Indeed. The best news I have found in the English-speaking world are the various *BCs of the Commonwealth countries. BBC being the most well-known example, but the CBC (Canada) and ABC (Australia) are both excellent too. Public broadcasters, no ads, less political bias (not to say there is none - but they generally have much tougher editorial guidelines and charters of responsibility than corporate news organisations). All three have a good, free web presence. All three have good 24h news TV and radio channels... the latter are freely available globally if you have the right equipment and can be streamed online/accessed via an app like TuneIn Radio). The TV channels are a bit trickier to get - BBC is available in the US if you have cable I think, the others stream online but would require a VPN.
Right - the proportion of people in Australia with pay TV (cable or satellite) is much smaller than in the US. Partly because Australian free-to-air broadcast channels are actually pretty decent compared to the US ones (a lot of 'premium' cable shows in the US air on normal broadcast TV in Australia) and partly because it's stupidly expensive.
I'm Australian and I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know that has cable/pay TV. I think one of my obscure cousins does. The rest of us just think "$100 a month to watch more ads? No thanks." Sport coverage is about the only reason people are willing to cough up the money.
Right - did you see the map of the hardware locations for XKeyscore? All over the place. Irritates me that as a non-American, it's quite possible that my communications, even domestically within my own country, are being monitored by the US. And they certainly would be if I communicated with someone in a different country that required peering through the US (which from where I am, is most other countries).
I mean the people, as in... the people you meet in your everyday life. I fully agree with you that the 'official' side of the country is far from welcoming. In fact I specifically mentioned cops. Same applies to immigration/customs officials at the border. But the average people you meet are nice.
Mind you I live in the Midwest, in a small city, where people may be a bit more welcoming/friendly than in the big metropolises. As you say, I have my particular frame of reference which may or may not match your experiences. I've traveled widely through Europe and Asia as well and know what you mean.
I'd recommend a second passport for people of any nation, regardless. If you can get one. They are handy things to have and open a lot of doors for working in interesting places. EU passports are particularly valuable as it allows you to freely work and live in any EU member state - one passport, many countries.
I have dual US and Australian citizenship which in case of mega-war isn't very useful (as the ANZUS treaty means if one of the two is at war, the other is as well: see Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) But it's a nice thing to have for economic reasons if nothing else (Australia was largely unaffected by the financial collapse in the States 2007 onwards, but is starting to struggle a bit now just as the US economy is rebounding). Options are always a good thing. And international travel/work is something I recommend everyone do at some point in their lives.
Sadly, even that is no longer the case. New iThings are generally first released in a dozen or so key markets on the same day. Which, due to time zones, basically means New Zealand, Australia and Japan are the first. I recall some articles about some idiots travelling from the US to the Apple Store in Sydney (Australia) when the iPhone 5 was released, just to be among the first... (/facepalm)
I'm certainly no troll. Keep in mind that our experiences are quite different in that I moved from a country that's ostensibly quite similar to the US (well, in comparison to China). Additionally keep in mind that I'm not really 'gung ho' about it. I didn't move to the US because I thought it'd be a better place to live than Australia. It was driven purely by family/personal reasons (to be closer to my wife's family as they get older).
I had to take a pay cut to move here (same position in the same company), I lost vacation days etc. Lots of downsides. Not something I would have done if not for family. I do have some good friends here though and spending a few years in another country is always a character building experience:) And given that noone likes to hear people mindlessly rubbish their home country, I do try to see and comment on the good aspects as well as the bad. Noone wants to be that obnoxious foreigner that's always complaining about how everything is different from home (like the stereotype of Brits who move to Australia, for instance!)
Hmm. I may have made the mistake of comparing only Federal income tax rates. In Australia, the first $18,000 you earn in a year is tax-free (i.e. our lowest tax bracket is 0%, applying from $1-$18000), whereas in the US, your lowest tax bracket is non-zero. Similarly, the top US Federal tax bracket is a good 10% lower than Australia's top bracket, and kicks in at a significantly higher income.
