But it doesn't matter if everyone knows the risks of second-hand smoke. Everybody knows the risks associated with being shot with a pistol, but that doesn't exempt you from liability if you let people shoot pistols in your bar, regardless of the warnings involved.
I don't believe we should try to create a world without risk. But we should try to prevent people from being negligent and reckless, or at the very least hold them liable if they are and injure people.
The social contract absolutely includes acceptance of responsibility for reasonable risks. I don't think a bar owner should be liable for every bump and splinter a patron receives in a bar. In fact, I don't think they should be liable even for electrocutions and broken noses, if they made a reasonable effort to make sure their wiring was safe and discouraged fights. But I don't think smoke is a reasonable risk -- a significant number of people develop cancer or respitory problems when habitually exposed to it.
I think it would be good to come to a consensus about what level of risk is reasonable. We obviously let people fly planes and drive cars even though they result in numerous deaths every year. If smoke fell within the acceptable risk levels, I'd be OK with that. But we haven't reached any kind of consensus about what levels of risk are acceptable, and the opponents of smoking bans mostly seem to say that smoke is OK because we've always lived with it. I don't think that's a valid argument -- when we learn about risks, we should evaluate those risks based on the evidence, not just accept the status quo.
To go back to the roller coaster example: I don't think the owner should be liable for a ride that's safe for ordinary people, but unsafe for people with heart conditions (they shouldn't even need signs, as long as the owner is correctly representing how fast/violent/etc. the ride is). But the owner should be liable if it's unsafe for a significant number of healthy people, even if they post signs. A good example of this is Disney's Indiana Jones ride, which caused spinal injuries for several healthy people before they altered the ride. It doesn't matter that Disney had signs saying the ride was rough, they're still liable for injuring people who had a right to expect that they wouldn't receive severe injuries from an amusement park ride.
For the same reason they would be liable for damage resulting from not correcting faulty wiring or tolerating fighting: negligence. The medical evidence for the dangers of second-hand smoke is very clear. Just because we didn't know any better until a couple of decades ago (and consequently have a culture of tolerating smoke), doesn't mean that smoke shouldn't be treated like the carcinogen it is.
Whether or not the patrons or employees are required to be there is immaterial. Maintaining a public place is an implicit acceptance of a social contract, which includes accepting liability for negligence.
I don't have any problem with these policies, as long as you also support the common sense measures for redistributing the externalities:
making owners of smoke-filled places liable for the damage done to their employees and patrons
not spending taxpayer money on medical attention for people who don't wear helmets and saftey belts
(Though I suppose the second one is moot, since most libertarians aren't fond of public health care anyway.)
Not that I'm interested in being treated like an infant, I mostly just don't want to be financially exploited by people who are negligent or reckless (respectively), and leave the state to pick up the tab.
OK, then. Is there any incentive for your employer to list you as a NY employee?
Inertia. I telecommute full time from Florida (and previously from England) to California. My employer kept reporting my income as CA income. I don't think there's any definite policy on it, though. I wasn't able to get a straight answer from anybody I talked to, and the wording of the tax pubs all lean towards reporting income as CA income. So it was up to me to convince them my income shouldn't be taxable by CA since I performed my work somewhere else.
I got my employer to amend my W2. So now CA seems fine with me not paying them state taxes. Though I don't know how CA and NY law differ.
This is the letter I sent to my senators and rep today:
I am deeply troubled by the recent news that the National Security Agency has been building a database of millions of records of telephone calls. Combined with the earlier revelations of warrantless NSA wiretaps, indefinite detentions, and a host of other similar activities, it appears the Bush administration is completely unconcerned with civil liberties. Their public statements show deep contempt for the rule of law.
Congress must act now. Hearings must be held immediately to find out exactly what the NSA has been doing. Any budgetary or regulatory leverage must be brought to bear to stop illegal conduct. Existing law must be clarified, to make it absolutely clear that the executive branch does not have the authority to violate the Fourth Amendment guarantees of privacy.
