I had a number of those smartphones before the iPhone. They were shit. Doing anything was an exercise in frustration. The browser was nowhere near desktop standard, for example.

The OP (being me) is misunderstood. I never said anything about moving offshore permanently, I was referring to the practice of taxing AU residents who work FIFO in another country, get paid (and taxed in that country) in non-AU dollars and then taxed again by Australia.

Such as FIFO workers who work offshore but are based in Australia. I never said anything about residency.

Or permanent FIFO work when you are living in Austraila and working for an Australian company offshore, but getting paid in non-AUD currency.

Australia also holds that view on personal income for Australian citizens on money earned abroad. I think the key with this proposal (vs. others which are just a pure money grab or in the Australian income tax case, double dipping) is the credit for taxes paid abroad. Presumably, if the company was already taxed at a higher rate, they would be refunded all the tax they paid to the USA. I think it's a good compromise - the company should have to pay taxes somewhere, and this will ensure that they do.

And buses don't generally run 24/7. What's your point?

cloud services

This isn't an iPad problem. This is an idiot parent problem.

Laying that complaint at the iPad is like whining that you can't carry 4 people on the motorcycle you just purchased...

It has moved on in heaps of ways. Clients are far more powerful and capable of far more processing. 3d acceleration has become commodity. Compression, pixmap caching, etc. are now commonplace. Power consumption is a concern. Security is much more of a concern - bundling so much code into the X server, with the level of security access it has is a bad idea.

You just need to open your eyes and look at well... virtually any other GUI system from the last 10-15 years and see how most of them leave X11 for dead in terms of security, performance, etc.

The much vaunted "network transparency" of X11, the feature everyone whines that they will lose - is crap and done better by plenty of other software, from VNC to ICA to RDP...

The problem is that the core design of X11 was decided upon about 30 years ago and the computing landscape has moved on significantly. During the past 30 years, there have been thousands of hacks to add new functionality to existing code-paths which are no longer relevant to today's environment - but necessary to be "X11" compatible.

It's XQuartz, which is open source that they contribute to.

Why are you so paranoid about losing network transparency, when I can do that with an X display manager on my Mac, WIndows, etc. that never even had a native X11 server to start with?

... and this will still be preferable to running full fat X11.

Perhaps I should have clarified: attempt to get my data out of it. Of course you can use DFU mode.

You're not going to get any of my data that way, which is what is actually important.