So based on those two things that I knew from personal experience, I made the simple judgement that Australia had a more progressive system (lower income people taxed less, higher income people taxed more) than the US (which has a flatter curve).
However Australia doesn't have State income taxes. Additionally, you have to factor in the complexities of various tax deductions and offsets (in both countries) which will affect the ACTUAL tax payable. Just looking at the brackets is far from the full picture in any tax system. So I apologise - seems I overly simplified the system and made a hasty and incorrect judgement. Your statistic that half the country doesn't pay tax would indicate that the lack of a 0% tax bracket in the US is largely irrelevant - lower income people end up actually owing zero once all is said and done.
I do have the feeling that at the other end of the scale, the rich pay less tax in the US than in Australia, though. The difference isn't huge (Australia isn't like Norway with its 65%+ brackets) but it's there. Also the distribution of ~wages~/income in Australia is much flatter. Minimum wage is $15/hr which equates to approximately $32,000/year for a full time position. So anyone with a full time job in Australia is paying at least SOME tax.
Can I just say that as someone who has just moved to the US four MONTHS (not years) ago, I echo this sentiment completely. I can tell that this place used to be the America that some people still think it is - the most prosperous, fair and free society on earth. And the people are still some of the friendliest you will meet. But gee, it's going downhill fast.
My experience in the first four months, for anyone that's interested in a new immigrant's perspective:
The amount of poverty (or near-poverty) here compared to my home country (Australia) astounds me. Huge portions of the population barely getting by...the run-down infrastructure etc. Not to say there's not nice areas too... but it's really inconsistent. You don't see that at home (due no doubt in part to a more progressive tax structure and universal medical/housing safety-nets). Education seems a bit lacking too - not so much formal education but general awareness by people of what's going on, both at home and abroad, and general knowledge (particularly of scientific matters). A lot of that comes down to the utterly terrible TV news here (relying on my VPN back to Australia to get decent ABC/SBS/BBC news services) and the lack of a decent documentary-focused public broadcaster (PBS is OK, but it pales in comparison to BBC/ABC (Australia)/CBC (Canada) etc.)
On top of that, I don't feel any more (or less) free here than in Australia. Sure there are some things I can technically do a bit easier in America - buy a gun, speed on the highway (speeding isn't enforced here as strictly as in Australia), etc. But OTOH, they have some weird restrictions on alcohol here (an older drinking age being only the tip of the iceberg) and certain other recreational drugs are prohibited in the US whereas they were decriminalized in my state in Australia. The US is also far more censored - it's actually quite hilarious seeing what they blur out or beep out on TV here. (My American wife was fairly shocked to see full frontal nudity on standard free-to-air TV in Australia, on the flip side). Both countries have similar fundamental rights and freedoms (America's are codified in the Bill of Rights, Australia's stem from the Westminster principles of good governance, centuries of local and English common law precedent, human rights statutes at a State level and accession to international rights treaties). Ironically, even though rights are arguably more strongly protected, on paper, in the US than Australia, it also seems that they are more regularly violated or infringed upon in the US too.
I do feel more 'monitored' here. More subject to suspicion, identification, verification. Every man and his dog asks you for ID or the ubiquitous SSN (Australia has no equivalent to this and even if it did, what the hell does social security have to do with my electric company or ISP or any other company that randomly seems to need my SSN?). I was prevented from doing basic things like buy some over-the-counter cold medicine (because I didn't have a US driver license... they wouldn't accept a passport, even a US passport!) or open a checking account at a bank (because I have no credit record... why does that matter when I'm not even trying to borrow any money!?) None of that would be an issue for a new immigrant in Australia, but here I've had no end of problems doing even the most basic things. Cops seem aggressive, paranoid and unfriendly here, whereas at home they are usually pretty nice guys and treat you with respect. It just feels... very unwelcoming... not like the America I expected. And I should be a 'desirable' immigrant by any standards - university educated, significant assets and savings, a stable well-paying job, no criminal history etc.
