Could also be something like what is called a "marketer". Where I live, we have multiple gas companies to choose from. That doesn't mean each house as 4 lines coming into it. All the lines are serviced/owned by a single company, if there is a service call, it's that company's trucks that roll. But you don't buy from them, they are a wholesaler only. Instead you buy from one of the marketers whose job it is to provide front-line support, billing/payments, etc.

Could the two be on in the same? Sure, electricity is a good example of something usually municipal where it's owned and operated by the same company. The marketer concept allows some level of competition (there are price wars across companies for natural gas where I live, for example), where you also don't want redundant infrastructure.

This guy is off-base:

"By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college..."

Private colleges are about 2.5 more costly than public (assuming in-state tuition):
http://www.usnews.com/educatio...

What makes this author and others like him think he is entitled to a private college education in a low-paying career? Let's face it, liberal arts degree in writing is not going to bring home the bucks. His family started out with a loan, then more, then bankruptcy. Is it any surprise there was a default? The bank should have stopped after the first one and informed he should transfer to a lower cost school before giving more money. Those who have repaid their student loans are now financing this author and others like him. It's not free, we all pay.

Perhaps degrees should have something like is on appliances for energy ratings, an average time to repay.

"This degree and this institution will take on average 20 years to repay"

Loan processors can use that to assess whether to grant the loan.

I like how of Steven's 78 replies in the conversation, 36 of them were some sort of single word affirmative answer (Yes, Yeah, Right, etc.). Add 8 more in there if you count affirmative answers with 1-4 more additional meaningless words added on.

Dell's fiscal year runs feb to jan and is 11 months ahead of calendar year by label. Last week it just finished FY13 and it is now in Q1FY14.

The first paragraph on Wikipedia is excellent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLM Also important to note this is only referring to NTLMv1 which is hella old. Also just because you are running Windows XP still doesn't mean you are using NTLMv1. It's a bit more complex than that.