If left unchallenged, these new assertions of executive power will form the foundation of a police state. Even though the current threat to our country is dire, and even though the current administration's intent may be noble, unchecked executive power will lead to tyranny.
I joined the ACLU, and my wife joined the EFF. What did you do?
And eventually, a new version of Windows will come out, and then just don't learn it. That really helps. The last version of Windows I used heavily was '98. I have used XP a bit, and probably enough to fix most problems users are going to run into, but they don't have to know that.
More to the point, especially when they are calling with virus/spyware/instability problems, tell them you switched to Macs because they don't have those problems. I've found friends with Macs don't need support as much.
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you. But not for pr0n. But I would bet that being able to get it in the privacy of your home, nearly instantly is worth a lot of money to some people. Sure there's free pr0n around, but I imagine the pay-content is going to be higher quality.
Like most big orgs (I work at a university library), we are officially a windows shop. Mac (and even Linux) desktops are allowed in special circumstances, but officially frowned upon. So every time I want a new machine, I've had to either a) find an alternate funding source like grant money or b) do a lot of justifying my desire to have a Mac and reassuring management that I can really interoperate with the windows world. Being able to say that I can just boot into XP if something doesn't work in MacOSX makes this much, much easier.
And there are a whole lot of non-technical users who would love to use Macs, but couldn't justify them or satisfy their manager that they could work with windows (without any support, of course). Now they can also use the "I'll just boot into XP if there are any problems" line, too.
So I think this is going to be a great boon for Apple. Their hardware prices are very competitive with the systems that big enterprises buy from Dell and the like. This will give a large number of enterprise users the ability to switch. This could be the wedge that Apple has been needing to break into the Enterprise market. I was at O'Reilly's Etech conference last month, and was surprised by how many people had PowerBooks (80% of the laptops, I'd guess). So I think a lot of decision makers have already switched.
first, in todays day and age, what is not facing the web?
it's not that there are a lot of apps that don't use the web, it's that they should be isolated from each other. my web browser generally only needs to write files in one or two directories (cache, downloads). ditto for my email client. my browser shouldn't be able to delete my email. my email client shouldn't be able to wipe my whole home dir. etc.
people like to say that linux and macosx are inherently more secure than windows because of user separation. but all of the data i care about is owned by my user account and could be deleted by my browser or email client (given the right vulnerability), because they both have uneccessary access to the filesystem.
I once had a co-worker who said he wanted a voice-controlled home automation system, and that he'd name it "Dumbass". So he could walk in and say "Hey, Dumbass, turn on the lights!".
Trying to write everything in one language is just silly. Even if you're a n all-Java shop, there will be likely by XSL somewhere, shell scripts and/or DOS batch files files, SQL, etc. And there will still probably be some place (again for an all-Java shop) where a lightweight Perl CGI will make more sense than a JSP or Servlet.
But the weak form of this (everybody should be using the same set of complementary tech, except in cases where there is a clear technical justification for it) makes a lot of sense. In particular, letting different people use different tech that are basically equivalent (like Java/C#, JSP/ASP/PHP, Perl/Python/etc.), just because different people like different stuff or want to try out new toys, can make your life much harder.
So if your company wants to make commitment to a set of tech (like Java, or.NET, or whatever) and try to use that in all the cases where it makes sense (even if there are other tools that could do the job just as well), I'd say that's a good thing.
would be to simply be a broker. I think Google is one of the few web companies that people would trust to do something like Passport -- give your bank and address details to Google, and then give your Google/GMail account credentials to other websites so they can access them.
Passport, evil though it was, really addressed a real need. Constantly entering address and credit card details is a real barrier (for me at least) to buying from new sites. From that point of view, it might tie in nicely with Froogle, since they'll already be working with those sites for data interchange.
It's about time somebody started charging bulk emailers a small fee per email received. Until we start charging all bulk emailers, we're never going to end spam.
I find the problem with scientists, mathematicians, engineers, etc. these days is that we seem to believe that everyone in this world "needs" to use the rather incomplete tools of absolute rationality and logic when facing life's deeper questions.
