Exactly. Governments aren't very good at getting value for tax payer's money, as this example (and plenty of others), shows. This served no public good (i.e. it wasn't building a common use road, or providing a social service), it was purely commercial venture. A government won't have done appropriate due diligence on this because "who cares, it's only $500k". An individual would have, and even if they didn't, they'd have only lost their own money. http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/

It is unlikely that every single citizen of Salinas would have been happy with making the investment, so what you should have been able to say is - "if the good people of Salinas wanted to risk $500 thousand in a questionable startup, they should have done so individually"

+1

and they've been around since the early 90s.

Nah. Just mindlessly jump on the Apple-hater bandwagon and demand that the rest of the world subsidize Australia. It's easier, and it's what the mob is doing.

It's only the people who buy Apple products that care, and I doubt they're "Apple-haters". I don't buy Apple products, so I don't give a shit what Apple charge for them in Australia. I do however think they've been taking advantage of the large currency disparity for too long. Of course, Apple seem to agree that they've been charging to much, otherwise they wouldn't be changing their prices - and if all your other points where true, they wouldn't be changing them for those reasons either.

Apple-fanboi much?

+1. I think 2012 will be the year of the "mobile cloud", because everything's better when mobile.

People don't assume and expect interoperability for those products. They do expect that they'd be able to call anybody with a telephone number when the underlying network is the Internet. Skype doesn't provide that because it doesn't talk open protocols.

Would you be happy with being forced to buy "GM only petrol" for your GM car? Be forced to have a Channel XYZ TV to watch Channel XYZ? Only be able to buy a memory stick for your Sony?

for that long doing a menial task.