I'm not so sure there's much of a difference.

Australia has unlimited plans, and plans with over a TB of quota per month these days.

Can't speak for NZ however.

I bought a WD Live the other day, and it's utterly fantastic.

It's small (About the same size as an Apple TV) and uses very little power. It can connect to a Wired network, or you can plug in a USB WiFi adapter. You can also plug a USB Hard Drive or Memory Stick into it and play movies directly off that.

As for networking, it can browse DLNA and Samba shares with a somewhat reasonable interface, and will happily play full bitrate 1080p content.

It seems to play most popular formats (Specifically, it'll handle h264/MKV and Divx/Xvid perfectly).

It also has built in support for Youtube, Live365, and Pandora radio.

There are a few flaws with it, but nothing major.
    * Copying via samba *To* the attached hard drive is very slow
    * Very occasionally loses lipsync. Can be fixed by pausing it for a second.
    * Corrupt/broken files sometimes crash it, and it requires a full power cycle (Turned off at the wall) to fix.

In Australia ISPs tend to not lock you out of your modem. You either purchase outright pay off as part of a contract, but in either case you own it and have full access to it.

(Some ISPs will rent a modem to you as well, but again they still give you full access to it).

Because I currently have three boxes sitting in the corner of my living room taking up space, causing a cable mess, wasting electricity, and just generally being annoying.

Putting them all in the one device makes perfect sense for me, when they are all essentially components of the same system.

That's like saying "Why would I want an email client, twitter client, ipod, *and* telephone in the same device"

Agreed. I don't care in the slightest about any advanced features. What I want in a router.

* 802.11n (duh).
* 5+ Gigabit ports
* ADSL2+ Modem
* Reliable NAT, including basic UPnP port mapping
* Software that isn't entirely shit (I'm looking at YOU d-link).

I'm happy to pay $300+ for a reliable router, but it's damned hard to find one even at that price range. D-Links products are notoriously bad. The web interface for the last one I used would only work in IE6. (And specifically only IE6).

Exactly.

When I'm plotting my suicide terrorist schemes to kill the president by blowing up new york using illegally downloaded music and child porn, I use something a little more secure.

(Ohai there NSA!)

In this case, any network outside of Australia is considered "Trusted" for my purposes.

I pretty much just want to get around the whole Australian Governments "We are going to watch everything you do" policy. Specifically, their desire to log every website I visit.

Last thing I want is for the feds to bust my door down because I'm googleing a particular book by Vladimir Nabokov.

I trust SSL/TLS against malicious users, not government level sniffing. I'd almost guarantee that the NSA have copies of most root certificates for the purpose of conducting MITM attacks.

This is why I have a VPN

I'm was a time KDE user up to and including version 3.

When KDE4 came out I used it for several months before finally giving up due to severe bugs that made it almost unusable.

Since then I keep trying it under the assumption that they've had time to fix the bugs- but it seems they just keep adding on more unusable features instead of stopping and cleaning up what they've already got.

I'm not a big fan of the gnome desktop, but at least it's stable.

Here in Australia, we tend to have much smaller data allowances and higher prices (Due to higher data costs in Australia; We're very remote).

However competition among ISPs is fierce, and most areas of the country have dozens of different ISPs to choose from. This has lead to a very innovative market.

Finally, something about our internet that is better :P.

Speaking as someone with a mild case of Tourettes, you can't just "Get" it. You're either born with it or not.

However, many people with the faulty genes go through there entire life without noticing the symptoms until they experience a particularly stressful moment- at which point something "breaks" and it becomes a lot more severe.

I cannot possibly fathom a supermarket price scanner burning someone (It's just not possible), however it's possible the girl believed it did, causing her enough psychological stress to trigger the Tourettes.

However, if that was enough to set her off, she was going to get it pretty soon anyway with several years of stressful High School on the horizon.

> Sure, Chrome and Firefox will support it. But can Google get Safari and IE on board?"

They don't have to- they just need to convince Adobe to get on board and they are set. Web Developers will be able to have a Flash fallback without needing to re-encode their videos