Exactly. Governments aren't very good at getting value for tax payer's money, as this example (and plenty of others), shows. This served no public good (i.e. it wasn't building a common use road, or providing a social service), it was purely commercial venture. A government won't have done appropriate due diligence on this because "who cares, it's only $500k". An individual would have, and even if they didn't, they'd have only lost their own money. http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/

It is unlikely that every single citizen of Salinas would have been happy with making the investment, so what you should have been able to say is - "if the good people of Salinas wanted to risk $500 thousand in a questionable startup, they should have done so individually"

+1

and they've been around since the early 90s.

Nah. Just mindlessly jump on the Apple-hater bandwagon and demand that the rest of the world subsidize Australia. It's easier, and it's what the mob is doing.

It's only the people who buy Apple products that care, and I doubt they're "Apple-haters". I don't buy Apple products, so I don't give a shit what Apple charge for them in Australia. I do however think they've been taking advantage of the large currency disparity for too long. Of course, Apple seem to agree that they've been charging to much, otherwise they wouldn't be changing their prices - and if all your other points where true, they wouldn't be changing them for those reasons either.

Apple-fanboi much?

+1. I think 2012 will be the year of the "mobile cloud", because everything's better when mobile.

People don't assume and expect interoperability for those products. They do expect that they'd be able to call anybody with a telephone number when the underlying network is the Internet. Skype doesn't provide that because it doesn't talk open protocols.

Would you be happy with being forced to buy "GM only petrol" for your GM car? Be forced to have a Channel XYZ TV to watch Channel XYZ? Only be able to buy a memory stick for your Sony?

for that long doing a menial task.

Switching off the NBN will switch off the Internet.

Care to explain what it even means? Poster has been drinking the Steve Jobs iPad Kool-Aid. Surely you knew that native apps were naturally less buggier and more secure - Steve said so.

All in all though, I would like you to post a source for your response or give an example of a kernel that is not supported. Have you ever tried running the proprietary driver yourself or do you have a purely philosophical objection based on it being closed source?

No I haven't run a proprietary driver, and never will. As for philosophy, I don't think it is ethical to be running and probably claiming to support an "open source" operating system and then use a binary module. As for practice, I've been running Linux since 1992, completely with open source drivers for all that time. When I buy hardware, I ensure open source drivers exist for it.

I remember occasions where I've come across people being stuck between kernel updates and nvidia binary driver problems. I don't pay much attention, other than observing that it has happened, because I'm never going to be effected by the issue of a binary module/kernel version conflict.

Doesn't make it any less a possibility. Can you guarantee you won't be caught out? I can guarantee I won't be.

The problem is that if you run an Nvidia binary, it usually constrains you to running certain kernel versions. If that kernel version has a security problem, and you need to upgrade it to overcome the security problem, your Nvidia binary may now not work. So what do you do? Do you continue to have video and run a kernel with a known security vulnerability, or do you run a fixed kernel and have no video. You'll be stuck in that position for as long as it takes for Nvidia to upgrade their driver. That might occur quickly if your card is 12 months old, but what if it is 3 years old. IOW, you security depends on how important the security issue is to Nvidia, and they may not consider it as important as you do, or be willing to fix it as quickly as it is necessary for you to. This problem doesn't exist with open source video card drivers.

(Look at the ID ;-) )

I think this guy summarised it well -

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/v6ops/current/msg06483.html