I mean this seriously: if you're going to dispose of what makes Ubuntu Ubuntu (the branding, interface and security model), why not just have done and use Debian, Arch, Mint or something?
I know I use it because of the interface (it doesn't clash with itself much, stays out of the way, and is generally polished) and I can't imaging going to the effort of pulling it out.
Yes, because building your own datacentre, or paying hosting fees to a five-nines-plus facility, costs nothing. Air conditioning, batteries, generators, fire supression, multiple, redundant network connectivity: that stuff''s all free. A mainframe solves it all!!
Look, a quality DC costs millions to build or tens of thousands to rent space in. Servers and mainframes cost money to manage, support and spare out. If you're starved for capital, why wouldn't you use EC2+EBS+S3 for a few bucks a month, rather than tie up dollars that could be spent on developers, marketing or suchlike in hardware and facilities that you're not really benefitting from. To build something like EC2 and the like is seriously expensive. Can your average startup with a server or two claim five nines? Really?
All these people who chant "Don't use the cloud, there could be an outage/breach!!" are just one screw-up away from the same, and it's often pure luck that they haven't been whacked yet.
But, i think people also take better care of the machines when they own them.
Have you seen most people's home PCs? I mean, aside from the state of the operating system and software, the actual machine is usually crawling with dust bunnies.
I know how to service my stuff. We do have sales people and project managers who do the same thing though. It's worked well for them.
The problem is that it doesn't scale, and many, many clerical users (receptionists, order-takers, warehouse staff, etc) cannot or will not do so. And since you need these people to do those jobs at that salary, you need a way to mitigate the problems they create. We eventually went with thin clients because they're nigh-indestructable, and b) we can lock down the server OS, change it, patch it, destroy profiles and re-create them, etc, etc, all far more quickly than we could a desktop PC. Do they complain? Yes, on occasion, but these are the kind of people who complain all the time. They're very functionally fixated, and you, as IT, have the job to make the system work such that they never hit situations that cause them trouble.
It's worked so well that we're considering something like XenDesktop or VMware View for our thick clients, and why we carte-blanche gave iPads to executives who don't create content. Desktop management sucks, and anything you can do to abstract the user's environment from the hardware and OS makes everything easier for everyone. We did a VMware View PoC a few months back, and it blew the user's mind when we restored their desktop to the previous day's iteration when they buggered it up, or when they saw their laptop stolen and we just dropped their most recent View image on the replacement PC.
The problem is that there is no way you will achieve what you want. People are not going to become better drivers instinctively because those kinds of reactions are something you condition for, not something you can test and train and expect someone to duplicate when 99% of their driving is wholly uneventful. Only for race-car drivers is training really feasible
We have stats that prove that driver training is, truly, not very helpful for most people. We also have stats that show that ABS, Airbags and ESC all reduce accident frequency and severity. This sounds counter-intuitive and unpleasant if you subscribe to the liberatarian "personal responsibility, first and foremost" philosophy, but it doesn't scale to millions of drivers.
Believe you me, I'd rather have a preoccupied commuter on the highway with me in a car with ESC/TSC/ABS than in some bare-bones crap-box from the seventies.
Cars, like computers, are appliances. Enthusiasts need to come to grips with that.
The problem is that automobilia is a competitive market with not a lot of differentiation. Economy cars are bought and sold on comfort, reliability and economy, and ETCS (and the sometimes-odd behaviour it enables) improves those metrics. If you driven any of the more recent 40mpg+ compacts, they all go for the high gears, hold onto revs and lug the engine where possible.
If you don't like this behaviour (or brake override, or stability control, or what have you) you're on the right track with, eg, a Caterham. You could also pick up any one of a number of sport-oriented cars that perhaps don't run as clean, or are as reliable, but they're more aligned to what you want.
The problem is assuming that what you want is better for most people, or is better in holistic or objective terms. It isn't.
If I am so incapable at driving that I need a computer to stop me putting my foot on the brake by mistake, then I should probably not be driving.
The problem is, most people who do drive probably shouldn't, by that logic. What you're proposing is akin to requiring people who own a PC to have a Comp Sci degree. It would be nice, but it's not going to happen, so we need alternative measures to save people from themselves. Personally, if ABS/ESC prevents someone from skidding out in front of me, or plowing into me at a stoplight, and if ETCS ensures cleaner air and less fuel used, then I'm all for it.
Throttle cables do not snap, snag, stick neither, unless on a maintenance it was damaged
That's brilliant. They never break, unless they do?
