drawn - in an evocation of the "Minstrelsy" shows - is indeed going to strike many people as racist, intended or not.
If you'd invested NASA's budget in materials or medical research, you'd probably have a similar number of developments. Probably more, because you wouldn't be blowing a lot of the budget on PR stunts like the space shuttle.
Bullshit. The thing that makes NASA's programs and resources so important is that the challenges they face are unique, daunting, and require out-of-the-box thinking that you'd never get in materials and medical research.
Put money into medical research, and you get a bunch of "new" drugs or "new" devices that function the same as the old drugs/devices, just changed enough to re-patent. Put money into materials research, and you get incrementalism. Again, people are more interested in "how to change it to be re-patentable." Put money into a lot of other fields - even other fields of travel, like avionics and automobiles - and you get the same incrementalist bullshit.
NASA has done more, with less, than most fields have ever dreamt of even producing, yet the "free market" types refuse to acknowledge this, despite the fact that even the space X-prize produced "companies" that have yet to so much as get a rocket into proper orbit, let alone a human being.
"Oh, and by the way, domine domine domine, you're all Catholics now."
Erm... none of the Founding Fathers were Catholic. They were mostly Deists and Non-Anglican Protestants, who had left Britain specifically because the Anglican Church were being a bunch of dicks about allowing people to worship (or not) as they chose to.
There is a big difference in striking an area that may contain civilians, because a military target is present as well, and sending someone in to blow up a pizza shop full of innocent civilians just trying to get lunch.
Read the Geneva Conventions. Specifically, the parts covering the terrorist's favorite tactic, human shields:
The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations. - Geneva Convention IV, Article 28
So, for example: the fact that Moammar Gadhafi sticks his secret bunker under a "public housing" apartment building does NOT render that building immune to military strikes designated to take the motherfucker out.
A terrorist is someone who attempts to force some form of change in public opinion/behavior by means of random violence.
Many terrorists consider themselves "freedom fighters", but they really aren't. If you're fighting for "freedom" then you restrict yourself to legitimate military targets, and you don't kidnap and ransom people.
Terrorists use the populace as human shields, deliberately hide their weapons and identities, deliberately target civilians, and are just generally subhuman scum.
"Allowing both groups" presents the following problems:
#1 - it is unfair to allow one group (the ones who were in the "heightened chance" of the faulty selection process) to have more than one chance to get in. #2 - it is unfair to deny another group (the ones from the other 28 days' worth of submissions) an EQUAL chance at selection. #3 - it is unfair to those from other years, who were each given EQUAL chances in each year, to provide a different standard for this year only. #4 - it is unfair to the US to insist that, because of an error that was caught soon enough to rectify it before any serious harm was done, they should accept double the "winners" from this year (which would undoubtedly lead to a LOWER CHANCE for applicants in subsequent years as they then played catch-up).
#5 - it is unfair to allow there to be two groups of "winners", one set of which had a "random selection" chance from 1/15 of the total pool, the other set of which had a "random selection" chance from 14/15 of the total pool. One group clearly had a higher chance of selection than the others.
This was part of the problem so frustrating about the space shuttle program. Originally, the shuttles were supposed to fly a LOT more missions and do a lot more. For one example: the fuel boosters were originally designed to be carried into space as reusable modules to add to a space station. Politics killed that part.
There were originally supposed to be a lot more launches, but Congress killed funding to produce enough shuttles and booster parts to make that a reality. Later dipshits in Congress would lament "we were supposed to be launching a lot more regularly" in their attacks on NASA, while ignoring the fact that their predecessors were the ones responsible for not providing enough money to do so.
Every time the "budget for NASA" is drawn up, it's not the actual NASA budget. If NASA were able to put the money where it was needed, they'd be in a lot better shape.
What Congress does instead is writes a "NASA budget" with a fuck-ton of strings attached. They give a "budget" for various missions, not overall. They cover salaries and the funding of various project bids, which can't be reassigned until Congress writes the next "NASA Budget."
