Diigo. It has all the functionality of Delicious (can import from there directly) and also lets you add your own clippings, highlights and annotations to a page. With the FF toolbar, you can highlight and bookmark any text on a page, or do a screen capture of a webpage and save it.
When Diigo started, I was torn between using it and Delicious, then decided to continue with both (If I save something on Diigo, it gets auto posted to Delicious as well). Now the choice is clear.
Meanwhile, I have been using del.icio.us for the last 5 years and have over a thousand meticulously tagged bookmarks on it. I used to scoff at people who saved all their bookmarks in the browser and wailed when they forgot to backup and formatted their PCs, since I could locate my stuff anytime on the site.As of today, Yahoo is shutting down the service. I plan to migrate to Diigo, but this serves as a reminder about how you cannot replace saving your data locally with the cloud. The best way forward - backup your local data locally and backup often.
There's one more thing with multiplayer these days: The end of the LAN party as far as new games go. All new games depend on connecting to a company hosted server for multiplayer (console ones especially) which also ensures a constant revenue stream since you have to pay for your Xbox live or whatever subscription.
Back in the day when Quake, Halflife 1, Unreal Tournament etc supported server mode, you could easily have a LAN party or a one on one deathmatch at home, and not have to connect to a serverful of strangers spouting obscenities. Or you could browse kali.net or other places for lists of privately hosted servers that you just logon and play. I bet there's still several Quake 1/Halflife (to name only 2 golden oldies) hosting fragfests.
It's been a while since I stopped gaming - do any of today's games even come with the ability to host a server locally anymore? What happens when the company decides to shutdown its server and move on, or even goes out of business?
Before torrents, there was Kazaa, Gnutella,Limewire and eDonkey. (They still exist). All of these support searching peers from within the client without any intermediary website. I always wondered that bit torrent seems like a step backward - since it relies on websites and trackers that can be shut down, or seized and have the users traced from the logs. So why is BT so popular as compared to the earlier services? Is it a more efficient P2P protocol? After all you still require a client to download and you still need to open ports on your firewall to allow traffic, same as with the others.
I have a licensed copy of Admuncher for Windows - it sits quietly in the system tray and silently filters all HTTP traffic on my PC. Back in the day, I could use an IE based browser like Maxthon and fearlessly surf the web because all crap got filtered. Then I switched to Firefox in 2004 when it was still called Phoenix. Now I use Adblock Plus and Cookie Safe as the second layer of protection. My cookie permissions are set to deny all by default. Only sites that require authentication are allowed to set cookies. And as a final resort, I use an adblocking hosts file for the rare item that does get through.
This setup has worked for me for the last 7 years- and the result is I have an extreme aversion to surfing the net on anyone else's PC - with banners and other crap crawling all over the pages.
Demos, or shareware if you like, were the way games actually got popular. Apogee (or was it Epic?) released a fully functional demo episode of Wolfenstein 3D, if you liked it you paid up and bought the full version with 6 episodes. Id Software made it a standard practice with Doom - I still remember the message on your DOS screen at the end: "Sure, don't order Doom. Sit back with your milk and cookies. Or, act like a man! Slap some shells into your shotgun and get ready to kick some demonic butt!' followed by ordering information - how quaint the 1-800 lines and BBS links sound now!
The same was done for Quake, Duke Nukem 3D and all the others that came out in the mid to late 90s. You got a fully functional episode of the total game so you could see the gameplay, and if you liked it you got extra levels and maybe newer weapons/enemies in the full version. Valve took it even further by releasing the demo as a separate single player mission distinct from the full game (Halflife Uplink), essentially a free teaser.
No one seems to make demo versions anymore - partly perhaps PC game installs have bloated to multiple gigabytes of high-res graphics that might take ages to download. Or maybe because of releasing the same game for consoles as well as PC - it's apparently not worth the trouble for game publishers to take the extra effort. Personally I'd much rather try out a demo to see if the full game's worth paying up for.
If it serves to enlighten people that corporations have become the de facto world government for at least the last twenty years, then the leaks will have been the most important journalistic product in my lifetime.