The other thing that really surprised me is the bloatedness and inefficiency of the government. Americans look at places like Australia and think we must have a huge government in order to deliver all those social programs such as
I use Internode and I'm fairly certain there is no "no servers" clause at all. And I definitely have a dynamic IP (as does iiNet and Grapevine, the last two ISPs I used). Well, a dynamic IPv4 at least...the IPv6/60 subnet Internode gives you is static.
That is complete rubbish. My ISP gives me not only a public facing IPv4 address, but an entire/60 public-facing IPv6 subnet! And this is a standard residential/family plan, not a business plan.
Firstly, it's not a one-size-fits-all cap like with some North American ISPs (I used Charter cable in the US for a while and it had a 300 GB soft-cap, though it wasn't enforced unless you went over it for several months in a row). My Australian ISP offers a range of caps, from 30 GB on the low end, to 1.2 TB (yes, terabytes) on the high end. This includes plans delivered over the NBN at 100 Mbps downstream/40 Mbps upstream.
Or to put it another way, there are capped plans that allow me to download four times as much as on my 'unlimited-but-not-really' cable plan I had in the US. And at faster speeds too. Or comparing apples to apples, the cost of a 300 GB cap plan in Australia is roughly the same as for a plan in the US with the same cap.
IMO caps are a good thing as they allow ISPs to predict their bandwidth requirements ahead of time and thus build their network accordingly. And for consumers, choice is a win - if you are a light user, save some money and get the 30 GB cap plan for some measly amount of money. If you are a heavy user, go for the huge 1TB+ caps. Myself personally, I'm on a 150GB cap and never come even close to using it. And if I DID...I'd pay an extra $10 a month and upgrade to the next cap up, no big deal.
PS. The NBN is no 'dream in the sky'. It's not available where I live yet, but my parents already have it. As do some of my friends. And I'm actually hosting a server at my parents' house as we speak, making use of their nice upstream bandwidth:)
Here in Australia there are very few ISPs that have such a restriction. Most are completely silent on the issue (and thus permit servers).
Of course, residential ISPs generally give you a dynamic IP which isn't very useful for hosting purposes (DynDNS or equivalents notwithstanding) and charge some extra fee (e.g. +$10/month) for a static one. So they make extra money off the customers doing any serious form of hosting anyway.
But yeah, the "don't run servers" clause in ISP terms of service seems to mostly be a North American thing. I've used dozens of ISPs in Australia, NZ and various European countries and never come across such a clause.
DVD+R is (marginally) better. But yeah, I swore off optical media for good almost a decade ago now. The minute you could buy reasonably priced external USB hard drives, I stopped buying CD/DVD+/-Rs (and I used to buy a LOT of them). Faster, more robust and more reliable.
Hard drives don't last forever, but provided you keep multiple backups and move data to new drives every 5 years or so, you should be fine.
A good argument, although there are plenty of very densely populated areas in the US (on par with the more densely populated countries you mention) that still have poor speeds. I think the issue in the US is the inconsistency of the speed available. One guy might have 100 Mbit FiOS available, whereas his friend a few blocks away can only get 3 Mbit DSL. Competition is also a problem - I know for me in my mid-sized midwestern city, I have precisely ONE broadband option (one cable provider who fortunately provides a healthy 30 Mbit, though my previous place only had AT&T DSL at a maximum of 6 Mbit available which sucked ass).
The US could see a big jump in its average speed merely by switching out the ADSL1 exchange equipment in DSL-only areas and replacing it with ADSL2+ and/or VDSL (ala U-verse, but available universally, not just in select areas). Those people stuck on 3 or 6 Mbit DSL could then get 12, 18, 24 Mbit speeds using their existing phone line.
So yeah the US appears to be the fastest large (geographically) country on the list (though, one of the most expensive still) and I agree that it's actually doing quite well in terms of its ranking, all things considered. I expect it won't stay that way for too many more years though (Australia in particular should leapfrog the US in the 2015-16 timeframe once the NBN hits critical mass - this will provide 100 Mbit to 93% of the population and is already available in some areas, but not enough to make much of a difference yet).