Add to that the fact that NASA projects are usually on the order of a decade long, and most of these Congressional Fuckwits from either party are up for reelection (and a lot get replaced) every couple years, then come in and rewrite the budget and re-earmark things to the states of whatever party's in power to the loss of the states that aren't.
The current, added problem is that the Republicans - the party currently with "power of the purse" - have a hate-on for NASA because NASA was actually DOING the climate research and ongoing studies in response to screams of "global climate change is a myth, there's not enough research." The cuckoo clock wing of the party wants to kill NASA right now because they don't want there to BE enough research, ever.
All religions have a serious amount of silliness to them if you look at it objectively. A lot of "commandments" that are either artifacts of the time/place in which they were created, artifacts of the mind-altering drugs or other wackiness the people who created them were into, or artifacts of the people who have altered/rewritten/co-opted them for political purposes since their founding.
I was told once by a Muslim woman that there is a requirement for women to veil their faces because "the wives of Mohammed veiled their faces in public." Nevermind the fact that they were living in a fucking sandbox, and anyone with half a brain wears long flowing robes and headgear that amounts to a veil merely so that they don't get sand in their eyes. Nevermind that many people over there still do it today, men included, for the same reason - to her, it was about "religion", merely because some hopped-up misogynist Imam had drilled into her impressionable young head an idea of "modesty" that really doesn't have bearing in modern society.
Just imagine what would have happened if Mohammed had been an Inuit instead. Would all Muslims in the world be praying towards the North Pole, and insisting on wearing sealskin overcoats in climates like Texas? Probably.
Man, you guys are nuts. The Tea Party is trying to save you from a huge government about to take regulate every thing you do (including sex) and all you can do, is fight the very people who TRULY have the interest of gay people at heart. Gay Marriage would not be an issue, if states were able to decide what was marriage instead of having the federal government make the final and only determination... let the states have at it as they will.
Voting for smaller government is a vote for freedom, whatever your interest are.
..... wow.
Michele Bachmann, aka Homophobe Barbie who runs around trumpeting the "need for a Federal Marriage Amendment", is the preeminent Tea Party candidate currently and you claim the Tea Party is the right place for gays to vote in order to support gay rights?
Maybe we should ask the Texans about their right to talk with their doctors in the privacy of the examination room? The disgusting "sonogram bill" that says your doctor can be punished if he doesn't say certain legislatively demanded things, even if he finds them to be medically inaccurate or worse, was put forth by... wait for it... the leader of the "Texas Tea Party Caucus" in the Texas legislature.
It was the predecessors of the Tea Party types who were responsible for anti-sodomy laws, which the Supreme Court dutifully struck down, and you want me to believe that the "Tea Party" groups won't try to pass something like that again?
I mean really just... wow. I am in awe at the willful cognitive dissonance required to even formulate the blatantly dishonest claims that you put forth. Should we go back to letting "the states" decide to have miscegenation laws too?
#1 - OWA is already set up (maintained so that users can have web-based access to the Exchange environment).
#2 - BES Express is not "effectively free", as it requires extra hardware to run on, and the server admins did NOT like the idea of adding it on to the existing server as-is.
At the moment, we're not "getting blackberries" any more. We're waiting out the few users trapped in cellphone contracts and unable to switch out without spending money on a new phone.
No. On the other hand, being able to keep multiple email accounts (work, school, home) separately (and I mean ACTUALLY SEPARATED) on the same phone is a good start.
GPS + Mapping on Droid or iPhone is far better than RIM's shitty offering.
LocalEats. Good to have.
Barcode scanner and QR Droid work very well and are useful. Barcode scanning especially when grocery shopping to doublecheck the so-called "sales."
I could go on but the point is... most of this stuff isn't even available on the RIM offering (let alone a decent SSH or RDC client).
