Having watched and heard this moment in history more times than I can remember, playing it over in my mind, I do think there's a slight "hiccup" in the audio, but I'm not sure if it's long enough for a dropped "a".

But it doesn't really matter. "a" or no "a". It was a moment in history that will never be repeated, or surpassed, ever again. What Buzz Aldrin, Neal Armstrong, and Michael Collins (in alphabetical order) have accomplished stands on its own merits. It is no more and no less of an accomplishment no matter what he actually said, or didn't say.

Buy an unlocked GSM phone, and activate it on T-mobile. Or, keep the one you have, if it can handle US frequencies.

Of the four national US carries (small regional carriers typically piggy-back on the big nationals), only AT&T and T-mobile are GSM. Verizon and Sprint use CDMA.

Over ten years ago I dropped AT&T after their network became too saturated, and became pretty much unusable. From what I hear, things haven't changed.

Verizon and AT&T have the largest network and best, fastest coverages; but if you're moving to a large, populated, city, T-mobile's coverage will probably be as best as the bigger guys. Out in less-populated areas, far away from the civilization, Verizon's going to be only game in town; sometimes it's AT&T.

Sprint falls somewhere in the middle between Verizon/AT&T, and T-mobile, who is the smallest, but I think they're the most friendly to people who prefer to use their own, unlocked phone, and have very low tolerance for US cell carrier B.S. They even used to have discounted plans for people who bring their own unlocked phones, but I don't think they do that anymore. They do have "pre-paid" plans, which seem to be a bit cheaper.

There's no such thing as an unlocked CDMA phone, so with Verizon or Sprint you have to buy one from them, when you buy service. Verizon is notorious for feature-castrating their phones. It's been my experience that "Bluetooth" on Verizon's castrated phones only means a wireless headphone. That's it. No bluetooth file transfer/browsing, no other Bluetooth profiles. If you want to load your own MP3 ringtone, you can only get them on the phone by buying them from Verizon. Sometimes, I heard a rumor that some Verizon phones let you configure an MP3 ringtone that you've transferred over USB, but, it's been my experience that the UI on Verizon's phones do not let you select an uploaded/copied ringtone.

I've been happy on T-mobile for the last ~10 years. They don't care what phone I use, I just pop in a SIM, and off I go. I finally decided to get a data plan as a back-up for my wired broadband, since I telecommute. Set it up, then twiddled a bit with my phone, and had it set up tethering without any issues. From what I heard, if you want to tether with the bigger carriers, you're likely end up getting charged extra, on top of paying for the data. Utter bullshit. From what I've heard, they've been getting bitch-slapped recently, on that account, because, supposedly they're not allowed to do that anymore, as a condition for buying some recently-auctioned wireless spectrum. Whatever, I don't care.

As far as prices go, the differences between the carriers are pretty much negligible. The only other thing is: T-mobile, themselves, does not sell Iphones; but if you get an unlocked GSM one, shouldn't be too difficult to activate it. Verizon and AT&T are the primary carriers of Iphone in the US. I think Sprint might be selling them too, though.

There was one crucial piece of information missing from TFA: exactly why would a non-insignificant fraction of the population in large would even care that this particular think-tank's piddly web site exists? It would be news if say, some major national bank's web site blocked visitors who've enabled the do-not-track header. That, I can understand, would be news. But...

1) Who is ITIF, and

2) Who cares about their web site?

As soon as someone explains that, we can move ahead to the next step.

Time to start sending out resumes.

In other words,

/me puts on his sunglasses

... Steve jobs has been uploaded to the iCloud.

I always said that the original break-up of the legacy Ma Bell did not go far enough. It was broken up into local and long distance entities, with local telcos providing local telephone service, and AT&T long distance providing long distance service.

The problem is that the ILECs ended up owning both the physical plant, and the voice/data service. The breakup should've had its bar pushed even farther down the line. Specifically down to the last mile, and not an inch above that. The local telephone companies should've left with owning nothing but the last mile, and all they would do is charge tariffed rates for maintaining the physical plant. They should not have allowed to provide voice or data services as well. The ILECs should own only the physical plant, and any company should be allowed to install their equipment in the CO, and provide voice or data service to any wired customer, charging whatever the competition will bear, with ILECs getting paid a tariffed rate (the higher the capacity of the last mile, the more they could charge) for maintaining the physical plant, and nothing more.

I'm in one of the states where Amazon recently announced they agreed to collect sales tax. Starting in about a year and a half.

At first, I couldn't figure out why they agreed. Although, I understand, there were discussions going on between Amazon and the state government, from what I could see it was nowhere near the level of contention that I've read about in other states, where lawsuits were flying back and forth.

But I figured that there had to be a business reason that Amazon thought worked in their favor, for them to agree so readily to this. After thinking about the various possibilities, that's pretty much what I thought was going on. I have a huge Newegg warehouse a mile from here, this area is convenient to all the major highways, and there are many other warehouses here. I figure that Amazon was planning to open a warehouse here, so they figured that they'll have to do it anyway, but now they bargained at least a year's worth of tax-free sales.

