For those who missed the joke: (traditional) Japanese has no punctuation.

In the proposed trials they've been suggesting prices of $2 / GB, which Conroy has been referring to as effectively free. And they wonder why take up rates are so low...
The money to pay for the NBN has to come from somewhere, and the amount we're paying for it is completely ridiculous. The Liberals' plan offered them same speeds, rolled out over a longer period, at a fraction of the cost.

You missed the point - what matters isn't the potential the OS has, but rather what capabilities it has in practice. Android should be designed in a such a way that being locked down like that is impossible to maintain, either through legal or technical measures.
You cannot rely on the free market to solve issues like this, because the majority of people don't understand why openness is important. Openness should be more than an option/possibility - it needs to be a guarantee.

So what you're saying is that for the majority of people, Android is in effect locked down.
My standard for open is being able to root the device (if you have to at all) in under 30 sec by simply installing an app. If you have to fight the manufacturer/telecom to root it, it's not really open. Replacing the firmware/kernel on the N900 is similarly easy - it has no need to be connected to a computer because it is one in its own right. Let's see you do that with an Android.

Then why does it take 4-10 times longer on Ubuntu compared to Windows? Windows can continuously copy files at ~8 MB/sec as you would expect, but Ubuntu slows down exponentially? Even a relatively small 124 MB file is copied only at ~1 MB/sec, and the average speed decreases as the file size increases.

This is a simple, commonly performed task (copying files to a USB), yet Ubuntu's performance is orders of magnitude worse than Windows'. This is exactly the sort of thing that can prevent Linux of achieving widespread adoption.

Since you seem to know what you're talking about, I'll post this here in the hope that you at least have a general idea of how to answer my question.
Does anyone know if this is related to the atrocious write performance on USBs? The performance seems to asymptote to 0 when copying files with either Nautilus or cp, regardless of filesystem. Using dd with a large (100M) blocksize seems to resolve it, so I'm thinking it has something to do with lots of small, frequent writes to the USB.

After the last debacle with EXT4* I just switched to XFS. No problems, and the performance seems better too.

*When EXT4 was first included in Ubuntu, it turned out there was a problem where deleting many small files could freeze the system. This was most commonly invoked by attempting to empty the trash folder, and had to be remedied by booting into the recovery mode(i.e. a root shell) and manually recursing through the folders and deleting their contents.

...and I just realised that your UID is an order of magnitude less than mine.
Forget everything I said.

I've heard it mentioned several times recently how the /. demographic is changing - from geeks/enthusiasts to professionals. Articles with technical depth are increasingly rare these days, since there aren't as many people around who actually understand them or even find them interesting. A natural consequence of all the people moving into the IT industry just before the dot com crash, I suppose.
I suppose this is another one of the signs of that.

Citation needed. Preferably to the actual judgment or at least an article citing it.

IIRC, /. is actually designed not to store the details of which user made the post. It got mentioned when they took down a post because the CoS threatened to sue.

I think you may have missed something...

It might be hard to determine whether other people are going to freeze, but it shouldn't be too hard to determine how you would respond if you have a decent level of self-awareness. (If you can relate to this, you probably already have a plan to put into action)
Unfortunately, self-awareness is incredibly rare these days...

The author was probably thinking of the sailor uniform, which slightly more than half Japan's population will wear at one point or another.

I was under the impression that mobile telecoms NATed mobiles. Most people wouldn't noticed since they don't even know what their IP address is, but I do know that mine (Virgin) does.