1) The keyboards are always phenomenal. I can take notes on a blackberry quite well, keeping pace with a speaker. And the notes are always, automatically synced to the Exchange server, so I dont even have to worry about backups.
You must have womanly-small fingers. I could never use a BB keyboard without constantly getting the wrong key.My HTC Evo Shift, meanwhile, has a gloriously useful keyboard that I can take notes on better than any BB I ever had.
2) Battery life is phenomenal compared to Android power-devices. If the thing doesnt last through 8 hours of talking and data usage, then its worthless to me. Most days I dont use it quite that much, but others Im on the phone all day.
If I'm going to need 8 hours of talking and data usage, I'm going to be somewhere I can plug in. My charger is standard micro-USB, easily plugs into the car adapter, wall adapter, or the nearest device with any sort of USB plug no problem.
3) Keyboard shortcuts are phenomenal. It is trivial to fly around the menus on my Bold, compose a mail, copy/paste, bookmark and all the rest. Very little fiddling with menus.
Funny. On my Droid, the stuff I use most is trivial to get to as well. The top 8 things I do are a homescreen touch away. That's a lot of things.
4) BES is king.
You're insane. BES is expensive, barely workable, wonky as hell crap that gives our server admins nightmares.
Active-sync is nice, and has its pros (like not needing yet another server and yet 2 more GB of RAM),
That's just the beginning.
but it also has a lot of cons-- certificate woes, iPhone woes (where it simply refuses to connect, even if the certs are all correct-- could be any number of things)
Funny, we have yet to have an iPhone have a problem connecting. Likewise with Droids. Supply username, password, server name, and they sync right up.
For Blackberries, meanwhile, you have to provide: - the EXACT https OWA link - Username/password - User's "box" name, which could be anything at all and is likely different from the username - AND every time they reset their password, you don't just have to reset the stored pword on the Blackberry, you have to delete the entire account setting and re-create it to get the fucking piece of shit to resync correctly.
This is a BLACKBERRY problem, not an OWA problem.
lack of manageability, and not as many things are synced. Email, calendar, and contacts all sync. What else are you looking to sync?
Its getting better all the time, but BES still has fewer issues, easier deployment, better security, and more management options. And the new 5.0 BES has a web-management interface which (despite being ActiveX-style crufty) is great-- allows you do manage which public folders you sync, lets you do backups, etc.
I'm now convinced you have never actually seen an AD/OWA implementation, and are simply talking out your ass.
If your idea of a smartphone is occasionally getting some emails and doing phone calls, sure, get an iPhone or Android. Some of the folks in my office have iPhones, and love them in general. But if you (like me) find yourself typing email on your phone even if theres a computer nearby, you really want to use a Blackberry. Theyre wonderful for business use, and I think it would be a mistake for RIM to start catering to home users-- theyll never beat iPhone at that game. The strength of a Blackberry is productivity.
Blackberries help with productivity? You really must be joking. We've got users defecting to iPhone and Droid models in droves, who 2 years ago insisted they loved their blackberries and would never part with them, merely because of how cranky and impossible to use their blackberries are compared to the simplicity and elegance of the iOS and Droid models.
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Wow. So I'm modded "flamebait" for linking to the Tenaha abuses by police, in a story about police misconduct? I get the feeling some republican just ran through the entire thread dropping downmods anywhere they could.
If you really want people to understand, listen, and take you seriously about grievances you have with your local police, you need to back off of the political garbage and treat the problem for what it really is, cops that lie and cheat.
When one political party is a group of people who in the past few years have been strongly associated with Stormfront-level racism and thuggery, the political party seems to have more to do with it than you are willing to allow.
Looking at the rhetoric coming from the Republicans and the Tea Party in areas like Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, the secessionist nutwad fringe from California, and even in northern states like Wisconsin and Ohio, it's not hard to understand why the OP would consider the primary problem to be the association of so-called "law enforcement" with the Republican Party, especially if OP happens to be of one of the demographic or racial groups that the Republicans/Tea Party have been targeting recently.
