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://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.openshift.com%2F
- https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.openshift.com%2Fdevelopers%2Fjava
- https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.openshift.com%2Fdevelopers%2Fpricing
- 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!)

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution