Seven Strikes Back - but it makes us look a little impotent

Australia is a land of green and gold ... and dust. Never forget the dust. Well, dirt really. When we drove through Australia in 2001, well, a bit of it, anyway, there was dirt as far as the eye could see.
Anyway, moving on from the dirt to more ... dirt. This country has three major commercial television stations for free-to-air broadcasting. They all seem much of a muchness. Two, Seven and Nine, have "current affairs" programs called Today Tonight and A Current Affair, respectively. I think the use of current affairs is an abuse. They are good at serving up drivel that is more biased than Bill Gates on Microsoft. Then there is Ten, which apart from having some acceptable U.S. shows also runs the Australian version of Big Brother.
Now, back to the plot. Seven has announced that it shall be rolling out the TiVo by 2008. And there is applause. But really, I see no reason for the excitement. The TiVo has been available to the public in the U.S. since 1999; Foxtel released it's iQ at the beginning of the year, but Murdoch Empire minion Sky in the U.K. released a similar product in 2001. What really gets my goat, while leaving the other animals alone, is that Australia, as supposedly one of the leading developed countries, is quite backwards. What do I mean by that?
Australia is a country which is defined by distance. We do not have lots of people suffering from malnutrition or with serious birth defects (except in Tasmania, but that is what you get from incest). THE quality about Australia which sets us apart from everyone else, and which no one else seems to be able to get their head around, is the immense distance between places. And yet, we do not have the infrastructure to deal with the problem of distance. We do not have hi-speed fibre optic networks running hither and thither. And yet, these have been rolled out in the U.K. (and most of real Europe) since the mid-1990s.
Air travel is extortionately expensive; at certain times of the year it can be cheaper to get a round trip ticket to London than Darwin (capital of the Northern Territory) However, there is no high-speed rail network. Obviously the local fauna would cause issues (I am not sure hitting a kangaroo at 300 km/h is a good thing) and the heat would reek havoc with the lines, but putting that to the side, there has been no research or development of a high speed network in Australia. And to be honest, if Japan, with earthquakes, warts and all can install one of the best high speed networks in the world, what's our excuse?
So, at the end of the day, while it is nice that we are finally getting digital video recorders, let's drop the fanfare and do something which really deserves applause.

Walsingham Nut