Also, consider the cases we've had in political and police corruption in the past. Civil Rights legislation and investigations - some of cases going back 60 years or more - go on because the police were all in the same political party, were all members of the KKK, and were all complicit in that sort of behavior in the South. The fact that OP's home county is dominated by the one political party is not to be discounted in the ability for said party to be corrupt, through and through.
Of course, I'm assuming that OP lives in the South. But it's not a bad assumption. They're well-known for the whistle-stop sort of towns with cops who do crap like went on in Tenaha, TX, another Republican stronghold.
If you read the OP's post, the judge appears to have disallowed that line of questioning. Which, to me, would be a clear indication that the judge is trying to tilt things and just wants to get the money from the victims.
Yes, you could appeal the conviction, but you're talking about traffic court, and it's already an uphill battle to fight a judge's decision on what evidence should or shouldn't be allowable. Appeals courts regularly reject cases that small as being beneath their notice.
Remember, in Ohio (a Republican stronghold), the police don't even have to have a measurement of your speed: they can just tell the judge they "estimated" your speed and that's good enough for their Supreme Court judges. This even after the corrupt cop in the case couldn't prove he was certified to operate a radar gun, and that revelation got the radar gun reading thrown out of court.
Republicans love rigging the system it seems. In the absence of sane levels of taxation, they get their revenue by turning the cops into the Badged Highwaymen, shaking down random citizens for money.
If you ever have any question, make sure you're in view of the dashcam and ask the cop the following, verbatim:
"Officer, am I under arrest or am I free to go?"
At that point, the officer must make the determination. The two options you have given them are the only two options available to them legally, and are mutually exclusive. If they choose to arrest you, they'd better have a damn good reason. If they don't, and they simply want to ask you questions, you are well within your rights to say "As I am free to go, and I choose not to answer your questions, I will now leave."
Also consider the following regarding "traffic stops" and "minor tickets":
If you show up to "just pay it" or "take defensive driving", they give you a "break" and it costs you around $150-200 after court costs.
If you want to plead not guilty, then you have to burn:
- The cost of your lawyer.
- At least one half-day (if not a full one) of leave from work to show up and plead not guilty.
- At least one half-day, if not full day, to "meet with the prosecutor."
- A large amount of time subpoenaing whatever you need to subpoena, taking your own measurements of the area, photographing. And half the time the corrupt police won't deliver the things requested as evidence (like the officer's dashcam record, radar gun calibration records, etc) and you'll have to fight for those, which means you have to show up in court and burn MORE leave time to get the judge to issue the subpoena for discovery.
- At least one half-day, if not full day, to actually be in court and empanel the jury.
- At least one half-day, if not full day or even more, to be in court to actually argue your case.
And at the end of it, you have to be prepared for the possibility that if you're found guilty, the corrupt judge is going to throw the book at you and the Prosecutor is going to tack on a bunch of miscellaneous bullshit charges, whatever they can come up with, to punish you for "wasting our time" by actually asserting your constitutional right to plead innocent and have a trial by jury.
The whole system is rigged. Cops know it; they're the corrupt underpinning of it.
Privatizing = cutting corners.
I'm reminded of an old Far Side cartoon with a bunch of guys in a WWII trench; their Sergeant is telling them "Ok, on the count of 3, we rush the enemy. And remember boys, your guns were made by the lowest bidder!"
Dr. Bob obviously had one too many binge-drunks during his time at Quack Factory Diploma Mill and killed most of his brain cells.
I loved this one: "And I won't bother going into the issue of all that infrared radiation spewing from the Kinect sensor."
OMG. RADIATION! Oh wait. Infrared radiation is... heat. Plain, simple, heat.
Hey Dr. Bob. You know your lightbulbs? They're putting out RADIATION OMG!