The point is, when we did the move the opposite direction (my American wife moving to Australia to live with me), her US license was able to simply be swapped for an equivalent Australian license on the spot - no tests. But the reverse is not true. Kind of irritating.
It's not because the US thinks that an Australian license isn't "up to scratch" (indeed, Australian licensing standards are generally more stringent than the US), but simply because a process to convert a foreign license simply didn't exist (at least in my state). In Australia OTOH, pretty much every state has such a process (they maintain a list of countries which it deems to have acceptable levels of testing and licensing requirements, and will happily convert those to local licenses once you prove Australian residency and identity).
Actually, because the US is one of the few countries that tax their citizens' worldwide income (even those who have permanently left the US), a foreigner or short-term resident being 'given' US citizenship is indeed a bit of a punishment. They'll have the 'fun' of filling out US tax returns for the rest of their life.
True, if you're going to do it, do it that way. My point was more that I don't think it's worth it in the first place. If you have a volume already set up for other purposes by all means, but personally I wouldn't go to the trouble if I was in the OP's situation.
I was in your situation a couple of months ago. I'm an Australian who's just moved (April 2013) to the US for at least a few years, maybe longer. I also had a lot of media on me when I crossed the border (ripped or otherwise). I don't think you will have any problems unless you literally had half a suitcase filled with dodgy-looking burnt DVDs (which looks like piracy and shows up easily on Xray).
Carry your stuff in on a removable hard drive or two or on a laptop and you will just blend in with the millions of other business travellers who enter and exit the US with laptops/storage devices/other computer peripherals every week. Airports are busy places (especially in the US where they seem to be chronically under-staffed compared to Australia), and customs have bigger fish to fry. They are looking for threats to agriculture/disease/pests and illicit drugs, mostly. If you look like a regular dude with a laptop they won't hassle you at all.
And 'welcome' to the US - it can be a pretty frustrating place as a new resident (trust me on this - US systems and processes seem not to consider 'foreigner' or non-resident alien as a use case so it's a complete nightmare doing even mundane daily tasks, until you get a local drivers licence, a SSN etc. Also in most states they won't recognise your existing Australian licence as equivalent, so you'll have to do a driving test to get a local one, hooray. And they don't give a toss about your credit history either so have fun applying for a rental apartment/getting a loan/even getting approved for a contract cell phone etc.)
But bear with it. After a few months once you jump through all the bureaucratic hoops things get a lot easier. Doing stuff here (at any level of government or even within private companies) is inconsistent, arbitrary, piecemeal. But once you're set up and good to go, it's a good place to live. Though you'll want to get a VPN back to Australia to get a fix of decent TV or radio news (ABC, SBS or otherwise) - 'news' here on all networks is mind-numbingly dumbed down and locally-focused.
Not too many home connections in the US would make that feasible either, assuming we are talking about multi-terabytes of data. Upload speeds generally suck residential connections in both countries (some exceptions exist: FiOS in the US and any NBN or Telstra Velocity FTTH connection in Australia).
I wouldn't even bother with the TrueCrypt - if they discover the partition, it might just attract further checks.
No - neither the Australian legislative drafting process, nor the way legislation is debated and passed (or not) in Parliament are amenable to that kind of thing. An Act covers only a single topic (dictated by the long form of its title) and can't have US-style riders attached to it.
Incidentally, the change in meaning of the word 'liberal' only occurred in the US (and Canada?). In the rest of the world, 'liberal' still means what you say it did in the 18th and 19th Century.
I live in Australia but have a lot of American friends and family. It is always a pain in the ass explaining to them that the "Liberal Party of Australia" is actually the main conservative/right wing party here (with the Australian Labor Party being the main progressive/left party). You have to basically add a bit disclaimer about the different meaning of the word liberal in the US every time you talk about politics, otherwise they think you're saying the opposite to what you actually are.:)
The hacked system belonged to contractors/a construction company involved with the building, not a government system. Still highly embarrassing, but it wasn't an ASIO screw-up (this time, at least).