Something similar has already happened in India - the $40 billion telecom scam where a telecom lobbyist collaborated with well known and respected journalists to approve the appointment of the minster involved. The news was played down by the Indian media, and widely criticized online as an example of big business and media being in cahoots to appoint ministers favorable to their interests.
My suggestion about digitizing early 20th century work came from reading Robert Boyle's 'The public domain', where he points out that you can look at the catalog of old books on the LoC site, but not read them online because of possible copyright violation. And obviously I'm for digitizing content so that it can be made available to the public.
It's a sad state of affairs if content remains locked up for a century and more because of the risk of litigation from copyright holders if any. It is next to impossible to track down the rights holders of obscure works of music and literature that are at the LoC- many of the people and companies who created them are long since dead/defunct.
I'm not for copyright *removal* here- I'm for copyright retainment. This is opt-in - unless you assert and provide proof that you own copyright over certain material it will enter public domain. This will effectively take care of unlocking orphaned works that have nobody to claim them.
I also don't get this talk of 'rights holders' as opposed to authors. What value are these rights holders adding, to expect to collect rent on someone else's work for perpetuity? Why is the Disney company still collecting royalties for Steamboat Willie until 2023, nearly a century after it was made?
Speaking of funding,it doesn't have to be the LoC. If you guys (I'm not a US citizen) made a law bringing everything older than 80 years old into the public domain unless contested, I can guarantee there will be large amounts of content that no one will claim. Just the fact that these things are freely available to digitize would mean any private individual or group with the budget and interest could do so, not necessarily just the LoC (and thereby at taxpayers' expense).
Finally - I disagree with the notion that anyone else should be allowed to retain the rights to a piece of work and seek rent for the privilege of accessing it long after the original author has died. Why do I have to pay royalties to anyone for accessing early 20th century literature/music when it's not going to go to the original authors who are long dead & gone?
But how will they...can one just buy up copyrights?
If you claim that you own the rights to the only copy of some recording made on wax cylinder in the 1890s that's sitting in the LoC currently, you better show some proof.
As I see it- there's no economic benefit to be had from 100 year old obscure works of music or literature and all this stuff is sitting there just on the off chance that someone might own the rights to it.
I saw this article somewhere about the huge number of orphaned works that are stored in the LoC, that can only be viewed by physically going there - recordings, books, films from long since vanished
artists and producers. Yet they can't be digitized and made available on the net due to copyright liability.
The best thing for the US would be to announce that all works from before 1940 should automatically return to public domain one year from now, unless rights holders come forward to claim copyright.
If there's nobody living to make the claim, then let it into the public domain.
..the rest just act bombastic and make controversial statements. Cloud computing has been talked about for a few years, and most companies have their plans related to it in place. I work for IBM, and cloud computing is taken quite seriously here. There's a push for virtualization of services and hardware, and there are internal presentations and talks by experts in the field. For the outside world, IBM quietly continues to make its offerings available without too much fanfare.
I'm going off topic here, but I think it has to do with corporate culture. IBM is perhaps the founder of what we call 'Information Technology' and was already more than 50 years old when the present day Silicon Valley companies started up in the 70s. All the Silicon Valley companies have a strong cult of personality attached to their founder-CEOs (and even later ones). You cannot think of Microsoft without associating with Bill Gates, or Oracle -Larry Ellison, Sun - Scott Nealy, Apple - Steve Jobs, or until recently, HP - Carly Fiorina.
In IBM's case, the brand is bigger than any individual CEO, in fact one doesn't immediately think of Thomas Watson Sr. either when talking of IBM. Can anyone quickly recall who headed the company when it made the mistake of letting Microsoft have the license to DOS instead of buying it out? (without looking up Wiki).
It is very rare for an IBM executive to make controversial statements in the tech media about other companies- unlike the people mentioned above, who have all been sources of great quotes at various times. Google is similar, in that it largely doesn't crow about its success (though CEO Eric Schmidt will forever be quoted for his views on online privacy).
Stick a tranquilizer gun in it to knock out the poachers from a distance so that they can be picked up.
If they try shooting back, use a sniper rifle on them.
