That's a feature not a flaw.

Unlikely. It makes the authorities look bad if they are blocking harmless sites. That's certainly what happened in Australia when ASIC tried to block a site for running a fraud, and accidently blocked the Melbourne Free University and around 1200 other live sites.

If you've got too few friends for that, then you probably have bigger problems.

Perhaps, but just because I have bigger problems doesn't mean I want to accumulate all of the lessor problems that would come from losing access to my email account.

Site blocking has technical issues. If you block an IP address, you are likely to take out countless unrelated sites that happen to be on the same server. If you block the domain name lookup, there's an easy workaround that anybody who wants to visit the site can use a different name server, or use other workarounds.

I'm worried about what would happen if I lost my phone, or phone and computer together. What would be the chance of convincing Google to ever let me log in again?

I believe if you leave Australia long term or permanently, you'll cease to be an Australian resident as soon as you depart Australia. You may even be able to file your tax return early and possibly get a decent refund (based on having a lower than expected income for the shortened financial year), although unrealised capital gains may be an issue. I don't see anything in the links you gave to contradict that.

I haven't tried emigrating from Australia, but I've done it from a couple of other countries with similar systems and that's how it worked.

Yes, the article mentions that, and says extending by only 1000 nucleotides is a good thing because "cells that divide endlessly could pose a increased cancer risk if used in humans.". Of course if you kept repeating the treatment, it would be the same as dividing endlessly anyway.

At least you managed to make an account. I'm not sure how you do that on Instagram: it points you to some app that doesn't run on Linux.

Is there any law against breaking a "public promise"? If you ignore the promise and sue somebody, would the promise make any difference to the outcome? It's not a licence or a contract.

Otherwise it's just a huge duplication of effort, a lot of time wasted at MS.

Of course Microsoft are already spending their resources developing IE. You have to wonder whether they are getting value for money: why not just ship Firefox or Chrome with their OS?

Open sourcing it as abandonware (or nominally to some new or existing "foundation") is an option they should take seriously.

What do you mean? Is the lag on satellite Internet connections too high to do anything interactive? Low-orbit satellites would avoid that. Or is the uplink capacity too low to do anything other than request downloads? I'm not sure that there'd be any technical reason for such a limitation.

Personally, I'd love to have more options in Internet connectivity. Not every location in the world is supplied by the perfect ISP at a low cost.

If I remember correctly, they did have a scientific explanation for that. The explosion that separated the Moon from the Earth was so powerful that its relative velocity was close to the speed of light, so distance was contracted according to the theory of relativity.

However, I don't remember any explanation for how the moon and its inhabitants could survive intact with such a powerful explosion and rapid acceleration. Maybe I need to go and rewatch the series to find out.

In theory, since the "free market" is suggesting that that's where the greatest labour shortages are, and you'd think companies would be keen to cut their costs in this area. However I'm not really sure that these people's salaries are set by anything resembling a free market, and they don't seem to have much trouble crossing national borders anyway.

Immigration systems are always unbelievably complex. The intention is apparently to allow immigrants to fill labour shortages. Labour shortages can be seen when people are getting paid well over the median wage. So create a visa that allows working in any job paying over three times the median wage, or whatever.

How many laptops still have DVD drives these days? The last one I saw doesn't even have an ethernet port (and the laptop was too thin for one to fit anyway).

Can they make backup bootable USB sticks?

Artificial life forms could be resistant to many kinds of accidents. All they have to do is keep an offsite backup of their mental state and restore to new hardware after the accident.

There's no reason to think that every form of high-speed data transfer must be susceptible to viruses.