Maybe they don't do all that much. If you've looked at the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for 2009 2Q, worker productivity increased 6.4% (annualized rate):
Over the long run, productivity is key to improved living standards by spurring rising output, employment, incomes and asset values. While the jump in productivity could suggest that the economy is poised for a strong recovery once it reaches bottom, that could be offset by the negative impact on consumer demand from job losses.
For the economy to recover, those people will end up having to find something else (productive) to do. This is not a trivial undertaking. But, in the long run, it's better then them idling away on more TPS reports.
(Also: IBM employees do a bunch of "solutions" custom-software stuff through IBM Global Services. Microsoft uses developers developers developers to brute-force things instead of doing real project management - or at least they did for Vista. The rest? your guess is as good as mine.)
Fear of them tracing it back to you, I guess? Though if you set up a throw-away account well enough it wouldn't be as much of an issue. (Pay everything with cash, use a proxy or an Internet cafe or whatever for whatever digital downloads are in question...)
If Disney promised to send you a physical DVD (or whatever-media-is-popular-these-days) whenever you wanted to cancel your account or if they decided to discontinue the service, would that address your concerns?
Universities moreover are excellent at price discrimination: charging you exactly as much as you're willing to pay, and maximizing their profit. Most students will even fill out forms to help the university price-discriminate against them better. It's called "financial aid". And yes, if there is more money available to the typical student for attending college, the typical college is able to charge more, plain and simple.
I lucked out with a big fat faculty-dependent tuition concession and graduated with zero debt, and a thousand dollars' advance from a programming job in California.
Alternatively.... some Christian groups can claim (to the horror of others) that the Bible is not the Truth. Rather, the Truth is the Truth, and the Bible is a book about truth, and humanity's relationship to it. This key distinction lets said groups avoid fundamentalism, and also means that the accuracy of the timelines in question is relatively inconsequential to the religion's understanding of itself and of the world.
Noticing this, one may even begin appreciate a few Religious Claims from time to time. For instance, the statement "Let there be light!" is really about the best summary of the beginning of the universe until the 1930s when Georges Lemaitre -- a Catholic priest, mind you -- refined it into modern Big Bang theory. (Yeah, and you thought the Catholics were all anti-science just because Pope Urban VIII was too much of a 17th-century Italian nobleman to let Galileo insult him in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Not so much. A tragedy, yeah, but it was more about politics and calling the pope's guy "Simplicio" and making him stupid than it was really about science.)
"PowerBoost" (a basic token bucket scheme) is basically their way of saying "Here, look, you can use the Internets for browsing the Web and it will seem fast, but you're out of luck if you want to download anything big."
Considering that downloadable video games and movies and such are substitutes for regular cable television service, it's not surprising that Time Warner would want to hobble those (while showing people it's fast for other stuff.)
I don't think it's so much price-per-byte structure. The technology for that is simple and readily available and still permissible under most net-neutrality schemes under suggestion. Which is possibly just as bad as anything else: when your ISP is your cable company, and they don't want you to use Internet video (YouTube, iTunes video store, BitTorrent) which competes with their cable offerings, then charging you by the byte is a perfect way to abuse their local monopoly.
It's the whole ISP-level QOS "google please pay us extra for people browsing YouTube for it not to suck" deal that's tricky and takes fancy hardware.
Security tokens are the second factor in two-factor authentication. The banks are just convinced that another-password is good enough, mostly because it's cheaper than doing it right.
I found the problem for the solution! It's called "Airplane Mode". I suspect a related problem may also exist in the wilderness, on the ocean, or places with underdeveloped network infrastructure!
Well, here we see how unemployment benefits really help society and the economy by encouraging people to go out and do something productive instead of just sitting around collecting unemployment!
And the "open mesh point-to-point network" idea is cute too, but doesn't work so well for VOIP and voice (too many hops, ick!) and doesn't work at all unless there's a bunch of people in the area doing it: lots of Silicon Valley hops, sure, but how do you string over the mountains even to a place as close as Santa Cruz? and what's the point if you can't ?
So I don't see that replacing my network carrier any time soon. Mesh-huggers. Gaah.
It's probably helping the economy more than harming it. Office software and the like is not an end in and of itself, it's a means to achieve useful ends (running businesses, doing school reports, drafting the next great American novel). Free rider problem or no, the economy has demonstrated that it is capable of producing adequate quantities of office software. So just about everybody in the economy wins, except for Microsoft (/Adobe/etc).
I dunno, it doesn't exactly look to me like anyone else has done anything towards the end of "peace" this year. Maybe they should have just called off the 2009 prize altogether.:P
Okay. Cisco 800. You go to it in your browser, and get a web page. This web page pops up a login window, which pops up a Java applet which will do many of your tasks. However, if you try to do a certain set of the tasks, it'll pop up a (new) web browser to take you to an old-style-Cisco in-browser web-based interface. With a separate login, if I recall correctly.