Cable problems used to happen quite frequently, and sometimes totally unexpectedly, and to housewives or sixteen-year old kids or seniors who had no clue what was going on, much less how to stop it. ETCS completely solves that by having two or more redundant, sanity-checked signals.
Now, the electronics is doing that for you, and you are being ignorant and clueless about what is actually happening, and therefore loosing lots of potential savings in fuel consumption by not actually knowing what's going on.
Except that the computer is way, way better than the average driver at optimizing fuel economy.
To date on any car i've driven or a close friend has owned a significant period of time, only one had problems with the cable
Good for, you've got an anecdote. Go back through the years of statistics that the NHTSA maintained on recalls and incidents; Toyota's trouble stirred much of this to the surface and it's easy to find. Note how high SUA issues and recalls were.
Electrical throttle has given me grief many times tho.
You're driving the wrong cars, then. Electronic throttles have been well worked out on, well, just about everything from supercars on down. You'd think that, if mechnical throttles were better that someone---Ferrari, BMW, whomever---would be using them. They're not.
Now brake override: STUPID idea. Insanely stupid idea.
Again, I point to the recent Toyota SUA incidents as a counterpoint. It was proven that most people don't step on the brakes hard enough to overcome the engine, or that they pump the brakes, or that they do something similarly stupid. SUA rates were quite low for cars with brake/throttle override. It's actually a very simple, very elegant idea that works for most people. Oh, sure, it makes heel/toe and left-foot braking harder, but outside of rally drivers that sort of behaviour is asking for trouble.
You're under the impression most people drive on a racetrack. Most people don't.
All this interference with driver decisions for most part is simply because people don't care enough to learn to actually control a car.
Yes, that's true. And the "interference with driver decisions" is why road accident and fatality rates are at their lowest ever, despite there being more cars on the road than ever. Half the people on the road are, by default, below average. Most aren't all that skilled. Personally, I'd like to avoid getting hurt because someone isn't 31337 enough to induce just the right amount of wheel lockup to not skid into me, or apply just the perfect amount of opposite-lock.
ABS systems for example are FAR FAR FAR too slow and moronic to work on slippery surface (snow, ice, bad tires on wet tarmac).
Traction control often causes a car to get stuck because the traction control removes all power from the wheels
But they work well for most people under most conditions, allowing them to retain steering control (for ABS) or skidding uncontrollably (ESC). Yes, if you're a rally-racer they should be disabled. Most people aren't. You seem to miss that point
So my suggestion to you: Before you start lecturing, maybe you should gather some kind of ACTUAL driving experience.
My, aren't we elitist? Look, good for you that you can drive your home-built Caterham at 10/10s on the track and can tear down and rebuild and engine in two hours. I'm glad for you. But you need to realize that most people are not you, and never, ever will be you. So just keep sneering to yourself.
But don't assume that electronics don't make cars more reliable, more efficient, safer, cleaner and faster for 99% of the people out there who don't give a shit about throttle oversteer or adjusting camber between laps. The facts are a) cars have more electronics, and b) those cars are thusly better in every way for everyone who isn't a gearhead.
This thread started because someone offered the usual "Oh noes, more stuff to break!" fallacy which has been proven, time and again, to be utter crap. It wasn't started as debate on automotive purity.
You can still fix a car on your own, only some of the tools have changed. Most of the mechanical bits are not hard, and inexpensive scanners exist for the ECU. I know guys who tune cars pretty much by ECU hacking only, and it's still entirely possible (and quite common, if you read about all the people with Honda Civics who have dropped B18s or K20s into their ride).
On the flip side, there are tools that, for a modern car, you should generally never need to do because it's done at the ECU level, just as you should rarely need, oh, a chip puller or a desoldering pump for a modern PC.
Most of the grousing comes from people who don't want to change how they work with cars (or PCs, or what-have-you). They expect to be able to, oh, I don't know, bore out a block and depair not being able to fit a four-barrel performance carb to a modern car.
That delay happens to minimize emissions and maximize fuel economy; my Honda does the same thing. On a car that isn't designed to be an appliance, it doesn't work that way, and some cars allow you to tune throttle response for economy, normal, performance or batshit-crazy driving. Can't do that with a cable.
Throttle cables snap, snag, stick and, if they fail, have no multi-redundant backup, Sudden unintended acceleration (or no acceleration at all) was quite common in the era of mechanical throttle linkages. With electronic throttles you have at least two, sometimes more, indepedent signals that are sanity-checked against each other. If they fault, the computer knows why and how and will put the car in limp mode, whereas a cable will just go and let the engine race. We've seen what happens.
