Not on dial up but I'm further away than space - Western Australia.

Facebook has to tolerate Microsoft - Microsoft owns part of Facebook:
http://whoownsfacebook.com/

Not a lot, true but certainly enough to have a small say. Also, Facebook make most of their revenue on PC, not mobile, and PC is still almost exclusively Windows (around 90%), so while Microsoft's star is falling, Facebook still makes most of its money via Microsoft users.

Would work for sure.... probably want to carefully define "cure" however.

I don't type with my wrists. My species evolved hands with fingers on the end of them. Ridged bandages on your wrists don't prevent you from typing....

Hmmm. That's actually a possibility I hadn't considered because Blackberry had been so against this in the past. Now you mentioned, it, however, it does seem the only legit option I can think of. Unless BB gave someone like the US DoD an incredibly good deal - like $1 phones or something.

You don't kill people SMSing in a classroom, theatre or restaurant. I currently have two broken wrists, thanks to a stupid 17 year old who slammed into my car on Monday of last week, while sending a text. My car, which was less than 2 months old, is written off and he himself is incredibly lucky to be alive. He drove directly in front of my car, so I hit him perpendicular at speed, without even having time to break. I hit his rear door so hard his back seats were buckled. If I'd hit his front door (where he was sitting), and this was milliseconds from being the case, he would be dead, 100% for sure. And all this because the idiot was too busy sending a text to look at the road and he simply pulled out directly in front of me.

So yes, ban them in cars (and incidentally, they are banned for the driver in cars here in Australia). He's actually going to be charged, because he not only was txting while driving, but he also pulled in front of my by trying to turn right, over a double white line (illegal in Australia), from the left lane (also illegal). He'd had his license less than 2 weeks so he will now lose it for 3 months and he can forget about getting insurance for the next decade because both cars (mine and his dad's), written off, had a collective value of well over $120k.

Aside from the fact that you can't afford (or store) billions of apps on your iPhone, the Play Store and the App Store have virtual parity in the number of apps now, anyway. Furthermore - and much more to the point, only a handful of apps in the App Store ever get downloaded because the rest are basically either niche or rubbish.

Most iPad apps have never been downloaded.

We tried this in 2001, after a tonne of people opened some Love virus email variant. Me and one other IT guy at our University just did it off our own bat - I wrote a small and simple vb6 exe and he emailed it out from a hotmail account as "funny.doc.exe". All it did was log who clicked the file back to a txt file on the network.

We didn't get any kind of authorisation or even discuss it with anyone first and yes, we got in trouble with management for embarrassing staff (we did not name and shame, so we didn't get in too much trouble).

Umm, no... That's not what this is about.

This isn't a taxation issue - it's an extortion issue. This is pure and simple that (predominantly) American companies double, triple and sometimes a lot more than that the price of digital downloads when destination == .au. Apple does it with iTunes, Steam does it with games. Adobe does it with whatever crap they're flogging these days and so do most of the rest. Hardware as well. When I hear Americans talk about $500 computers at "Best Buy" or whatever, I feel sick. The kind of people who buy computers at Best Buy in the US are the kind of people who pay $2,000 for the same thing, in Harvey Norman, here - and our dollar is worth more than the USD, so it's not exchange rates.

Considering they're all assembled in China, which is closer to Australia, I don't buy that's it's a freight cost, either. It's long been known that IT companies just jack up the price massively if they're dealing with Australia because we've allowed ourselves to become accustomed to it.

It's ridiculously expensive to buy software in Australia. Most of it is purely digital and there's no justification. I hope the other vendors follow suite, soon. Overseas readers may not be aware that it's cheaper to fly TWO people to America and buy Visual Studio there, then fly back here, than it is to buy it here (link here if you think I'm exaggerating: http://theconversation.edu.au/cheaper-hardware-software-and-digital-downloads-heres-how-8382). That's just an example (I know Visual Studio is not exactly top pick on Slashdot but it's still got its place).

It's much cheaper to buy games on Steam through a proxy - as in about 50% cheaper. It's just completely unfair and I'm glad someone is finally doing something about it.