First of all at least please read the link you provided: "iSuppli also said the flooding may have affected operations of Nidec Corporation, a Japanese company that supplies more than 70 per cent of the motors in global hard drives."

Then, even if the numbers you quote are right I don't see any indication for "cartel pricing" or "gouging" or anything else. The fact is PAYING CUSTOMERS don't think the prices are high enough and they literally just don't stop buying. If you try to sell a now a drive at the "normal" price or even twice that it will just sell out and literally there aren't enough drives in the world to keep the drives on the shelves at prices before "crisis".
There is no arbitrary limit at which prices would stop. Even a difference of 1% between supply and demand can increase prices 10 (or 100) times if the customer just don't STOP BUYING.

Of course it's one of the countries in which is legal to share music, as it's legal to share in ALL countries. The problem comes when you start to qualify the statement: "depending on the license", "without compensation", "for free", etc.
Are you saying that you're allowed to share (obviously without compensation or any previous agreement) the latest Metallica album:
a. on your web site?
b. in your shop (street corner, class, company, etc)? Even assuming you're using "taxed" CDs?

... and just print some money and hand it to these bozos to leave us alone? I mean we can't pretend anymore that there's any fairness at all. Copyright was some kind of a deal in which both parties contributed with something: "the people" agreed to let "the authors" have some kind of unnatural monopoly over how some specific information is distributed with the understanding that they'll get back after a while some more interesting information in return. Free for share and for recycling in any way we see fit.
Already life of the author plus 50 years or whatever is whatever relevant jurisdiction is ridiculously high and defeats the spirit of copyright. Heck, there's freakin' JULES VERNE still under copyright (and really hard to find if you are on the wrong continent).
Life + 70 years is just a spit in the face. It should be like patents, about 20 years, with the need for explicit extensions. And a DRM-free copy of the original should be provided in escrow to some state organization which should make sure at the date when the copyright expires the DRM-free copy is available for everyone. Or you chose your poison: copyright will not protect you if the copy you distribute has DRM. Either it's mine to do whatever I am legally allowed to do OR you don't come crying that you want to sue a printer in some campus for "distributing copyrighted work".

If I'm not mistaken Canada is also one of the countries where if you want to back-up your pictures (for example) to CD it's presumed that you infringe copyright and you have to pay some fee no matter what, isn't it? I think this goes back to my original argument that there's no rhyme or reason to the laws, just get what you can for whatever pretext.

Because not that much software in general runs on Apple OSes?
Windows mobile 2003 is probably worse than Windows 95 security-wise (pocket internet explorer, nu security updates, etc) but nobody bothers to write malware for it. And is as "unlocked" as DOS or windows 95 ever were.

No such thing available for my device (of course the part that goes INSIDE the phone is the interesting one); one guy did some VERY VERY VERY nasty hardware mod: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1319473
Nasty in the sense that I wouldn't do it to my phone, the mod itself is really cool.

Well, smartphones in this range get 4-5+ hours of video play, isn't it? I guess you could easily strech the (standard) battery to 2-3 weeks if you manage to limit yourself to 20 min of notepad/one sms (and the needed boot and shutdown). If not one (or more) extra batteries would've been lighter (and possibly cheaper) than most arrangements of the Power Monkey+solar panel type.

However with a little tweak this IS after the best scenario for solar power. Just leave the charger there! It'll recharge many, many phones, it'll power maybe directly a small radio.
Or somebody might just get up a bigger (like 50+W) solar panel (maybe foldable if it's too complicated, or only the cells and glue them to a roof or something). And then you can charge directly more than 10 phones at a time.
It's not that solar wouldn't work in the long run for small devices, it's just the break-even point in terms of size/weight/price is usually at weeks rather than hours.

Really, what is with this idea of leaving a small(ish) solar panel in the car to charge either the phone or a very small buffer battery?
The car already has a huge battery and you can use it to charge the phone countless times. Yes, it's finite but compared to what a small solar panel can get you from inside a car (being behind glass, in the shade a good part of the day and almost always not in the optimal position) it might as well be infinite.
A modern car will certainly use up more juice than a phone for its own standby (plus locking/unlocking/automatically turning on lights and stuff when you unlock/lock, etc).

Would you care to edit the relevant parts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock ?
They list only Israel and Singapore as countries banning simlocked phones; I'm sure somebody will add Chile but probably won't think/won't find the relevant "citation needed" to add Estonia as well.

Can you please quote this elusive EU law that's "forcing carriers to allow unlocking FOR FREE" ? Please note that "after 1,2,5,50,500 years" doesn't qualify as "FREE" anymore as even popular expensive smartphones tend to be "left behind" after about one year or so nowadays.
Because the countries are so small and close you might want to go to Germany tomorrow (for one day, one week or one month) and use (for example) a cheap local SIM for data with YOUR phone. And you can't (and the fact that your provider might unlock your phone after 245 days doesn't help you a bit).

Not only I find hard to believe that this "EU law" exists but I'm not aware of ANY EU country that has a local law that either forces the providers to sell unlocked phones or forces them to unlock the phones for free without further qualification. Wikipedia seems to be agree with me as well.

Any unexpected (and everything is unexpected at some point) regulation is "somewhat unfair"; the provider might bet on you staying with them after you finished your contract because you don't want to lose your number but then number portability comes and then they can't keep you.
Fact is the provider is intentionally crippling a perfectly good phone betting there will be enough people paying for their "official" unlocking service to offset all the costs associated with these procedures and even get them some extra profit.
It's a non-zero sum game in which the "total" optimal strategy would be for the provider to just stop messing up with the phones. The problem is that market will not reach this point by itself once those 2-3 big providers sell only locked phones.

.. otherwise the law might have been struck as "unfair": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#Belgium
Yes, you read this right, forcing your provider not to lock your phone is "unfair" in the EU.

Why don't you quote the rest?
"Google has complied with these laws by not including sites containing such material in its search results. However, Google does list the number of excluded results at the bottom of the search result page and links to Chilling Effects for explanation."

To put it shortly: out of 57634762346346 sites google was legally forced to remove 113 sites from the index and despite this you can still learn what URLs had the removed sites from the takedown notices.

Doesn't sound evil to me.

It's not only about high speed rail, it's also about buses and subways. Of course if you drag with you two tons of car it doesn't matter much if you have one extra kilo or not.
No device will fit everybody, if you buy something which you carry only on vacation and maybe sometimes from the parking lot to the building of course you don't care much about weight and size.

I never actually took my netbook anywhere except vacations because I still had to carry it. May as well bring a laptop then, the only advantage of the netbook was the weight.

Let me guess: you fly for vacation and go anywhere else by car.