Both Doom and Duke Nukem 3D (unless you meant the side scrolling Duke Nukem I & II) were open sourced by Id/3D Realms, so if you have the original game files, you can still play.
Eduke32 is the most popular Duke3D version - with high resolution textures and a new engine.
Lolwut? I don't know what dumbphones you're looking at, but on every Nokia a long press on any of the keypad keys will either trigger a speed dial, or prompt you to assign one if not present. How hard is that?
You forget that the audience for this is not the average Slashdot reader. Facebook has become so successful because the average internet user hasn't really bothered about privacy, and blithely post their photos and updates for the entire world to see.
It's alarming how many people are increasingly relying on Facebook even for simple things that could benefit from a web search.
I've seen questions like 'Who directed Avatar?' on Facebook Questions - something you could look up in an instant on wiki/google. So rest assured that people will snap this up to get their Farmville fix and FB will continue to print money.
All of the Abrahamic religions are inward looking, and their holy books contain passages advocating the killing of infidels or unbelievers among others. The same books also self contradictorily contain other passages talking about peace and brotherhood. This leaves everything to selective interpretation.
Till the 15th century, both Christianity and Islam tended to follow their violent teachings. The difference being the Western world had the Renaissance, and was able to initiate some sort of religious reform. Islam has had no such movement, the majority of Muslim rulers oppressed their non Muslim subjects or converted them on pain of death(in selective accordance with their holy book).
Today, majority of Christians choose to ignore teachings such as these, and instead focus on the more humanitarian aspects of the New Testament.
The lunatic fringe in Islam - be it rabid clerics or terror groups - have the loudest voices, and continue to preach hatred towards non Muslims and plot attacks against them. The so called voice of moderate Islam remained silent when Theo van Gogh was murdered for making a film criticizing Islam's treatment of women, yet complained loudly about a bunch of cartoons in a Danish newspaper.
Today, if a cult were to spring up that tried to enforce strict adherence to the Old Testament, with all its colorful punishments, it would be shunned as barbaric, but at no point could you deny that they were following the teachings of the Bible. Just that they chose to follow the most warped and perverted teachings among them.
The same is true about those who kill in the name of Islam. They are NOT misguided, but merely obeying their faith selectively (how one can follow contradicting instructions in the Koran/Bible is beyond me). So called 'moderate' Islam cannot be allowed to exist under the tenets of Islam, it's an all or nothing club that you can check out of but never leave (under penalty of death for apostasy).
So, to all self professed liberal and moderate Muslims - you may disagree with the mad mullahs and terrorists who share the religion with you, but they're the ones more faithful to it than you, warped as it may sound. Your own tolerance and respect for other beliefs is part of a value system that you have made for yourself (perhaps by obeying the peaceful chapters of the Koran), it is not to Islam's overall credit. Islam has nothing in it that recognizes the right of any other religious belief to exist.
Come to India sometime. It's like Baskin Robbins where mobile operators are concerned. Airtel (owned by the Bharti group) and Vodafone India(formerly Hutchison-Essar) are the oldest and biggest mobile providers, followed by Tata Telecom,Idea and Reliance.
Tata have recently partnered with Docomo to provide 3G access (which was missing all this while due to spectrum allocation issues with the government).
In addition to these, there are several regional and new players in the fray - MTS, Spice telecom, Aircel, Virgin Mobile, just to name a few.
Number portability is also being rolled out - under government mandate by 1Q next year. So while you're here, you can use any GSM phone with any operator by purchasing a SIM card. Extreme competition combined with a market growing at rocket speed has resulted in some of the lowest call rates in the world. Incoming calls are free by law.
If you're visiting India, you can buy a prepaid SIM card for about $5 to $7 and pop it in your phone. Or if you haven't got your shiny smartphone along, you can buy a cheapass basic phone for under $20 with a prepaid connection and still make calls.
Everything is based on open GSM standards, a SIM module is all that's required - and the result is a healthy market with loads of competition that's ultimately beneficial to users.