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Indeed. The best news I have found in the English-speaking world are the various *BCs of the Commonwealth countries. BBC being the most well-known example, but the CBC (Canada) and ABC (Australia) are both excellent too. Public broadcasters, no ads, less political bias (not to say there is none - but they generally have much tougher editorial guidelines and charters of responsibility than corporate news organisations). All three have a good, free web presence. All three have good 24h news TV and radio channels ... the latter are freely available globally if you have the right equipment and can be streamed online/accessed via an app like TuneIn Radio). The TV channels are a bit trickier to get - BBC is available in the US if you have cable I think, the others stream online but would require a VPN.
Right - the proportion of people in Australia with pay TV (cable or satellite) is much smaller than in the US. Partly because Australian free-to-air broadcast channels are actually pretty decent compared to the US ones (a lot of 'premium' cable shows in the US air on normal broadcast TV in Australia) and partly because it's stupidly expensive.
I'm Australian and I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know that has cable/pay TV. I think one of my obscure cousins does. The rest of us just think "$100 a month to watch more ads? No thanks." Sport coverage is about the only reason people are willing to cough up the money.
Right - did you see the map of the hardware locations for XKeyscore? All over the place. Irritates me that as a non-American, it's quite possible that my communications, even domestically within my own country, are being monitored by the US. And they certainly would be if I communicated with someone in a different country that required peering through the US (which from where I am, is most other countries).
I mean the people, as in ... the people you meet in your everyday life. I fully agree with you that the 'official' side of the country is far from welcoming. In fact I specifically mentioned cops. Same applies to immigration/customs officials at the border. But the average people you meet are nice.
Mind you I live in the Midwest, in a small city, where people may be a bit more welcoming/friendly than in the big metropolises. As you say, I have my particular frame of reference which may or may not match your experiences. I've traveled widely through Europe and Asia as well and know what you mean.
I'd recommend a second passport for people of any nation, regardless. If you can get one. They are handy things to have and open a lot of doors for working in interesting places. EU passports are particularly valuable as it allows you to freely work and live in any EU member state - one passport, many countries.
I have dual US and Australian citizenship which in case of mega-war isn't very useful (as the ANZUS treaty means if one of the two is at war, the other is as well: see Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) But it's a nice thing to have for economic reasons if nothing else (Australia was largely unaffected by the financial collapse in the States 2007 onwards, but is starting to struggle a bit now just as the US economy is rebounding). Options are always a good thing. And international travel/work is something I recommend everyone do at some point in their lives.
Sadly, even that is no longer the case. New iThings are generally first released in a dozen or so key markets on the same day. Which, due to time zones, basically means New Zealand, Australia and Japan are the first. I recall some articles about some idiots travelling from the US to the Apple Store in Sydney (Australia) when the iPhone 5 was released, just to be among the first... (/facepalm)
I'm certainly no troll. Keep in mind that our experiences are quite different in that I moved from a country that's ostensibly quite similar to the US (well, in comparison to China). Additionally keep in mind that I'm not really 'gung ho' about it. I didn't move to the US because I thought it'd be a better place to live than Australia. It was driven purely by family/personal reasons (to be closer to my wife's family as they get older).
I had to take a pay cut to move here (same position in the same company), I lost vacation days etc. Lots of downsides. Not something I would have done if not for family. I do have some good friends here though and spending a few years in another country is always a character building experience :) And given that noone likes to hear people mindlessly rubbish their home country, I do try to see and comment on the good aspects as well as the bad. Noone wants to be that obnoxious foreigner that's always complaining about how everything is different from home (like the stereotype of Brits who move to Australia, for instance!)
Hmm. I may have made the mistake of comparing only Federal income tax rates. In Australia, the first $18,000 you earn in a year is tax-free (i.e. our lowest tax bracket is 0%, applying from $1-$18000), whereas in the US, your lowest tax bracket is non-zero. Similarly, the top US Federal tax bracket is a good 10% lower than Australia's top bracket, and kicks in at a significantly higher income.
So based on those two things that I knew from personal experience, I made the simple judgement that Australia had a more progressive system (lower income people taxed less, higher income people taxed more) than the US (which has a flatter curve).