Face it, computers have made cars more reliable, better running, faster and more efficient. Knee-jerk Luddism is just that.
Not true. As cars have gotten more complex, they've also gotten more reliable because electronics allow greater precision and control. Problems per mile has been going down for the entire industry, and the most complex cars (hybrids) are among the most reliable.
Remember carburetors? Mechanical throttle cables? Tune-ups every 3K? Automotive electronics before body computers?
It's possible to customize GNOME, it's just not as easy as it is in KDE. That said, out of the box, GNOME doesn't seem to offer all the interesting little interface ([inconsistencies|features]-delete whichever is inappropriate), so there's a reason for that.
This sort of thing, and the scrutiny over different forms of treatment, are what is wrong with public health care
Then why
Are people healthier in other parts of the western world where these is public health care
Do other western nations pay less, in net terms, than Americans do and get public health care
Do other western nations' health care systems score better?
Whatever might be wrong with comprehensive public health care, the hybrid model in the US is much, much worse, and the "No health care" model isn't really an option for a functioning nation state. Public healthcare might inconvenience a few people, especially if they're rich, but the American model seriously harms something like a fifth or more of the population, and costs everyone else an arm and a leg in the process.
Just cook from fresh produce/meats and other ingredients, calculate calorie content and divide into sensible portions on the fly
Some people---actually, many people----don't have the time to do that. If you have one or two young children and both parents work, cooking something healthy is a challenge. Spending half an hour adding up calorie and nutrient content? Are you kidding?
Many posters on this thread are not getting it. It's wonderful that someone, with education, time and money, can eat perfectly. Good for you, you're such a wonderful person. Here, have a cookie (or don't). But the people who are struggling with diet, who can't afford the time or the cost of perfectly healthy foods, who cannot sit down and do their basal metabolic rate and then calculate the amount of nutrition in any given meal. They have, oh, their actual life getting in the way. These are the people who are getting fat because we have lost control of how we produce food. And your single, childless, educated elite self preaching to them about how they should try and work this shit out when they've got to pick the kids up from daycare or school, get them fed and what have you.
Poor, busy, less-intelligent people are the ones getting fat. Proposing solutions that work only for rich, idle and educated people is basically designing for failure.
I have a handy little iPhone app that does this for me, and even it's time-consuming, and I won't pretend for a second that it's easy or convenient. For Joe Sixpack? No way.
Much as it pains libertarians to hear this, a regulatory bitchslapping---and a real one, not the limp-wristed regulation that amounts to corporate reach-around America is famous for---and some real, progressive, long-term plans are about the only way you're going to solve this. You need rational portion sizes and nutrition information, guidelines for nutrition that aren't a sop to a given industry's lobby, but most importantly, you need to make healthy food less expensive and more convenient than unhealthy food, and you need to do it now, before the health crisis spins even further out of control.
The rest of the western world has more government-provided services, generally has less government intrusion and, interestingly, spends less doing so. All of this is because they don't have a pathological fear of government that forces everything to be done below-board and half-assed.
To put it succinctly, America has the government is citizens deserve.
Nothing about this bold social plan could ever possibly go wrong!
Well, America could implement, say, the kind of health care plan that any other western nation has and probably cut Medicare expenses (and overall health spending, public and private) and still come out ahead, or at least be able to fund social security in a sustainable fashion. But of course, you can't have a single-payer system that comprehensively covers all your citizens. Oh, no. That's socialism, and we can't have that! It's wrong for the government to employ a bunch of doctors and nurses and have themgo around and heal people!
You can, mind you, have the government employ a huge, well-armed and trained military force to kill people. That's perfectly ok.
This is a salient point. Android is eating RIM's non-enterprise market; where the phone of choice used to be a WM or nonpremium BlackBerry, now it's a year-old and/or bottom-grade Android phone.
Android, out of the box, has nothing even close to Exchange's mobile policy, let alone what BES can offer. Even iPhones implement some of it. Android requires bolt-on software, at a premium, in order to supply a very poor equivalent. This isn't saying that it won't, some day, but Google et al aren't showing interest; it also doesn't mean that Android won't get in "through the backdoor" through the demands of VIPs, but that's unlikely given that the iPhone is still the fashionable choice and the top-end BlackBerry is no longer lame.
Interesting point about the Welfare Queen and her Cadillac: Reagan (who started that story) completely made it up. It's a fabrication, with no basis in fact. Reagan was very very good at that sort of thing, and did it more than a few times**: telling people what they wanted to hear, what sounds true, what feels good, even if it's totally bogus.
