The dirty secret of universities: the job of most faculty isn't to teach, it's to research and bring prestige to the university. In the sciences, research is a byproduct of bringing in money, so research grants are the most important part.

Thus, on top of those three classes (two at the university I live near) they're expected to put in full time work on their research.

From what I see, it's about a 60 hour average week in the social sciences. That dips to 35-40 in the summers.

http://www.agentsheets.com/lisp/XMLisp/ as an example of what XML in lisp would look like, and I can't say it's much of an improvement. Further, end tags make human debugging much easier.

Cycling seems to be governed by the phrase, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying."

Java or bust! Level the playing field.

Client-side: Punch tape goes in, results come out. The idea of a server doesn't make sense because there isn't enough power for time sharing.

Server-side: We have powerful enough computers to timeshare, but computers are too expensive to have less powerful ones for everyone.

Client-side: a computer for each person doing more elaborate things is cheaper than a mainframe. Bandwidth is expensive, so it doesn't make sense to deliver all but the most basic GUIs remotely. (How many people were using remote X applications across the world in 1989?)

Server-side. Maintaining application executables (upgrades on all machines, security rights, telecommuting and mobile computing) is more expensive than putting it all on a web server. However, interpreted languages are just a bit too slow to run on their own. (Java was a viable option, but applets never caught on for many reasons, one of which was that Sun didn't put the work in to make the GUIs pleasant to use.)

Now, we have client side computers and javascript interpreters powerful enough to develop client side utilities that can be dynamically loaded, giving developers the best of both worlds. The balance switched again in favor of client-side applications. I expect this to hold for a while, until bandwidth and centralized processing power overtakes individual client machines to make server-side applications more valuable again.

It's not like the free market doesn't compete. UPS and FedEx are still around, for example, just not on bulk mail and first class. It also connects with other postal services in other countries, and reciprocity agreements are governed by treaties, making a true free market solution incongruous with the rest of the world.

PS -- the post office is the second oldest institution in the US, and government-controlled postal services go back to (at least) Darius I in Persia. There's more precedent for a privatized military.

The problem is that the post office exists mostly because most rural mail costs more to deliver than the price. It is in the government's interest to make sure that it can send and receive mail to and from all pieces of the country (for taxes, the census, and for general commerce for rural areas. )

As such, bulk mail is a subsidy.