Technically, a quadband GSM phone should work in the US as well, between operators. As for the frequency discrepancy, the Nokia N8 is the first phone to have pentaband 3G support, so it will work literally anywhere in the world, AT&T and T-mobile included. Nokia are launching more phones with 5 band 3G in the future(C7 and E7) - so I don't see how this leaves any further excuse for operators to lock phones based on differing frequencies.
Nothing made by a North American mobile OS company at any rate. All this privacy violating, security hole bullshit seems to be confined to iOS/Android/Winmobile 7 (not sure about BB/Palm)
That leaves Nokia, SonyEricsson, LG and a plethora of no brand Chinese handset makers who still make hardware for the rest of the world in the old fashioned way- where you the purchaser own your device entirely and are free to do whatever you want with it without any artificial restrictions.
In India, there are new players that are giving Nokia a run for its money in the low end space, with innovative features (dual SIMs, TV/AC remote controls, 3D displays and so on). Take a look at Micromax, for example, they offer a Blackberry style qwerty handset with email/social networking for barely 5000 Rs. (close to $100) unsubsidized.
MyNokia is a voluntary, free SMS service that sends you tips and tricks on using your phone. In India receiving SMS is free, so it's not like we're being forced to pay to read them. The service is enabled by default when you purchase a new phone, but you can turn it off and won't be bothered again.
I bought my N8 a couple of weeks ago- when I inserted my SIM card and booted up the phone, it greeted me with my Ovi account username and asked to enter my password to enable the Ovi services on the phone. It registers the phone number and IMEI with Nokia, (who check if I've signed up for Ovi with my phone number and send back the associated username) and the next time I logged onto the Ovi website, my preferred device had automatically been set to N8 (from the N82 that I had before).
After setting up my account, it was easily able to sync with Ovi services - maps, contacts and email.
I have never been bothered by Nokia for marketing purposes or anything else, and there's nothing on the phone that would 'phone home' to Nokia after the first time.
Symbian phones are locked in? Are you serious? The concept of a jailbreak does not exist for Symbian phones because you can do whatever you want with them.
Every phone has supported Mass storage mode for the memory card for at least 5 years now.
The only reason to hack a Symbian phone would be to add your own self signed certificate to the keystore if you explicitly want to run pirated software which won't install without a valid digital signature. A very small fraction of people need to do this- for the majority of users, all features of the phone work perfectly fine unlocked out of the box.
You don't need an iPhone style jailbreak to enable tethering or Bluetooth file transfer or what have you- all these things are available right away.
Slashdot Mirror
Diigo. It has all the functionality of Delicious (can import from there directly) and also lets you add your own clippings, highlights and annotations to a page. With the FF toolbar, you can highlight and bookmark any text on a page, or do a screen capture of a webpage and save it.
When Diigo started, I was torn between using it and Delicious, then decided to continue with both (If I save something on Diigo, it gets auto posted to Delicious as well). Now the choice is clear.
Meanwhile, I have been using del.icio.us for the last 5 years and have over a thousand meticulously tagged bookmarks on it.
I used to scoff at people who saved all their bookmarks in the browser and wailed when they forgot to backup and formatted their PCs, since I could locate my stuff anytime on the site.As of today, Yahoo is shutting down the service.
I plan to migrate to Diigo, but this serves as a reminder about how you cannot replace saving your data locally with the cloud. The best way forward - backup your local data locally and backup often.
There's one more thing with multiplayer these days: The end of the LAN party as far as new games go. All new games depend on connecting to a company hosted server for multiplayer (console ones especially) which also ensures a constant revenue stream since you have to pay for your Xbox live or whatever subscription.
Back in the day when Quake, Halflife 1, Unreal Tournament etc supported server mode, you could easily have a LAN party or a one on one deathmatch at home, and not have to connect to a serverful of strangers spouting obscenities. Or you could browse kali.net or other places for lists of privately hosted servers that you just logon and play. I bet there's still several Quake 1/Halflife (to name only 2 golden oldies) hosting fragfests.
It's been a while since I stopped gaming - do any of today's games even come with the ability to host a server locally anymore? What happens when the company decides to shutdown its server and move on, or even goes out of business?
