I think you will find that iiNet was excluded from the trial - they put in a proposal but presumably were excluded as they would the whole thing just look silly.

You are looking for ICON Perhaps it was the *awful* acronym that beat you :)

In what must be a first the Aussie government is a step ahead of what is needed. Basically Canberra (the Nations capital & home of more government than you can poke a stick at) has a wonderful fiber network called ICON which happens to consist of dark fiber that is physically patched between agencies. Now that doesn't mean the QKD is a famously good idea since we already have really well thought through key distribution techniques, but it's not the lack of the network that will stop it.

I'm glad I am not the only person to have suffered at the hands of Dulles Immigration.

From discussions with various people - you get that if you make the mistake of landing there... (or being diverted there like I was...)

Sadly visiting Canada probably isn't a solution - for some reason flights which transit through the US end up having to go through US Immigration.

I think it depends a lot on how many systems you use, both now and in the future, and also your rate of learning.

If I'm a new Java programmer I'll probably get more out of Eclipse than vi or Emacs; if I'm using Windows I might get more out of Visual Studio than vi or Emacs. But that's just in the short term. In the long term, the language and operating system might change, but the need to work on text files is likely to still be there. If I'm using multiple languages or OSes now, or if I expect that I'll be using different languages or OSes in the future, it means I'm likely to change IDEs. Each time I change, I'm learning from scratch. This means I don't get more than a decade of becoming an expert with one editor; instead I learn the most common tasks but not the advanced features.

With vi(m) or Emacs, I get something that's not optimized (specialized) for one environment, but instead something that's general-purpose and adapts to many different systems, and I can carry what I learn from one system to the next. I've been using vi and Emacs on Solaris, OS/2, Linux, Windows, Mac, with C, Scheme, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, SML, and many other languages. I could've used Visual Age on OS/2, but most of what I learned would not have been that useful when I switched to Eclipse on Linux, and most of that would not be useful when I switched to Visual Studio on Windows, and most of that would not be useful when I switched to XCode on Mac. Instead, I'm using a tool that's less optimal for my current needs, but it's something that I can keep using for other needs.

It extends beyond programming to my editing of text files, email, messages for newsgroups, HTML, my diary, my calendar, blogs, XML, config files, etc. Do you use Visual Studio for editing your blog, or do you use a different editor? Do you use yet a different editor for HTML? For email? I think it's a reasonable way to go but I find that I only use the simplest editing functions when I use lots of editors, because I can't count on features being available as I switch from one context to another.

It's a tradeoff, and I don't know for sure whether it's better to be a novice with specialized tools or an expert with a single general-purpose tool. I'd consider vi(m) and/or Emacs if you're editing a whole lot and expect to be editing on many different systems, languages, etc. I'd stick to IDEs if you're using one system a lot and don't expect to switch often, or if you don't edit enough that there's any benefit to learning vi(m) or Emacs.