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Comment Value vs Price (Score 1) 573

I had the option of upgrading to Time Warner's new top tier of 50Gbit download speed and passed. Of course, they wanted an additional $50/month for the upgrade, so roughly a total of $100/month for the service.

At that price it wasn't worth it. If the upgrade were more reasonably priced, I would consider it.

Comment Re:How about graduated scale or deregulation ? (Score 1) 582

Except UPS doesn't charge a flat rate to ship a envelope sized package to anywhere in the country. There are distinct rates for business addresses, and also escalating charges based on where the destination is.

Compare the cost to send a small package via UPS to a business in a major city near to you with the cost to ship something to a residence in Nome, AK and note that there is a significant difference in price between the two. That is something the Post Office is not allowed to do.

Comment Re:How about graduated scale or deregulation ? (Score 3, Insightful) 582

Actually, the people who have tried anyway had a rate half that of the USPS. Of course the government shut them down, because monopolies are efficient and virtuous.

Actually in that article the "American Letter Mail Company" did exactly what UPS, FedEx or any other private company would do if allowed to compete - pick large cities and only serve that market. USPS has the mandate of serving any address in the country for the same cost, regardless of whether it is the middle of Alaska or downtown Manhattan.

It is easy to undercut USPS if you only serve New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.

Comment Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score 1) 437

I been a Java developer for 8 years, worked at several different consulting companies and large in-house corporate environments. I've never seen Windows+Tomcat being used in an actual production setup.

I work for a large corporation and we have several in production. It almost always boils down to vendor A supports a few different OS's. When none of the Unix versions comply with corporate standards, then you deploy Java applications (including Tomcat) on Windows.

Comment Re:The technical issues (Score 1) 309

The next question is what exactly are these people going to do for a job out there? While the population density may be similar to Manhattan, there is no easy way to go anywhere away from where you live/work. Especially when you consider what it would take to make a floating runway capable of supporting commercial airliners. So it may be really hard to find enough people who would be able to tolerate living on these floating communities for any length of time.

Comment Re:There are cheaper alternatives (Score 1) 439

But the problem is with the publisher, not with the educational institution.

I'll take issue with that, at the college level at least. Go back and look at your college texts, how many of them were written by some professor at the school? If institutions didn't insist on using using the textbook from "their professor", you could have significantly larger printing runs of the textbooks which would greatly reduce costs.

Not saying the publishing companies aren't making a profit, but both sides are responsible for gouging the students.

Comment Re:Keep in mind... (Score 1) 241

Whereas the leftover warheads from the former USSR........well, they're not lost, I'm sure that former officials in Russia know exactly who they sold them to.

Yes they do. They were paid quite well for them. Of course why take the risk of selling them to a terrorist organization when there are legitimate agencies ready to buy them as well.

Yes, the cost of nuclear power has gone down since the 1990's because those decommissioned nukes are much easier to de-enrich to civilian nuclear power plant levels than it is to enrich normal uranium ore.

Comment Re:For $6.5b (Score 1) 526

IBM still has a competing JVM, though it is only at the 1.5 spec. It is what webshpere 6.1 runs on.

Actually the current version of Websphere is 7.0 (about 4 months old) and it runs on a Java 6.0 JVM (which is IBM's for the Windows and AIX versions of Websphere).

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