However Australia doesn't have State income taxes. Additionally, you have to factor in the complexities of various tax deductions and offsets (in both countries) which will affect the ACTUAL tax payable. Just looking at the brackets is far from the full picture in any tax system. So I apologise - seems I overly simplified the system and made a hasty and incorrect judgement. Your statistic that half the country doesn't pay tax would indicate that the lack of a 0% tax bracket in the US is largely irrelevant - lower income people end up actually owing zero once all is said and done.
I do have the feeling that at the other end of the scale, the rich pay less tax in the US than in Australia, though. The difference isn't huge (Australia isn't like Norway with its 65%+ brackets) but it's there. Also the distribution of ~wages~/income in Australia is much flatter. Minimum wage is $15/hr which equates to approximately $32,000/year for a full time position. So anyone with a full time job in Australia is paying at least SOME tax.
Unfortunately, the Aussie's weren't stupid enough to fall into that acronym trap. It's ASIS - http://www.asis.gov.au/
Can I just say that as someone who has just moved to the US four MONTHS (not years) ago, I echo this sentiment completely. I can tell that this place used to be the America that some people still think it is - the most prosperous, fair and free society on earth. And the people are still some of the friendliest you will meet. But gee, it's going downhill fast.
My experience in the first four months, for anyone that's interested in a new immigrant's perspective:
The amount of poverty (or near-poverty) here compared to my home country (Australia) astounds me. Huge portions of the population barely getting by...the run-down infrastructure etc. Not to say there's not nice areas too ... but it's really inconsistent. You don't see that at home (due no doubt in part to a more progressive tax structure and universal medical/housing safety-nets). Education seems a bit lacking too - not so much formal education but general awareness by people of what's going on, both at home and abroad, and general knowledge (particularly of scientific matters). A lot of that comes down to the utterly terrible TV news here (relying on my VPN back to Australia to get decent ABC/SBS/BBC news services) and the lack of a decent documentary-focused public broadcaster (PBS is OK, but it pales in comparison to BBC/ABC (Australia)/CBC (Canada) etc.)
On top of that, I don't feel any more (or less) free here than in Australia. Sure there are some things I can technically do a bit easier in America - buy a gun, speed on the highway (speeding isn't enforced here as strictly as in Australia), etc. But OTOH, they have some weird restrictions on alcohol here (an older drinking age being only the tip of the iceberg) and certain other recreational drugs are prohibited in the US whereas they were decriminalized in my state in Australia. The US is also far more censored - it's actually quite hilarious seeing what they blur out or beep out on TV here. (My American wife was fairly shocked to see full frontal nudity on standard free-to-air TV in Australia, on the flip side). Both countries have similar fundamental rights and freedoms (America's are codified in the Bill of Rights, Australia's stem from the Westminster principles of good governance, centuries of local and English common law precedent, human rights statutes at a State level and accession to international rights treaties). Ironically, even though rights are arguably more strongly protected, on paper, in the US than Australia, it also seems that they are more regularly violated or infringed upon in the US too.
I do feel more 'monitored' here. More subject to suspicion, identification, verification. Every man and his dog asks you for ID or the ubiquitous SSN (Australia has no equivalent to this and even if it did, what the hell does social security have to do with my electric company or ISP or any other company that randomly seems to need my SSN?). I was prevented from doing basic things like buy some over-the-counter cold medicine (because I didn't have a US driver license ... they wouldn't accept a passport, even a US passport!) or open a checking account at a bank (because I have no credit record ... why does that matter when I'm not even trying to borrow any money!?) None of that would be an issue for a new immigrant in Australia, but here I've had no end of problems doing even the most basic things. Cops seem aggressive, paranoid and unfriendly here, whereas at home they are usually pretty nice guys and treat you with respect. It just feels ... very unwelcoming ... not like the America I expected. And I should be a 'desirable' immigrant by any standards - university educated, significant assets and savings, a stable well-paying job, no criminal history etc.