Then, a week ago, on a Thursday, I ordered some junk from Amazon. Super-saver shipping. Previously, it took them 4-5 days to ship, from somewhere out on the Left Coast. This time, the stuff arrived the following Monday. The tracking info on the package started somewhere in Joisey. Go figure.

I wouldn't be surprised if, in a year, they'll figure out a way around the sales tax anyway...

I have no idea how my current employer does performance review. I haven't had to deal with performance reviews in over 15 years. This is one of the benefits of working as a consultant on a contract, and one of the things I don't miss about working as an employee.

I personally find consulting to be a more civilized, sane way to earn a living. My total compensation gets negotiated up front, for some prescribed period of time. Then, when the time is up, we just negotiate again(1). Simple. No fuss, no mess. You know how much you're making, and you don't feel shortchanged when the bean counters decide to cut down on some fringe benefit.

I guess that periodic contract extensions would count as a periodic performance review, of some sort. But there's no bureaucracy involved, and I don't need to dance like a pony, in front of someone. It's purely a business transaction, and nothing more.

The oft heard suggestion of unionizing is a joke. It's never going to happen. If you want to unionize, sure, but good luck to you. On the other hand, if you want to become a consultant, that can happen today. Your choice.

(1) Yes, I've went through an occasion of an 800lb corporate gorilla deciding, by fiat, to cut all their consultants' rates, for budgetary reasons, assuming that everyone is going to accept it and that they have no choice in the matter. As my then-managers discovered, that assumption was wrong. One of the other benefits of consulting, you see, is far fewer questions of what happened at your last job. Naturally, contracts come to an end all the time, and one's services are no longer required. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly understandable, and expected.

Microsoft needs to hire more people in marketing. Whoever thought up of this name "Surface", needs to be fired.

Hey, didya hear about this hot new tablet? It's called "Surface"!!!

It's obvious that they're trying to pick a generic name, in the spirit of "Word" and "Access". But, for some reason, this one doesn't fly. When I read this yesterday, I had to double-check and make sure I didn't accidentally stumble on The Onion.

Really, if they wanted to pick a generic name that's likely to form a subliminal association with this gizmo, they should've just called it "Jumped the shark", and that would've been the end of it.

Another job well-done, by the alleged editors. That link goes to the second page of a two-page article.

First page.

Your provider has de-facto admitted that they messed up. These things happen. The only question is whether they would truly respond in a professional manner. If they do, and they agree to the following, do the following, and move on. Contact them, and request them to:

* Provision a new virtual host for you.

* You will copy all your existing data into your new virtual host, using your own copies of whatever you use the host for. You do have your own copies of everything, and you don't trust the host with the entirety of your data, right?

* For convenience, I think it's ok to copy some data directly from your compromised host, provided that you're comfortable with whatever verification steps you deem are necessary to certify that it hasn't been tampered with. Data, no code.

* When your migration is complete, your provider will swap in your replacement virtual host in place of the compromised one, which they'll decomission.

Of course, for the duration of your migration, your host will not charge you for the second virtual host. You might consider negotiation with your host for an additional discount, as compensation for the work you have to do as a result of their security breach. I think that free hosting for however long it takes you to migrate, that is, no charge for the new virtual host, and billing suspended for your compromised host, would be fair. If that's the two weeks they're already willing to give you, then that's that.

The focus of the movie will be the less-known romance Steve Jobs had with Ada Lovelace. That's why they chose Kutcher. He's the natural choice for something like that.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just can't find -- even on that anonymous blog that I've never heard of -- any reference to any state that was trying to make birth control illegal. That's what Twinkle-Toes was blabbering about, way out in the left field back on Jan. 7th, on orders from Axelrod.

I don't think I'll ever use a subsidized phone again. The last contract phone I got was some shitty Motorola that, believe it or not, was completely incapable of reliably ringing the alarm clock every day, on its preset time. And I could easily crash that worthless garbage simply by adding a recurring calendar entry for several years in advance (the dumb thing apparently creates an individual calendar entry for each date, and runs out of its pitifully small internal memory very quickly). Googling around, I was not the only one, but it was too late to return that POS. That was the last time I allowed myself to be locked into a contract in exchange for some piece of crap.

My current Nokia, bought at retail, is the best phone I ever had. I just popped in T-mobile's SIM, and that was the end of it. Although it's a smart phone, I don't need, and I don't pay for, an overpriced data plan, I just use it with Wi-fi. Works fine, and without any hassles from either the phone, or T-mobile. Too bad that looks like this will be the last good phone that Nokia will ever make, now that they've sold their soul to Microsoft.

T-mobile used to have some pretty sweet discounted plans, on a contract-free, bring-your-own-GSM-phone basis They still do, but just as not as good as they used to be.