SpaceX has yet to get so much as a hamster into space safely. And their "rocket system" is widely regarded as an inferior, unsafe piece of crap.
Michigan J. Frog is the reference, but the way he's drawn - in an evocation of the "Minstrelsy" shows - is indeed going to strike many people as racist, intended or not.
If you'd invested NASA's budget in materials or medical research, you'd probably have a similar number of developments. Probably more, because you wouldn't be blowing a lot of the budget on PR stunts like the space shuttle.
Bullshit. The thing that makes NASA's programs and resources so important is that the challenges they face are unique, daunting, and require out-of-the-box thinking that you'd never get in materials and medical research.
Put money into medical research, and you get a bunch of "new" drugs or "new" devices that function the same as the old drugs/devices, just changed enough to re-patent.
Put money into materials research, and you get incrementalism. Again, people are more interested in "how to change it to be re-patentable."
Put money into a lot of other fields - even other fields of travel, like avionics and automobiles - and you get the same incrementalist bullshit.
NASA has done more, with less, than most fields have ever dreamt of even producing, yet the "free market" types refuse to acknowledge this, despite the fact that even the space X-prize produced "companies" that have yet to so much as get a rocket into proper orbit, let alone a human being.
"Oh, and by the way, domine domine domine, you're all Catholics now."
Erm... none of the Founding Fathers were Catholic. They were mostly Deists and Non-Anglican Protestants, who had left Britain specifically because the Anglican Church were being a bunch of dicks about allowing people to worship (or not) as they chose to.
There is a big difference in striking an area that may contain civilians, because a military target is present as well, and sending someone in to blow up a pizza shop full of innocent civilians just trying to get lunch.
Read the Geneva Conventions. Specifically, the parts covering the terrorist's favorite tactic, human shields:
The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations. - Geneva Convention IV, Article 28
So, for example: the fact that Moammar Gadhafi sticks his secret bunker under a "public housing" apartment building does NOT render that building immune to military strikes designated to take the motherfucker out.
No, not really.
A terrorist is someone who attempts to force some form of change in public opinion/behavior by means of random violence.
Many terrorists consider themselves "freedom fighters", but they really aren't. If you're fighting for "freedom" then you restrict yourself to legitimate military targets, and you don't kidnap and ransom people.
Terrorists use the populace as human shields, deliberately hide their weapons and identities, deliberately target civilians, and are just generally subhuman scum.
That's because he has nothing to support it with.
"Allowing both groups" presents the following problems:
#1 - it is unfair to allow one group (the ones who were in the "heightened chance" of the faulty selection process) to have more than one chance to get in.
#2 - it is unfair to deny another group (the ones from the other 28 days' worth of submissions) an EQUAL chance at selection.
#3 - it is unfair to those from other years, who were each given EQUAL chances in each year, to provide a different standard for this year only.
#4 - it is unfair to the US to insist that, because of an error that was caught soon enough to rectify it before any serious harm was done, they should accept double the "winners" from this year (which would undoubtedly lead to a LOWER CHANCE for applicants in subsequent years as they then played catch-up).
#5 - it is unfair to allow there to be two groups of "winners", one set of which had a "random selection" chance from 1/15 of the total pool, the other set of which had a "random selection" chance from 14/15 of the total pool. One group clearly had a higher chance of selection than the others.
So, he has no rational basis to stand on.
You don't remember correctly.
This was part of the problem so frustrating about the space shuttle program. Originally, the shuttles were supposed to fly a LOT more missions and do a lot more. For one example: the fuel boosters were originally designed to be carried into space as reusable modules to add to a space station. Politics killed that part.
There were originally supposed to be a lot more launches, but Congress killed funding to produce enough shuttles and booster parts to make that a reality. Later dipshits in Congress would lament "we were supposed to be launching a lot more regularly" in their attacks on NASA, while ignoring the fact that their predecessors were the ones responsible for not providing enough money to do so.