The other thing that really surprised me is the bloatedness and inefficiency of the government. Americans look at places like Australia and think we must have a huge government in order to deliver all those social programs such as
I use Internode and I'm fairly certain there is no "no servers" clause at all. And I definitely have a dynamic IP (as does iiNet and Grapevine, the last two ISPs I used). Well, a dynamic IPv4 at least...the IPv6 /60 subnet Internode gives you is static.
That is complete rubbish. My ISP gives me not only a public facing IPv4 address, but an entire /60 public-facing IPv6 subnet! And this is a standard residential/family plan, not a business plan.
True, but this is not a big deal.
Firstly, it's not a one-size-fits-all cap like with some North American ISPs (I used Charter cable in the US for a while and it had a 300 GB soft-cap, though it wasn't enforced unless you went over it for several months in a row). My Australian ISP offers a range of caps, from 30 GB on the low end, to 1.2 TB (yes, terabytes) on the high end. This includes plans delivered over the NBN at 100 Mbps downstream/40 Mbps upstream.
Or to put it another way, there are capped plans that allow me to download four times as much as on my 'unlimited-but-not-really' cable plan I had in the US. And at faster speeds too. Or comparing apples to apples, the cost of a 300 GB cap plan in Australia is roughly the same as for a plan in the US with the same cap.
IMO caps are a good thing as they allow ISPs to predict their bandwidth requirements ahead of time and thus build their network accordingly. And for consumers, choice is a win - if you are a light user, save some money and get the 30 GB cap plan for some measly amount of money. If you are a heavy user, go for the huge 1TB+ caps. Myself personally, I'm on a 150GB cap and never come even close to using it. And if I DID...I'd pay an extra $10 a month and upgrade to the next cap up, no big deal.
PS. The NBN is no 'dream in the sky'. It's not available where I live yet, but my parents already have it. As do some of my friends. And I'm actually hosting a server at my parents' house as we speak, making use of their nice upstream bandwidth :)
Here in Australia there are very few ISPs that have such a restriction. Most are completely silent on the issue (and thus permit servers).
Of course, residential ISPs generally give you a dynamic IP which isn't very useful for hosting purposes (DynDNS or equivalents notwithstanding) and charge some extra fee (e.g. +$10/month) for a static one. So they make extra money off the customers doing any serious form of hosting anyway.
But yeah, the "don't run servers" clause in ISP terms of service seems to mostly be a North American thing. I've used dozens of ISPs in Australia, NZ and various European countries and never come across such a clause.
DVD+R is (marginally) better. But yeah, I swore off optical media for good almost a decade ago now. The minute you could buy reasonably priced external USB hard drives, I stopped buying CD/DVD+/-Rs (and I used to buy a LOT of them). Faster, more robust and more reliable.
Hard drives don't last forever, but provided you keep multiple backups and move data to new drives every 5 years or so, you should be fine.
A good argument, although there are plenty of very densely populated areas in the US (on par with the more densely populated countries you mention) that still have poor speeds. I think the issue in the US is the inconsistency of the speed available. One guy might have 100 Mbit FiOS available, whereas his friend a few blocks away can only get 3 Mbit DSL. Competition is also a problem - I know for me in my mid-sized midwestern city, I have precisely ONE broadband option (one cable provider who fortunately provides a healthy 30 Mbit, though my previous place only had AT&T DSL at a maximum of 6 Mbit available which sucked ass).
The US could see a big jump in its average speed merely by switching out the ADSL1 exchange equipment in DSL-only areas and replacing it with ADSL2+ and/or VDSL (ala U-verse, but available universally, not just in select areas). Those people stuck on 3 or 6 Mbit DSL could then get 12, 18, 24 Mbit speeds using their existing phone line.
So yeah the US appears to be the fastest large (geographically) country on the list (though, one of the most expensive still) and I agree that it's actually doing quite well in terms of its ranking, all things considered. I expect it won't stay that way for too many more years though (Australia in particular should leapfrog the US in the 2015-16 timeframe once the NBN hits critical mass - this will provide 100 Mbit to 93% of the population and is already available in some areas, but not enough to make much of a difference yet).
