I'm a Slicehost customer, and I just found out about all this from a blog - it's two days after this Hacker News post, and I still haven't received email about the matter. Rackspace, I'm very, very unimpressed.
Interesting. I'm now experimenting with "H&J" on some pages of mine that have fairly long, side-by-side columns of text. I haven't decided yet whether I'll stick with it. It's a bit disconcerting, albeit not at all surprising, that Hyphenator.js sometimes yields three or more hyphenated lines in succession. I'll probably run my pages by some friends and ask whether they find them more readable with or without "H&J" - unscientific but maybe good enough for my purposes.
The death of the SSC kept me out of particle physics. I was thinking of becoming a theoretical particle physicist, but I'm skeptical of doing theory without frequent input from experiments - it may be mathematically elegant, but it may well not be physics. I eventually went into biology, where there's more data of some kinds than we know what to do with, albeit other kinds of data we'd like are still hard to come by.
Having just been mugged by T-Mobile (read here for the details: http://nyti.ms/dRW9yO), I can't say I expect worse customer service from AT&T, but that certainly isn't saying much. Oligopoly means rarely having to say you're sorry; monopoly means never having to say you're sorry.