In its complaint, Microsoft alleged that some of the features of the Kyocera smartphones infringe patents the software company holds in the areas of power management for enhanced battery life, "self-aware" devices that respond to changes in the user's surroundings, text messaging and doing multiple tasks on a computing device at the same time.

So they have patented self-aware phones, and other amazing innovations like doing multiple tasks at the same time on a single device.

Three strikes and we let the rights holder go to court to get IP addresses? Given the rights holders have effectively had zero effect in getting the customer details from ISPs in the past, what are they going to do once they get them? If they can't get through the first stage of the legal battle and get thrown out at the discovery process, what chance have they got of actually successfully suing someone?

I hope some kind of court order would be needed before ISPs will hand over the customer details. However the article suggests that the details will just be handed over to anybody who claims an offense by any customer who has used up their strikes.

Then you can get their address and sue them for what exactly? And how do you know which IP address has politicians and rich supporters behind them?

Report the ISP's entire IP address range perhaps, it's sure to get one of them. I'd be interested to know what evidence the ISPs will require when deciding whether a report is valid. Also, whether they will accept reports from any copyright holder (I have a photo of my cat from this morning...) or just media organizations with a lot of lawyers.

Last time I checked it WAS the govt's job to do law enforcement, not the ISPs.

Traditionally it was a civil matter, publisher vs publisher. The government only provided the courts.

Aliens have perhaps refrained from eliminating humans because we have so much comedy value.

If spending $2 on a lottery ticket is so good, why not use every dollar you've got to buy lottery tickets. That will give you a much bigger chance of winning.

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.