Before torrents, there was Kazaa, Gnutella,Limewire and eDonkey. (They still exist). All of these support searching peers from within the client without any intermediary website. I always wondered that bit torrent seems like a step backward - since it relies on websites and trackers that can be shut down, or seized and have the users traced from the logs.
So why is BT so popular as compared to the earlier services? Is it a more efficient P2P protocol? After all you still require a client to download and you still need to open ports on your firewall to allow traffic, same as with the others.
.......yet lacks such newfangled things as OpenGL support
Say what? OpenGL has been supported since Java 5, which is itself over 4 years old.
I have a licensed copy of Admuncher for Windows - it sits quietly in the system tray and silently filters all HTTP traffic on my PC. Back in the day, I could use an IE based browser like Maxthon and fearlessly surf the web because all crap got filtered. Then I switched to Firefox in 2004 when it was still called Phoenix.
Now I use Adblock Plus and Cookie Safe as the second layer of protection. My cookie permissions are set to deny all by default. Only sites that require authentication are allowed to set cookies.
And as a final resort, I use an adblocking hosts file for the rare item that does get through.
This setup has worked for me for the last 7 years- and the result is I have an extreme aversion to surfing the net on anyone else's PC - with banners and other crap crawling all over the pages.
Demos, or shareware if you like, were the way games actually got popular. Apogee (or was it Epic?) released a fully functional demo episode of Wolfenstein 3D, if you liked it you paid up and bought the full version with 6 episodes. Id Software made it a standard practice with Doom - I still remember the message on your DOS screen at the end:
"Sure, don't order Doom. Sit back with your milk and cookies. Or, act like a man! Slap some shells into your shotgun and get ready to kick some demonic butt!'
followed by ordering information - how quaint the 1-800 lines and BBS links sound now!
The same was done for Quake, Duke Nukem 3D and all the others that came out in the mid to late 90s. You got a fully functional episode of the total game so you could see the gameplay, and if you liked it you got extra levels and maybe newer weapons/enemies in the full version. Valve took it even further by releasing the demo as a separate single player mission distinct from the full game (Halflife Uplink), essentially a free teaser.
No one seems to make demo versions anymore - partly perhaps PC game installs have bloated to multiple gigabytes of high-res graphics that might take ages to download. Or maybe because of releasing the same game for consoles as well as PC - it's apparently not worth the trouble for game publishers to take the extra effort. Personally I'd much rather try out a demo to see if the full game's worth paying up for.
Check out Ixquick, which started using SSL before Google introduced it, and has a pretty minimalist interface.
If it serves to enlighten people that corporations have become the de facto world government for at least the last twenty years, then the leaks will have been the most important journalistic product in my lifetime.
Something similar has already happened in India - the $40 billion telecom scam where a telecom lobbyist collaborated with well known and respected journalists to approve the appointment of the minster involved. The news was played down by the Indian media, and widely criticized online as an example of big business and media being in cahoots to appoint ministers favorable to their interests.
My suggestion about digitizing early 20th century work came from reading Robert Boyle's 'The public domain', where he points out that you can look at the catalog of old books on the LoC site, but not read them online because of possible copyright violation. And obviously I'm for digitizing content so that it can be made available to the public.
It's a sad state of affairs if content remains locked up for a century and more because of the risk of litigation from copyright holders if any.
It is next to impossible to track down the rights holders of obscure works of music and literature that are at the LoC- many of the people and companies who created them are long since dead/defunct.
I'm not for copyright *removal* here- I'm for copyright retainment. This is opt-in - unless you assert and provide proof that you own copyright over certain material it will enter public domain.
This will effectively take care of unlocking orphaned works that have nobody to claim them.
I also don't get this talk of 'rights holders' as opposed to authors. What value are these rights holders adding, to expect to collect rent on someone else's work for perpetuity?
Why is the Disney company still collecting royalties for Steamboat Willie until 2023, nearly a century after it was made?
Speaking of funding,it doesn't have to be the LoC. If you guys (I'm not a US citizen) made a law bringing everything older than 80 years old into the public domain unless contested, I can guarantee there will be large amounts of content that no one will claim. Just the fact that these things are freely available to digitize would mean any private individual or group with the budget and interest could do so, not necessarily just the LoC (and thereby at taxpayers' expense).
