Unless they're suicidal, how is that clever?

Good god, what a load of ignorant rubbish - governments are SUPPOSED to do it where it's not viable for private companies to do so!

Young people leave rural areas all the time because of limited employment opportunities. Putting high-speed links out there means you can move (or start) many types of tech-supported industries that otherwise wouldn't be able to exist outside of the city.

You know all that overcrowding the anti-boat-people brigade keep whining about? Well this is part of the reason for overcrowding. Because we keep trying to fit more and more people into the existing cities. Nobody wants to live out of the city because they can't get these sort of services.

That's a little disingenuous mate; when most people mention the insulation program, they are simply repeating the Liberal line that the whole thing was a fiasco. Which it wasn't. Some dodgy operators spoiled it for everyone (and perhaps the government could have taken a little more care vetting operators somehow), but overall the program was a success.

When you talk to just about anyone in Australia, and they immediately bring up one of the following, you may as well just walk away (or face the urge to throw yourself from the nearest window):

• The government is incompetent because the insulation program was a farce (it wasn't).

• The government is incompetent because the Building the Education Revolution (BER) program was a farce and a waste of money (something like a 3% complaint rate, I believe).

• The government is illegitimate and we should have another election.

• They call Julia Joolya or JuLiar (name-calling; it's practically a hallmark).

You can guess they get almost all their talking points from The Australian (a Murdoch rag) or AM talkback radio. For the record, I'm a Greens voter; I don't actually like Labor, but I think they're a damn sight better than the Liberals, and I'd rather have a government that (supposedly) aims for services and social mobility.

I disagree; NBNCo is not an ISP. I think it is more analogous to the case where Telstra resells access to its network via ADSL.

It's the wrong level to insert a filter at, because the NBN should not know what its traffic means.

Oh, and would you stop with the $1000000000 per household $80 billion dollar DEBT WASTE DEBT hysterics, would you?
The first phase of the NBN pilot came in both ahead of schedule and under budget.

Oh, please. I see your Strawman and raise you a Reductio ad Absurdum.

Sure, lazy developers are going to use debuggers and edit/continue to avoid thinking. But that doesn't mean that everybody needs to code with a soldering iron and debug with an oscilloscope.

And windbg? For 90% of cases, that's simply masochism (I, for one, don't use obtuse tools just so I can feel smart about being able to use them).

For example, you don't need to load up windbg, load SOS, and do a gcroot command just because an InvalidCastException was raised by some piece of code you haven't worked on in a couple of months. Just step in there, and see what object is being passed in (and, probably, track it up the call stack to see what's changed).

Keeping the entire source tree in your head slows you down (and probably drives you crazy). I tend to keep an overall map of the codebase in my head and just re-familiarise myself with bits while I'm working on them.

When an app has an unhandled exception, VS launches for JIT debugging, attaches, and takes me right to the place in the source where the error was raised. It shows me the full call-stack (a double-click on any entry in the call stack will take me to the source there) and, for each level in the call stack, automatically picks likely variables of interest (as well as being able to show me the contents of pretty much anything else I choose).