IMHO, rejecting Google App Engine at this stage is a bit myopic, but it's your choice.
Among the more open-standards-focused cloud offerings, there is Red Hat's OpenShift
- https://www.openshift.com/
- https://www.openshift.com/developers/java
- https://www.openshift.com/developers/pricing
- http://www.jboss.org/openshift.html
likely easier to swallow if you rephrase it as "lower rates for areas with lower costs of living"
Certainly in the United States, people are used to rates being higher in places with higher costs of living (NYC, Bay Area, etc).
Alternatively, realize that it already applies if you rephrase it as "lower rates for poorer states" (and you get a rhyme as well!)
How would you know that the calculations were wrong?
You know later. It's similar to things like the EPIC arch where you might (for example) execute both sides of a branch in parallel, but you don't 'commit' the results until you get the results of the predicate bits, at which point you'll throw away one side's results and commit the other side's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing
Predicated execution is used to decrease the occurrence of branches and to increase the speculative execution of instructions. In this feature, branch conditions are converted to predicate registers which are used to kill results of executed instructions from the side of the branch which is not taken.
Pie are not square. Pie are round. Cornbread are square.