** (one memorable one: making up quotable moments---that never happened---from START talks)
Slashdot Mirror
No, because wiping the security now means you have an unmanaged, insecure device. With a Blackberry, that policy will survive a reboot.
What Apple offers can be fairly easily circumvented (all you need to do is wipe the device yourself).
The abovementioned "it's better for your corporate masters" is dead-bang-on.
You can get third-party add-ons to manage Android phones, but it's not in the same league as BES.
For example: you can just wipe the phone to remove security policies and management apps. On a BES-locked BB, that's considerably harder.
So, why did you use Ubuntu, then?
I mean this seriously: if you're going to dispose of what makes Ubuntu Ubuntu (the branding, interface and security model), why not just have done and use Debian, Arch, Mint or something?
I know I use it because of the interface (it doesn't clash with itself much, stays out of the way, and is generally polished) and I can't imaging going to the effort of pulling it out.
Yes, because building your own datacentre, or paying hosting fees to a five-nines-plus facility, costs nothing. Air conditioning, batteries, generators, fire supression, multiple, redundant network connectivity: that stuff''s all free. A mainframe solves it all!!
Look, a quality DC costs millions to build or tens of thousands to rent space in. Servers and mainframes cost money to manage, support and spare out. If you're starved for capital, why wouldn't you use EC2+EBS+S3 for a few bucks a month, rather than tie up dollars that could be spent on developers, marketing or suchlike in hardware and facilities that you're not really benefitting from. To build something like EC2 and the like is seriously expensive. Can your average startup with a server or two claim five nines? Really?
All these people who chant "Don't use the cloud, there could be an outage/breach!!" are just one screw-up away from the same, and it's often pure luck that they haven't been whacked yet.
But, i think people also take better care of the machines when they own them.
Have you seen most people's home PCs? I mean, aside from the state of the operating system and software, the actual machine is usually crawling with dust bunnies.
I know how to service my stuff. We do have sales people and project managers who do the same thing though. It's worked well for them.
The problem is that it doesn't scale, and many, many clerical users (receptionists, order-takers, warehouse staff, etc) cannot or will not do so. And since you need these people to do those jobs at that salary, you need a way to mitigate the problems they create. We eventually went with thin clients because they're nigh-indestructable, and b) we can lock down the server OS, change it, patch it, destroy profiles and re-create them, etc, etc, all far more quickly than we could a desktop PC. Do they complain? Yes, on occasion, but these are the kind of people who complain all the time. They're very functionally fixated, and you, as IT, have the job to make the system work such that they never hit situations that cause them trouble.
It's worked so well that we're considering something like XenDesktop or VMware View for our thick clients, and why we carte-blanche gave iPads to executives who don't create content. Desktop management sucks, and anything you can do to abstract the user's environment from the hardware and OS makes everything easier for everyone. We did a VMware View PoC a few months back, and it blew the user's mind when we restored their desktop to the previous day's iteration when they buggered it up, or when they saw their laptop stolen and we just dropped their most recent View image on the replacement PC.
Boy, it must have been a rude shock for them when they actually had to use the Storm on an ongoing basis.
I know users who broke their Storms in order to go back to Bolds.
The problem is that there is no way you will achieve what you want. People are not going to become better drivers instinctively because those kinds of reactions are something you condition for, not something you can test and train and expect someone to duplicate when 99% of their driving is wholly uneventful. Only for race-car drivers is training really feasible
We have stats that prove that driver training is, truly, not very helpful for most people. We also have stats that show that ABS, Airbags and ESC all reduce accident frequency and severity. This sounds counter-intuitive and unpleasant if you subscribe to the liberatarian "personal responsibility, first and foremost" philosophy, but it doesn't scale to millions of drivers.
Believe you me, I'd rather have a preoccupied commuter on the highway with me in a car with ESC/TSC/ABS than in some bare-bones crap-box from the seventies.
Cars, like computers, are appliances. Enthusiasts need to come to grips with that.
Most platforms are fairly modular already. VW's MQB and MLB are examples: two platforms, just about everything they and their child brands make.
The problem is that automobilia is a competitive market with not a lot of differentiation. Economy cars are bought and sold on comfort, reliability and economy, and ETCS (and the sometimes-odd behaviour it enables) improves those metrics. If you driven any of the more recent 40mpg+ compacts, they all go for the high gears, hold onto revs and lug the engine where possible.