It's quite simple.
Every time the "budget for NASA" is drawn up, it's not the actual NASA budget. If NASA were able to put the money where it was needed, they'd be in a lot better shape.
What Congress does instead is writes a "NASA budget" with a fuck-ton of strings attached. They give a "budget" for various missions, not overall. They cover salaries and the funding of various project bids, which can't be reassigned until Congress writes the next "NASA Budget."
Add to that the fact that NASA projects are usually on the order of a decade long, and most of these Congressional Fuckwits from either party are up for reelection (and a lot get replaced) every couple years, then come in and rewrite the budget and re-earmark things to the states of whatever party's in power to the loss of the states that aren't.
The current, added problem is that the Republicans - the party currently with "power of the purse" - have a hate-on for NASA because NASA was actually DOING the climate research and ongoing studies in response to screams of "global climate change is a myth, there's not enough research." The cuckoo clock wing of the party wants to kill NASA right now because they don't want there to BE enough research, ever.
If I had modpoints, I'd mod this up.
All religions have a serious amount of silliness to them if you look at it objectively. A lot of "commandments" that are either artifacts of the time/place in which they were created, artifacts of the mind-altering drugs or other wackiness the people who created them were into, or artifacts of the people who have altered/rewritten/co-opted them for political purposes since their founding.
I was told once by a Muslim woman that there is a requirement for women to veil their faces because "the wives of Mohammed veiled their faces in public." Nevermind the fact that they were living in a fucking sandbox, and anyone with half a brain wears long flowing robes and headgear that amounts to a veil merely so that they don't get sand in their eyes. Nevermind that many people over there still do it today, men included, for the same reason - to her, it was about "religion", merely because some hopped-up misogynist Imam had drilled into her impressionable young head an idea of "modesty" that really doesn't have bearing in modern society.
Just imagine what would have happened if Mohammed had been an Inuit instead. Would all Muslims in the world be praying towards the North Pole, and insisting on wearing sealskin overcoats in climates like Texas? Probably.
I mentioned their LEADERS. If they don't speak for the Tea Party movement and serve as examples of the whole, who does?
Man, you guys are nuts. The Tea Party is trying to save you from a huge government about to take regulate every thing you do (including sex) and all you can do, is fight the very people who TRULY have the interest of gay people at heart. Gay Marriage would not be an issue, if states were able to decide what was marriage instead of having the federal government make the final and only determination... let the states have at it as they will.
Voting for smaller government is a vote for freedom, whatever your interest are.
..... wow.
Michele Bachmann, aka Homophobe Barbie who runs around trumpeting the "need for a Federal Marriage Amendment", is the preeminent Tea Party candidate currently and you claim the Tea Party is the right place for gays to vote in order to support gay rights?
Maybe we should ask the Texans about their right to talk with their doctors in the privacy of the examination room? The disgusting "sonogram bill" that says your doctor can be punished if he doesn't say certain legislatively demanded things, even if he finds them to be medically inaccurate or worse, was put forth by... wait for it... the leader of the "Texas Tea Party Caucus" in the Texas legislature.
It was the predecessors of the Tea Party types who were responsible for anti-sodomy laws, which the Supreme Court dutifully struck down, and you want me to believe that the "Tea Party" groups won't try to pass something like that again?
I mean really just... wow. I am in awe at the willful cognitive dissonance required to even formulate the blatantly dishonest claims that you put forth. Should we go back to letting "the states" decide to have miscegenation laws too?
#1 - OWA is already set up (maintained so that users can have web-based access to the Exchange environment).
#2 - BES Express is not "effectively free", as it requires extra hardware to run on, and the server admins did NOT like the idea of adding it on to the existing server as-is.
At the moment, we're not "getting blackberries" any more. We're waiting out the few users trapped in cellphone contracts and unable to switch out without spending money on a new phone.