Finally - I disagree with the notion that anyone else should be allowed to retain the rights to a piece of work and seek rent for the privilege of accessing it long after the original author has died. Why do I have to pay royalties to anyone for accessing early 20th century literature/music when it's not going to go to the original authors who are long dead & gone?
But how will they...can one just buy up copyrights? If you claim that you own the rights to the only copy of some recording made on wax cylinder in the 1890s that's sitting in the LoC currently, you better show some proof. As I see it- there's no economic benefit to be had from 100 year old obscure works of music or literature and all this stuff is sitting there just on the off chance that someone might own the rights to it.
The best thing for the US would be to announce that all works from before 1940 should automatically return to public domain one year from now, unless rights holders come forward to claim copyright. If there's nobody living to make the claim, then let it into the public domain.
I'm going off topic here, but I think it has to do with corporate culture. IBM is perhaps the founder of what we call 'Information Technology' and was already more than 50 years old when the present day Silicon Valley companies started up in the 70s. All the Silicon Valley companies have a strong cult of personality attached to their founder-CEOs (and even later ones). You cannot think of Microsoft without associating with Bill Gates, or Oracle -Larry Ellison, Sun - Scott Nealy, Apple - Steve Jobs, or until recently, HP - Carly Fiorina. In IBM's case, the brand is bigger than any individual CEO, in fact one doesn't immediately think of Thomas Watson Sr. either when talking of IBM. Can anyone quickly recall who headed the company when it made the mistake of letting Microsoft have the license to DOS instead of buying it out? (without looking up Wiki).
It is very rare for an IBM executive to make controversial statements in the tech media about other companies- unlike the people mentioned above, who have all been sources of great quotes at various times. Google is similar, in that it largely doesn't crow about its success (though CEO Eric Schmidt will forever be quoted for his views on online privacy).
Stick a tranquilizer gun in it to knock out the poachers from a distance so that they can be picked up. If they try shooting back, use a sniper rifle on them.
HP Lovecraft said it best, in his long winded essay
Both Doom and Duke Nukem 3D (unless you meant the side scrolling Duke Nukem I & II) were open sourced by Id/3D Realms, so if you have the original game files, you can still play. Eduke32 is the most popular Duke3D version - with high resolution textures and a new engine.
Lolwut? I don't know what dumbphones you're looking at, but on every Nokia a long press on any of the keypad keys will either trigger a speed dial, or prompt you to assign one if not present. How hard is that?
It's alarming how many people are increasingly relying on Facebook even for simple things that could benefit from a web search. I've seen questions like 'Who directed Avatar?' on Facebook Questions - something you could look up in an instant on wiki/google. So rest assured that people will snap this up to get their Farmville fix and FB will continue to print money.
Till the 15th century, both Christianity and Islam tended to follow their violent teachings. The difference being the Western world had the Renaissance, and was able to initiate some sort of religious reform. Islam has had no such movement, the majority of Muslim rulers oppressed their non Muslim subjects or converted them on pain of death(in selective accordance with their holy book). Today, majority of Christians choose to ignore teachings such as these, and instead focus on the more humanitarian aspects of the New Testament.
The lunatic fringe in Islam - be it rabid clerics or terror groups - have the loudest voices, and continue to preach hatred towards non Muslims and plot attacks against them. The so called voice of moderate Islam remained silent when Theo van Gogh was murdered for making a film criticizing Islam's treatment of women, yet complained loudly about a bunch of cartoons in a Danish newspaper.
Today, if a cult were to spring up that tried to enforce strict adherence to the Old Testament, with all its colorful punishments, it would be shunned as barbaric, but at no point could you deny that they were following the teachings of the Bible. Just that they chose to follow the most warped and perverted teachings among them.
The same is true about those who kill in the name of Islam. They are NOT misguided, but merely obeying their faith selectively (how one can follow contradicting instructions in the Koran/Bible is beyond me). So called 'moderate' Islam cannot be allowed to exist under the tenets of Islam, it's an all or nothing club that you can check out of but never leave (under penalty of death for apostasy).