If you don't like this behaviour (or brake override, or stability control, or what have you) you're on the right track with, eg, a Caterham. You could also pick up any one of a number of sport-oriented cars that perhaps don't run as clean, or are as reliable, but they're more aligned to what you want.
The problem is assuming that what you want is better for most people, or is better in holistic or objective terms. It isn't.
The problem is, most people who do drive probably shouldn't, by that logic. What you're proposing is akin to requiring people who own a PC to have a Comp Sci degree. It would be nice, but it's not going to happen, so we need alternative measures to save people from themselves. Personally, if ABS/ESC prevents someone from skidding out in front of me, or plowing into me at a stoplight, and if ETCS ensures cleaner air and less fuel used, then I'm all for it.
That's brilliant. They never break, unless they do?
Cable problems used to happen quite frequently, and sometimes totally unexpectedly, and to housewives or sixteen-year old kids or seniors who had no clue what was going on, much less how to stop it. ETCS completely solves that by having two or more redundant, sanity-checked signals.
Do you want single-channel brakes back, too?
Except that the computer is way, way better than the average driver at optimizing fuel economy.
Good for, you've got an anecdote. Go back through the years of statistics that the NHTSA maintained on recalls and incidents; Toyota's trouble stirred much of this to the surface and it's easy to find. Note how high SUA issues and recalls were.
You're driving the wrong cars, then. Electronic throttles have been well worked out on, well, just about everything from supercars on down. You'd think that, if mechnical throttles were better that someone---Ferrari, BMW, whomever---would be using them. They're not.
Again, I point to the recent Toyota SUA incidents as a counterpoint. It was proven that most people don't step on the brakes hard enough to overcome the engine, or that they pump the brakes, or that they do something similarly stupid. SUA rates were quite low for cars with brake/throttle override. It's actually a very simple, very elegant idea that works for most people. Oh, sure, it makes heel/toe and left-foot braking harder, but outside of rally drivers that sort of behaviour is asking for trouble.
You're under the impression most people drive on a racetrack. Most people don't.
Yes, that's true. And the "interference with driver decisions" is why road accident and fatality rates are at their lowest ever, despite there being more cars on the road than ever. Half the people on the road are, by default, below average. Most aren't all that skilled. Personally, I'd like to avoid getting hurt because someone isn't 31337 enough to induce just the right amount of wheel lockup to not skid into me, or apply just the perfect amount of opposite-lock.
But they work well for most people under most conditions, allowing them to retain steering control (for ABS) or skidding uncontrollably (ESC). Yes, if you're a rally-racer they should be disabled. Most people aren't. You seem to miss that point
My, aren't we elitist? Look, good for you that you can drive your home-built Caterham at 10/10s on the track and can tear down and rebuild and engine in two hours. I'm glad for you. But you need to realize that most people are not you, and never, ever will be you. So just keep sneering to yourself.
But don't assume that electronics don't make cars more reliable, more efficient, safer, cleaner and faster for 99% of the people out there who don't give a shit about throttle oversteer or adjusting camber between laps. The facts are a) cars have more electronics, and b) those cars are thusly better in every way for everyone who isn't a gearhead.
This thread started because someone offered the usual "Oh noes, more stuff to break!" fallacy which has been proven, time and again, to be utter crap. It wasn't started as debate on automotive purity.
True, but it really helps to know when the pedal position sensors are not sane. Ask Toyota why.
You can still fix a car on your own, only some of the tools have changed. Most of the mechanical bits are not hard, and inexpensive scanners exist for the ECU. I know guys who tune cars pretty much by ECU hacking only, and it's still entirely possible (and quite common, if you read about all the people with Honda Civics who have dropped B18s or K20s into their ride).
On the flip side, there are tools that, for a modern car, you should generally never need to do because it's done at the ECU level, just as you should rarely need, oh, a chip puller or a desoldering pump for a modern PC.
Most of the grousing comes from people who don't want to change how they work with cars (or PCs, or what-have-you). They expect to be able to, oh, I don't know, bore out a block and depair not being able to fit a four-barrel performance carb to a modern car.
That delay happens to minimize emissions and maximize fuel economy; my Honda does the same thing. On a car that isn't designed to be an appliance, it doesn't work that way, and some cars allow you to tune throttle response for economy, normal, performance or batshit-crazy driving. Can't do that with a cable.