Oh, please. The collapse of the banking sector's not fraud. Recklessness, certainly, but don't attribute too much to malice when there's plenty of stupidity to go around.:P
Slashdot Mirror
For the economy to recover, those people will end up having to find something else (productive) to do. This is not a trivial undertaking. But, in the long run, it's better then them idling away on more TPS reports.
(Also: IBM employees do a bunch of "solutions" custom-software stuff through IBM Global Services. Microsoft uses developers developers developers to brute-force things instead of doing real project management - or at least they did for Vista. The rest? your guess is as good as mine.)
Fear of them tracing it back to you, I guess? Though if you set up a throw-away account well enough it wouldn't be as much of an issue. (Pay everything with cash, use a proxy or an Internet cafe or whatever for whatever digital downloads are in question...)
If Disney promised to send you a physical DVD (or whatever-media-is-popular-these-days) whenever you wanted to cancel your account or if they decided to discontinue the service, would that address your concerns?
http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/
I thought all that chlorine in the water supply was there to sterilize it. Or you can just get distilled water.
Infrared band.
Universities moreover are excellent at price discrimination: charging you exactly as much as you're willing to pay, and maximizing their profit. Most students will even fill out forms to help the university price-discriminate against them better. It's called "financial aid". And yes, if there is more money available to the typical student for attending college, the typical college is able to charge more, plain and simple.
I lucked out with a big fat faculty-dependent tuition concession and graduated with zero debt, and a thousand dollars' advance from a programming job in California.
Alternatively.... some Christian groups can claim (to the horror of others) that the Bible is not the Truth. Rather, the Truth is the Truth, and the Bible is a book about truth, and humanity's relationship to it. This key distinction lets said groups avoid fundamentalism, and also means that the accuracy of the timelines in question is relatively inconsequential to the religion's understanding of itself and of the world.
Noticing this, one may even begin appreciate a few Religious Claims from time to time. For instance, the statement "Let there be light!" is really about the best summary of the beginning of the universe until the 1930s when Georges Lemaitre -- a Catholic priest, mind you -- refined it into modern Big Bang theory. (Yeah, and you thought the Catholics were all anti-science just because Pope Urban VIII was too much of a 17th-century Italian nobleman to let Galileo insult him in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Not so much. A tragedy, yeah, but it was more about politics and calling the pope's guy "Simplicio" and making him stupid than it was really about science.)
Should have included a few more !!!1111eleven's.
"PowerBoost" (a basic token bucket scheme) is basically their way of saying "Here, look, you can use the Internets for browsing the Web and it will seem fast, but you're out of luck if you want to download anything big." Considering that downloadable video games and movies and such are substitutes for regular cable television service, it's not surprising that Time Warner would want to hobble those (while showing people it's fast for other stuff.)
It's the whole ISP-level QOS "google please pay us extra for people browsing YouTube for it not to suck" deal that's tricky and takes fancy hardware.
Most courts are willing, under the right circumstances, to void parts of contracts which are "unconscionable".
Security tokens are the second factor in two-factor authentication. The banks are just convinced that another-password is good enough, mostly because it's cheaper than doing it right.
The technical term isn't lols, it's lulz.
Now someone mod me informative. :)
I found the problem for the solution! It's called "Airplane Mode". I suspect a related problem may also exist in the wilderness, on the ocean, or places with underdeveloped network infrastructure!
You may now physics and chemistry, but apparently some combination of English, typing, and proofreading has eluded you.
Or, not....
Open software / hardware, sure, lovely.
And the "open mesh point-to-point network" idea is cute too, but doesn't work so well for VOIP and voice (too many hops, ick!) and doesn't work at all unless there's a bunch of people in the area doing it: lots of Silicon Valley hops, sure, but how do you string over the mountains even to a place as close as Santa Cruz? and what's the point if you can't ?
So I don't see that replacing my network carrier any time soon. Mesh-huggers. Gaah.
It's probably helping the economy more than harming it. Office software and the like is not an end in and of itself, it's a means to achieve useful ends (running businesses, doing school reports, drafting the next great American novel). Free rider problem or no, the economy has demonstrated that it is capable of producing adequate quantities of office software. So just about everybody in the economy wins, except for Microsoft (/Adobe/etc).
You just lost the game.
I dunno, it doesn't exactly look to me like anyone else has done anything towards the end of "peace" this year. Maybe they should have just called off the 2009 prize altogether. :P
Okay. Cisco 800. You go to it in your browser, and get a web page. This web page pops up a login window, which pops up a Java applet which will do many of your tasks. However, if you try to do a certain set of the tasks, it'll pop up a (new) web browser to take you to an old-style-Cisco in-browser web-based interface. With a separate login, if I recall correctly.
I'll take a Flash UI over that, I think.
Entropy isn't poison: it's just uselessness.
Good help is hard to find. Worse, it costs money.
Oh, please. The collapse of the banking sector's not fraud. Recklessness, certainly, but don't attribute too much to malice when there's plenty of stupidity to go around. :P