The point is, when we did the move the opposite direction (my American wife moving to Australia to live with me), her US license was able to simply be swapped for an equivalent Australian license on the spot - no tests. But the reverse is not true. Kind of irritating.
It's not because the US thinks that an Australian license isn't "up to scratch" (indeed, Australian licensing standards are generally more stringent than the US), but simply because a process to convert a foreign license simply didn't exist (at least in my state). In Australia OTOH, pretty much every state has such a process (they maintain a list of countries which it deems to have acceptable levels of testing and licensing requirements, and will happily convert those to local licenses once you prove Australian residency and identity).
You can, but the IRS says you still have to pay taxes for 7 years after you renounce it...
Actually, because the US is one of the few countries that tax their citizens' worldwide income (even those who have permanently left the US), a foreigner or short-term resident being 'given' US citizenship is indeed a bit of a punishment. They'll have the 'fun' of filling out US tax returns for the rest of their life.
True, if you're going to do it, do it that way. My point was more that I don't think it's worth it in the first place. If you have a volume already set up for other purposes by all means, but personally I wouldn't go to the trouble if I was in the OP's situation.
I was in your situation a couple of months ago. I'm an Australian who's just moved (April 2013) to the US for at least a few years, maybe longer. I also had a lot of media on me when I crossed the border (ripped or otherwise). I don't think you will have any problems unless you literally had half a suitcase filled with dodgy-looking burnt DVDs (which looks like piracy and shows up easily on Xray).
Carry your stuff in on a removable hard drive or two or on a laptop and you will just blend in with the millions of other business travellers who enter and exit the US with laptops/storage devices/other computer peripherals every week. Airports are busy places (especially in the US where they seem to be chronically under-staffed compared to Australia), and customs have bigger fish to fry. They are looking for threats to agriculture/disease/pests and illicit drugs, mostly. If you look like a regular dude with a laptop they won't hassle you at all.
And 'welcome' to the US - it can be a pretty frustrating place as a new resident (trust me on this - US systems and processes seem not to consider 'foreigner' or non-resident alien as a use case so it's a complete nightmare doing even mundane daily tasks, until you get a local drivers licence, a SSN etc. Also in most states they won't recognise your existing Australian licence as equivalent, so you'll have to do a driving test to get a local one, hooray. And they don't give a toss about your credit history either so have fun applying for a rental apartment/getting a loan/even getting approved for a contract cell phone etc.)
But bear with it. After a few months once you jump through all the bureaucratic hoops things get a lot easier. Doing stuff here (at any level of government or even within private companies) is inconsistent, arbitrary, piecemeal. But once you're set up and good to go, it's a good place to live. Though you'll want to get a VPN back to Australia to get a fix of decent TV or radio news (ABC, SBS or otherwise) - 'news' here on all networks is mind-numbingly dumbed down and locally-focused.
Not too many home connections in the US would make that feasible either, assuming we are talking about multi-terabytes of data. Upload speeds generally suck residential connections in both countries (some exceptions exist: FiOS in the US and any NBN or Telstra Velocity FTTH connection in Australia).
I wouldn't even bother with the TrueCrypt - if they discover the partition, it might just attract further checks.
No - neither the Australian legislative drafting process, nor the way legislation is debated and passed (or not) in Parliament are amenable to that kind of thing. An Act covers only a single topic (dictated by the long form of its title) and can't have US-style riders attached to it.
Incidentally, the change in meaning of the word 'liberal' only occurred in the US (and Canada?). In the rest of the world, 'liberal' still means what you say it did in the 18th and 19th Century.
I live in Australia but have a lot of American friends and family. It is always a pain in the ass explaining to them that the "Liberal Party of Australia" is actually the main conservative/right wing party here (with the Australian Labor Party being the main progressive/left party). You have to basically add a bit disclaimer about the different meaning of the word liberal in the US every time you talk about politics, otherwise they think you're saying the opposite to what you actually are. :)
The hacked system belonged to contractors/a construction company involved with the building, not a government system. Still highly embarrassing, but it wasn't an ASIO screw-up (this time, at least).