Because getting several kilometers radius of coverage from one antenna to hundreds of phones without causing intolerable interference cannot be done in theory alone, field testing and measurements are necessary and needs expensive equipment before any federal organization would dare to assign a radio frequency spectrum to your standard.

Also because antenna design has gone from internal to internal, and makes a big difference in range, another task that needs more than theory. This has nothing to do with the standard as such, it would just require iPhone to have a little external antenna, remember those good times?
It's simple, not everything can be done in software and theory, and real world costs real money... unfortunately

Sure, one can jailbreak an iPhone or root an Android, but those are still limited frameworks.

The jailbreak iPhone community wouldn't get to be as big as the community making appstore apps over night.

Android could end up having quite a community, but since android is (mostly) open the huge Linux community can easily keep their systems Android compatible without locking the rest of the system up so much that they could not benefit from all the other good stuff going on around Linux.

So Nokia not committing to Android is a clever move in my eyes, because it opens up possibilities rather than limiting them.

Just my five cents...

Agreed, decentralization is hardly slowing anything down. There is however another major disadvantage when there's no central control, which was somewhat dealt with on eDonkey, anyone remember when ShareReactor was the thing? However, the media corporations managed to stop it for long enough for most people to move on to other technologies.

What is really slow is true anonymization, encrypted packets that have to jump thru several nodes to hide sender and receiver, generally not very suitable for large filetransfers. I saw someone suggesting to use Tor to anonymize it, and that's what makes it slow. However some hybrid could be beneficial, with the centralized parts hidden on an anonymous network like Tor, while the actual file transfers would not be anonymous, direct connections between sender and receiver, and thus still of acceptable speed.

NAT works, if no machine on the LAN is infected with something that allows remote control.

Updates will eventually obsolete this trick, of course servers are taken extra care of, clients would be vulnerable the longest.

Windows Firewall... I don't trust it, countless times have I been able to launch programmes not allowed thru windows firewall, it pops up asking me if i want to keep blocking it... however in the background i can see PuTTy or whatever establishing a connection just fine without my approval, just until i choose to block it, which would be too late had it been malicious software. And I've seen this on all windows from XP to 7... When it can't even keep local programs from getting out, why should i trust it would keep anything outside? What comes from outside has got to be much more unpredictable than what runs locally trying to get out... so I don't trust it...

You're right it won't be as severe as it was with the old windows counting percent, but counting the number of people that's gonna experience it, I don't know if it'll be fewer, there's a lot more computers around today than late 90's, don't know if it'll be more either...

This is very true.

The company I work for kept win2k until support ended before XP was deployed. Not so much because of the fear that XP was a bad OS, simply because win2k worked fine and they wanted to be sure that none of the software used internally would break. Same reason why IE6 is still the browser in use internally (in house webapps), it requires a documented need to get permission to have a newer IE. In this case the question may be, does Win7 run IE6? or will MS bet their entire salary that a newer IE/Windows doesn't break anything?

The day MS guarantees money back, losses covered and free re-implementation if it breaks, my employer wouldn't need to test new things for years before deployment, until then, we have to do it ourselfes, and while we do that, MS doesn't earn much. That's life and that's the curse of being the corporate OS of choice and being dependant on corporate customers. I'll say Win7 sees at least its 3 year birthday before it really gets to real corporate desktops, perhaps up to 5 years.