No. On the other hand, being able to keep multiple email accounts (work, school, home) separately (and I mean ACTUALLY SEPARATED) on the same phone is a good start.
GPS + Mapping on Droid or iPhone is far better than RIM's shitty offering.
LocalEats. Good to have.
Barcode scanner and QR Droid work very well and are useful. Barcode scanning especially when grocery shopping to doublecheck the so-called "sales."
I could go on but the point is... most of this stuff isn't even available on the RIM offering (let alone a decent SSH or RDC client).
Bullshit. Blackberries dont require constant resets or tweaking. they just work, out of the box.
Except when they don't.
OWA support on Blackberries, btw, is an absolute fucking joke.
Mines trouble free and is teh FIST
Wow. I worry about any phone that is "teh FIST." I mean, seriously, they have creams for that.
1) The keyboards are always phenomenal. I can take notes on a blackberry quite well, keeping pace with a speaker. And the notes are always, automatically synced to the Exchange server, so I dont even have to worry about backups.
You must have womanly-small fingers. I could never use a BB keyboard without constantly getting the wrong key.My HTC Evo Shift, meanwhile, has a gloriously useful keyboard that I can take notes on better than any BB I ever had.
2) Battery life is phenomenal compared to Android power-devices. If the thing doesnt last through 8 hours of talking and data usage, then its worthless to me. Most days I dont use it quite that much, but others Im on the phone all day.
If I'm going to need 8 hours of talking and data usage, I'm going to be somewhere I can plug in. My charger is standard micro-USB, easily plugs into the car adapter, wall adapter, or the nearest device with any sort of USB plug no problem.
3) Keyboard shortcuts are phenomenal. It is trivial to fly around the menus on my Bold, compose a mail, copy/paste, bookmark and all the rest. Very little fiddling with menus.
Funny. On my Droid, the stuff I use most is trivial to get to as well. The top 8 things I do are a homescreen touch away. That's a lot of things.
4) BES is king.
You're insane. BES is expensive, barely workable, wonky as hell crap that gives our server admins nightmares.
Active-sync is nice, and has its pros (like not needing yet another server and yet 2 more GB of RAM),
That's just the beginning.
but it also has a lot of cons-- certificate woes, iPhone woes (where it simply refuses to connect, even if the certs are all correct-- could be any number of things)
Funny, we have yet to have an iPhone have a problem connecting. Likewise with Droids. Supply username, password, server name, and they sync right up.
For Blackberries, meanwhile, you have to provide:
- the EXACT https OWA link
- Username/password
- User's "box" name, which could be anything at all and is likely different from the username
- AND every time they reset their password, you don't just have to reset the stored pword on the Blackberry, you have to delete the entire account setting and re-create it to get the fucking piece of shit to resync correctly.
This is a BLACKBERRY problem, not an OWA problem.
lack of manageability, and not as many things are synced.
Email, calendar, and contacts all sync. What else are you looking to sync?
Its getting better all the time, but BES still has fewer issues, easier deployment, better security, and more management options. And the new 5.0 BES has a web-management interface which (despite being ActiveX-style crufty) is great-- allows you do manage which public folders you sync, lets you do backups, etc.
I'm now convinced you have never actually seen an AD/OWA implementation, and are simply talking out your ass.
If your idea of a smartphone is occasionally getting some emails and doing phone calls, sure, get an iPhone or Android. Some of the folks in my office have iPhones, and love them in general. But if you (like me) find yourself typing email on your phone even if theres a computer nearby, you really want to use a Blackberry. Theyre wonderful for business use, and I think it would be a mistake for RIM to start catering to home users-- theyll never beat iPhone at that game. The strength of a Blackberry is productivity.
Blackberries help with productivity? You really must be joking. We've got users defecting to iPhone and Droid models in droves, who 2 years ago insisted they loved their blackberries and would never part with them, merely because of how cranky and impossible to use their blackberries are compared to the simplicity and elegance of the iOS and Droid models.