Of course does the list contain duplicates. Patents are usually limited to specific jurisdictions. Patents granted by the US patent office are only valid in the US. That is why companies file the same patent in many jurisdictions. That does not make the list less intimidating, because for VP8 to be free they still need to be invalidated individually in many courts around the world. Just take a look at the recent case of Microsoft vs Motorola for how tricky this is. A US judge agrees with Microsoft, while a German judge agrees with Motorola.

I never said the difference in price is due to taxes and other costs of doing business. Just that if costs increase, so do prices. So if costs of doing business in Australia are higher, you would expect to see higher prices. And this is perfectly acceptable. However if companies think they can jack up prices simply because people will pay anyway that is another question.

In case of Adobe and Microsoft it certainly does not. And they both admitted as much.

With regards of Apple it isn't as simple. Their hardware isn't much more expensive as in the US and the difference can be explain fairly easy by taxes and increased costs of doing business.

The iTunes store is a while different matter. Apple has to license the content from local copyright holders and prices are set by those local companies.

For example take a song created by an American artists. The American record company holds all rights to the song, but exclusively sub-licenses it to a local Australian company for distribution in their local market. If Apple wants to sell that song, it has to deal with the American record company for distribution in the U.S. and deal with the Australian company if they want to sell it in Australia. And the Australian company wants more money from Apple which leads to higher prices.

Most likely the Australian company is owned by the American record company, so guess where all the profits go to...

Longer warranties, import taxes and sales taxes are just costs of doing business. And costs of doing business are passed along to the customer. Did you really expect a commercial company to let higher costs eat into their profit margin? If taxes are being raised, prices go up. If legislation is passed that makes it more expensive for companies to operate, prices go up.

OK, so let me see if I understand this correctly. An X "server" isn't a server in the traditional (UT2K3) sense, but rather a piece of software which controls the display. An X "client", then, is the software which tells the server what to draw.

Think of it like this: The side which is initiating the conversation is the client (just like a webbrowser). The one responding is the server (just like a webserver). When an application wants to draw something on the screen, it will initiate the conversation, so this is the client. The display is just quietly waiting for somebody to give him something to do.