I'm a Virgin Mobile customer, so a few clarifications:

• The $30 a month is only with auto-pay with an iPhone. All other phones are $35 (unless you are grandfathered in or use the current YMMV glitch of switching an older phone to the $25 per month plan)
• They currently only have 1 4g phone, the HTC Evo V. 4G isn't actually throttled at all, but it uses Sprints older Wi-Max network, so expect speeds around 2-4 Mbps and spotty 4G coverage depending on where you live. All other phones (including the iPhones) are 3G only

All that said, I switched from AT&T to VM a while back and couldn't be happier. They speeds are slower and data coverage is worse than any of the major 4, but I pay half what I did before for my service, so it is worth it to me.

Also, in general, if you are going to be in a major city and want the best coverage (regardless of cost) go Verizon. If you are in a more remote area, and want the best coverage, go AT&T.

I moved a company of about 150 from a 10,000 sqft or so office to a newly built 13,000 sqft office. Not quite as large of a size increase but the main change was that in the old office, everything was rigged to work, the "server room" was just a re purposed office. The cat5 was run as needed, a lot by me.

Anyway, first focus should be your server/comm room. Shoot for an independent, dedicated A/C, a waterless fire suppression system (make sure they don't put a sprinkler head in during construction and that you have everything approved with local fire code), dedicated electrical circuit (ideally 220v), also make sure they don't blindly put carpet or things like that in the room. Run Cat5e everywhere. Plan out what you think you need now for each room and, if budget allows, double it. Rooms that are more likely to change, do your best to run extra Cat5e. If you can afford it, go up to Cat 6 instead of Cat5e, again, budget matters. Get professionals to do your wiring for you. Get several quotes and make sure you see some past work before you hire them. Well done cabling can make a huge difference in an office. You don't want people throwing cable over florescent lights, or parallel to unshielded power lines or things like that. A good cable runner will leave a service loop of 10-15 feet (maybe more depending on the room) above each drop in case you need to move wall locations later. Everything should be neatly labeled, organized, etc, so that when you have an issue, it should take 5 seconds to figure out which port is messed up, not 5 hours.

I'm in the US. My wife doesn't have insurance (pre-existing condition, minor but enough to get her disqualified). I have "private" insurance for myself and children since I work for a small business (small enough to not have to provide it). My last son born in Oct. cost us $13,000. It would have been cheaper to buy a baby off the black market :) The actual initial bill was closer to $25,000, but the nice thing about paying cash for health care (in the US) is that most doctors/hospitals/etc will give you huge discounts for paying right then with cash. They figure they don't have to file with insurance and they would rather get some money then and call it done, then have to chase you down or take small payments for who knows how long.

I actually use snapshot. I do agree it is frustrating sometime when the system registers a "hard break", which drops my discount when it was that hard break that prevented an accident through no fault of my own. Then again, when you think about it from their prospective, they was me to minimize my risk of an accident in any fashion, regardless of fault (in case of an uninsured motorist). So even if the hard break isn't my fault, if I do most my driving in stop and go traffic on the freeway, I am more likely to get in an accident than on a less congested city road.

I really don't mind the program or tracking. According to them, they only track speed, time of day, and breaking, but honestly even if they tracked more, I wouldn't really mind. The whole reason I signed up for it to begin with was because my wife is a stay at home mom and only drives her car two or three times a week and then not very far.

Exactly this. I have a server in a colo facility in Dallas, which I toured before putting it there. They are basically the same thing (can withstand an F4 tornado, on 3 power grids, 8 Internet backbone connections, generators with a week of fuel plus "guaranteed" 24 hour fuel delivery contracts, etc.)

Basically my thought was that if things get so bad even half of the contingency plans kick in, I'm not really going to care about my server anymore.