Throttle cables snap, snag, stick and, if they fail, have no multi-redundant backup, Sudden unintended acceleration (or no acceleration at all) was quite common in the era of mechanical throttle linkages. With electronic throttles you have at least two, sometimes more, indepedent signals that are sanity-checked against each other. If they fault, the computer knows why and how and will put the car in limp mode, whereas a cable will just go and let the engine race. We've seen what happens.
Face it, computers have made cars more reliable, better running, faster and more efficient. Knee-jerk Luddism is just that.
Not true. As cars have gotten more complex, they've also gotten more reliable because electronics allow greater precision and control. Problems per mile has been going down for the entire industry, and the most complex cars (hybrids) are among the most reliable.
Remember carburetors? Mechanical throttle cables? Tune-ups every 3K? Automotive electronics before body computers?
Canonical might disagree with that statement.
It's possible to customize GNOME, it's just not as easy as it is in KDE. That said, out of the box, GNOME doesn't seem to offer all the interesting little interface ([inconsistencies|features]-delete whichever is inappropriate), so there's a reason for that.
Then why
Whatever might be wrong with comprehensive public health care, the hybrid model in the US is much, much worse, and the "No health care" model isn't really an option for a functioning nation state. Public healthcare might inconvenience a few people, especially if they're rich, but the American model seriously harms something like a fifth or more of the population, and costs everyone else an arm and a leg in the process.
Some people---actually, many people----don't have the time to do that. If you have one or two young children and both parents work, cooking something healthy is a challenge. Spending half an hour adding up calorie and nutrient content? Are you kidding?
Many posters on this thread are not getting it. It's wonderful that someone, with education, time and money, can eat perfectly. Good for you, you're such a wonderful person. Here, have a cookie (or don't). But the people who are struggling with diet, who can't afford the time or the cost of perfectly healthy foods, who cannot sit down and do their basal metabolic rate and then calculate the amount of nutrition in any given meal. They have, oh, their actual life getting in the way. These are the people who are getting fat because we have lost control of how we produce food. And your single, childless, educated elite self preaching to them about how they should try and work this shit out when they've got to pick the kids up from daycare or school, get them fed and what have you.
Poor, busy, less-intelligent people are the ones getting fat. Proposing solutions that work only for rich, idle and educated people is basically designing for failure.
I have a handy little iPhone app that does this for me, and even it's time-consuming, and I won't pretend for a second that it's easy or convenient. For Joe Sixpack? No way.
Much as it pains libertarians to hear this, a regulatory bitchslapping---and a real one, not the limp-wristed regulation that amounts to corporate reach-around America is famous for---and some real, progressive, long-term plans are about the only way you're going to solve this. You need rational portion sizes and nutrition information, guidelines for nutrition that aren't a sop to a given industry's lobby, but most importantly, you need to make healthy food less expensive and more convenient than unhealthy food, and you need to do it now, before the health crisis spins even further out of control.
I think you've pretty much explained the last ten years at Nokia.
The rest of the western world has more government-provided services, generally has less government intrusion and, interestingly, spends less doing so. All of this is because they don't have a pathological fear of government that forces everything to be done below-board and half-assed.
To put it succinctly, America has the government is citizens deserve.
Well, America could implement, say, the kind of health care plan that any other western nation has and probably cut Medicare expenses (and overall health spending, public and private) and still come out ahead, or at least be able to fund social security in a sustainable fashion. But of course, you can't have a single-payer system that comprehensively covers all your citizens. Oh, no. That's socialism, and we can't have that! It's wrong for the government to employ a bunch of doctors and nurses and have themgo around and heal people!
You can, mind you, have the government employ a huge, well-armed and trained military force to kill people. That's perfectly ok.
This is a salient point. Android is eating RIM's non-enterprise market; where the phone of choice used to be a WM or nonpremium BlackBerry, now it's a year-old and/or bottom-grade Android phone.
Android, out of the box, has nothing even close to Exchange's mobile policy, let alone what BES can offer. Even iPhones implement some of it. Android requires bolt-on software, at a premium, in order to supply a very poor equivalent. This isn't saying that it won't, some day, but Google et al aren't showing interest; it also doesn't mean that Android won't get in "through the backdoor" through the demands of VIPs, but that's unlikely given that the iPhone is still the fashionable choice and the top-end BlackBerry is no longer lame.
Interesting point about the Welfare Queen and her Cadillac: Reagan (who started that story) completely made it up. It's a fabrication, with no basis in fact. Reagan was very very good at that sort of thing, and did it more than a few times**: telling people what they wanted to hear, what sounds true, what feels good, even if it's totally bogus.
** (one memorable one: making up quotable moments---that never happened---from START talks)