It's my opinion that if it weren't for these regional monopolies, internet service pricing would be much much lower.

If a good or service becomes a commodity, and the price of that commodity levels out at a sufficiently low cost, why wouldn't a municipality take out a bond and develop its own fiber service. How is it unlike a water and sewer department?

• Interesting Games: Shattered Horizon
• Interesting Movies: Moon (2009)
• Bad Television: Three Moons Over Milford

I concede that it was not ironic at all.

Do polls work so well because the people voting in the earlier polls influence the later polls?

If the predictions were shared in real-time with the people they were to predict upon, would they still have the same accuracy?

It seems to me that predicting is only useful when its use is unknown to those it's used on.

Tabloid?

I'm from NH and I can tell you that my fondest memories of my grandfather are traveling into the White Mountains and partaking of all the views, the most spectacular of which was The Old Man of the Mountain. Just staring up at the rocks while my grandfather drove I-93 and watching as they changed from rocks to a discernible profile remains a very good memory. It's sad that no new kids will experience this again.

As for replacing it, I disagree with anything that has to do with replacing on the mountain face The Old Man; I don't think it's worth the resources. IMO the best idea is to take the pieces that fell and construct a scale model with similar attributes and set it next to the lake below where the original stood.

Does this give Oracle the ability to offer total package "solutions" to their customers? Do they no longer need to go into a meeting with a potential or existing customer with a preferred hardware vendor at their side to make a co-deal? IMO this gives a lot of power to Oracle and sets up against each other two massive players in the development market.

I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't bid on Sun. I would speculate that they would want Sun for the MySql and Java markets. Had they bid and won they would control a vast proportion of the development market, from Database through to front-end, and over the next release or two of Visual Studio could unify Java and C#. As for the hardware, they could have spun it off to an interested party at an attractive price. IMO since Bill Gates left there's been a vision vacuum and the company is scrambling to find it's path through brute force instead of innovation and this is why they didn't entertain an offer.