Where do you live? My choices where I live are Verizon Fios or local Cable co. I have Verizon's cheapest Internet only plan, it is 15/5 and is $55 a month. Their next plan up is 25/10 and is $75 a month. The local cable co is basically the same pricing, but aren't quite as fast. Gigabit for $70 sounds like a good deal to me. I would even take the 5/1 for free

Pick a name from this chart? http://xkcd.com/1056/

Is it? Take the original collection of 11,000 songs. At $1 a song (pretty much the going rate), that is $11,000.
Spotfiy, Slacker radio, Rhapsody, etc. pretty much all cost $10 per month. Each of their goals (although none fully achieve it) is to have a complete catalog of music that can be played as desired. At $10 per month, $11,000 will pay for a subscription for almost 92 years, or your whole life.

Add into this that the streaming services are constantly adding to their collection, so in 2040, you can get the latest songs instead of being stuck with what you have already bought.

Really, with the current models, it is by far cheaper to rent and then just buy the random few songs that don't appear on your streaming service (as long as you can find a streaming service that has a decent collection of what you like, which I would claim most people could).

I thought this already looking at another MS web site the other day, but I wonder if they stick to square/blockly things because rounded corners in IE are such a pain (compared to chrome/firefox). That way, they can claim the lack of rounded corner CSS support in IE is just the MS box way.

The hard thing with Christianity is there are a lot of "flavors" or denominations or distros or whatever you want to call them. "Original Sin" is a core Catholic tenant, but generally isn't a core Protestant one (YMMV). Generally Protestants believe that children are ignorant of good and evil and therefore get an automatic pass if they die. This is why most protestant congregations do not practice infant baptism. In most protestant groups, people aren't baptized generally until around age 7or 8 or sometimes not until puberty or so (when all those sexual sins get so enticing).

For protestants, baptism is generally the outward sign of the acceptance of salvation/grace for the redemption of one's on personal sins (in the past and future), not the grace for one "original sin".

Here is some RNA: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/ Just give it a little more time, and it will get higher up.

Pick any of the online printers for a cheap price (snapfish, shutterfly, etc.), they are all about the same and will print with a quality photo processing machine on quality photo paper. Don't try to print any pictures you want to last at home. By the time you put enough money into it, you could have bought 5 copies of each of your other photos from a pro.


All that said, I would recommend only printing what you really want now (for frames, photo books, to put on the fridge, etc). Don't print them "to have a copy in 20 years". I do agree having a photo sharing site as the sole copy is a bad idea, but keeping them digital isn't.

I have all of our kid's photos on a computer at home (RAID 1 setup, but that may be too much for some to deal with), a second copy on a usb hard drive at home (for local backup), a third copy on a server I have in collocation (a similar solution would be mozy, carbonite, backblaze, etc.), and then the majority uploaded to Google Picasa for friends and family to view and order prints.

Sure, JPEG (what 99% of my photos are in) may not be around forever, but odds are, it isn't going to disappear overnight and I would much rather, in 10-20 year or whatever when JPEG goes away run some converting program overnight than deal with storing a bunch of shoeboxes of old photos.

Just keep your photos digital and put them on as many hard drives and in as many places as you can.

Sure, as long as you also don't want to travel by car or train or subways or ferries

I guess that still leaves by foot (as long as you don't go in a subway tunnel) and maybe horse. I guess we really shouldn't complain.

Exactly. I have often seen it quoted that for every 10K extra in salary you would expect to make, you should add an extra month to your job search/time without work in case of a layoff. Generally, a 35 year old expects to make more than a 25 year old. It stands to reason that it would take a little longer to find a job.

Instagram isn't a good data point. The instagram purchase was done pretty much by Mark Zuckerberg alone, and then told to the Facebook board (not proposed).

Pretty much it was a rich kid saying, "oh yeah twitter, 1 Billion dollars, how do you like that?!?"

I don't think this bubble is the same. Recent IPOs (Groupon, Zynga, etc) have pretty much calmed down (although they may still be somewhat too high, it isn't as crazy as the last time). Google just make 2.9 Billion, so their valuation is pretty reasonable. Facebook, according to SEC filings is cash positive, so it isn't unreasonable to place at least some value on them as well.