So, to all self professed liberal and moderate Muslims - you may disagree with the mad mullahs and terrorists who share the religion with you, but they're the ones more faithful to it than you, warped as it may sound. Your own tolerance and respect for other beliefs is part of a value system that you have made for yourself (perhaps by obeying the peaceful chapters of the Koran), it is not to Islam's overall credit. Islam has nothing in it that recognizes the right of any other religious belief to exist.
Come to India sometime. It's like Baskin Robbins where mobile operators are concerned. Airtel (owned by the Bharti group) and Vodafone India(formerly Hutchison-Essar) are the oldest and biggest mobile providers, followed by Tata Telecom,Idea and Reliance. Tata have recently partnered with Docomo to provide 3G access (which was missing all this while due to spectrum allocation issues with the government). In addition to these, there are several regional and new players in the fray - MTS, Spice telecom, Aircel, Virgin Mobile, just to name a few.
Number portability is also being rolled out - under government mandate by 1Q next year. So while you're here, you can use any GSM phone with any operator by purchasing a SIM card. Extreme competition combined with a market growing at rocket speed has resulted in some of the lowest call rates in the world. Incoming calls are free by law.
If you're visiting India, you can buy a prepaid SIM card for about $5 to $7 and pop it in your phone. Or if you haven't got your shiny smartphone along, you can buy a cheapass basic phone for under $20 with a prepaid connection and still make calls.
Everything is based on open GSM standards, a SIM module is all that's required - and the result is a healthy market with loads of competition that's ultimately beneficial to users.
Technically, a quadband GSM phone should work in the US as well, between operators. As for the frequency discrepancy, the Nokia N8 is the first phone to have pentaband 3G support, so it will work literally anywhere in the world, AT&T and T-mobile included. Nokia are launching more phones with 5 band 3G in the future(C7 and E7) - so I don't see how this leaves any further excuse for operators to lock phones based on differing frequencies.
Why is a nearly 5 year old article making news just now?
Nothing made by a North American mobile OS company at any rate. All this privacy violating, security hole bullshit seems to be confined to iOS/Android/Winmobile 7 (not sure about BB/Palm) That leaves Nokia, SonyEricsson, LG and a plethora of no brand Chinese handset makers who still make hardware for the rest of the world in the old fashioned way- where you the purchaser own your device entirely and are free to do whatever you want with it without any artificial restrictions. In India, there are new players that are giving Nokia a run for its money in the low end space, with innovative features (dual SIMs, TV/AC remote controls, 3D displays and so on). Take a look at Micromax, for example, they offer a Blackberry style qwerty handset with email/social networking for barely 5000 Rs. (close to $100) unsubsidized.
The way I understand it, the antenna is part of the metal back cover, which is what causes the attenuation on holding it.
MyNokia is a voluntary, free SMS service that sends you tips and tricks on using your phone. In India receiving SMS is free, so it's not like we're being forced to pay to read them. The service is enabled by default when you purchase a new phone, but you can turn it off and won't be bothered again. I bought my N8 a couple of weeks ago- when I inserted my SIM card and booted up the phone, it greeted me with my Ovi account username and asked to enter my password to enable the Ovi services on the phone. It registers the phone number and IMEI with Nokia, (who check if I've signed up for Ovi with my phone number and send back the associated username) and the next time I logged onto the Ovi website, my preferred device had automatically been set to N8 (from the N82 that I had before). After setting up my account, it was easily able to sync with Ovi services - maps, contacts and email. I have never been bothered by Nokia for marketing purposes or anything else, and there's nothing on the phone that would 'phone home' to Nokia after the first time.
Symbian phones are locked in? Are you serious? The concept of a jailbreak does not exist for Symbian phones because you can do whatever you want with them. Every phone has supported Mass storage mode for the memory card for at least 5 years now. The only reason to hack a Symbian phone would be to add your own self signed certificate to the keystore if you explicitly want to run pirated software which won't install without a valid digital signature. A very small fraction of people need to do this- for the majority of users, all features of the phone work perfectly fine unlocked out of the box. You don't need an iPhone style jailbreak to enable tethering or Bluetooth file transfer or what have you- all these things are available right away.