Sorry, but empiricism works. Even people who profess other epistemologies, are actually using empiricism 99% of the time. For example, faith-based bridges are extremely rare. The only reason for other epistemologies is to comfort people when they fear the finality of death.
I'm sorry but these tools are greatly at a loss for explaining much of what is required to explaining how people behave, how they think and how they should live. Science does not have the answers for any of these and unfortunately is not even close.
The psychologists, neurologists and other cognitive scientists know a lot about how people think and behave. Not all areas of this field are mature yet (it is a very young field), but it's certainly mature enough for marketers to use the findings to manipulate consumers.
Now I agree with you that it's elitist to label people idiots because they don't understand relativity, or evolution, or any other scientific theory that isn't relevant to their daily lives. But what gets taught in schools is another matter entirely.
To return to the topic at hand, the reason why evolution should be taught is because it is the overwhelming consensus of biologists. In our science classes, we don't teach children that the earth might be flat, or any of the other falsified, discarded scientific theories. Creationism, by any name, should be no different. People can believe whatever they want on their own time. What we teach them in school should reflect the established consensus of science.
But I've been doing what I love for years, and getting paid pretty decently to do it.
I graduated with a degree in English (go ahead and laugh, I use it every day to distinguish myself as the programmer who can write and speak articulately), and kind of floundered for a while not knowing what to do. I got a job as a glorified secretary at a small company, and wound up being the Computer Guy because I was the only one who knew anything about Linux when the previous Computer Guy (his name was actually Guy) quit. Of course this was in addition to my old job.
The job got worse and worse, more and more overtime, etc., but I stuck with it because my wife was in grad school and we needed the money. But one day I realized it was going to ruin my life and decided to make a change. I found a job at a place that shared my values (a university). It was less money, and still glorified secretarial work.
But, at least in my case, it mattered that I was articulate and had ideas to contribute about policy decisions. When there were gaps when people left, I was allowed to take on new responsibilities -- and get training and support to help me along the way. I got noticed by the head of the web development group when I volunteered to write a simple Perl CGI to replace the university's crummy static campus map website.
And it's been a pretty easy road since there. I've gotten to work on a lot of interesting projects. They let me switch to telecommuting full-time when I moved to England for a couple of years (the wife had a post-doc), and then to Florida (tenure-track!).
The lesson I've taken from all of this is: don't just slave away thinking your sacrifice will pay for your family. A crappy work situation can make your life miserable, even if you've got the house, the cars, the 2.5 kids, etc. paid for. Find a place to work that values you, and it'll all work out. Maybe not as well as it did in my case, but better than just sucking it up and staying on the treadmill.
And if you wanted to plan ahead, it could be even easier. You could figure out what the lucrative positions were ahead of time and get the education and contacts to get those jobs in the first place.
EPIC has a website about this, too. Not much can be done about it on the consumer end, except setting a password that's not your mother's maiden name or any of the other standard identifying info available to marketers.
One of the threads that comes a lot when linux usability is discussed is that it might be harder to learn, but linux makes people more productive. Another variant of this is that other systems might be best for some people (even most), but linux is adapted to certain types of users. At root is a belief by many linux users that there is no single system that works for everyone -- that some people will want different ways of doing things.
One way to look into this would be to administer a survey to the usability subjects, that went beyond the standard questions. Either one the PhD student developed, or some of the standard personality tests that psychologists use. Maybe this could provide some insight into why different people prefer different modalities, if there was any correlation between the personality tests and system usage.
True enough. But there is a small number of people with HDTV who will see a difference right now. I'm guessing that these people are also the ones who buy a disproportionally large number of movies, spend the most on their sound setups, etc. So catering to them would make good sense.
So maybe instead of offering a pan-n-scan and a widescreen version, they offer a pan-n-scan dvd and a widescreen bluray. Or maybe it comes out on bluray a few weeks before the regular DVD (and maybe those few weeks are right before xmas...).
I think there are a lot of things like this that will drive bluray (or whatever) adoption. And once a significant number of people adopt it, the player prices will come down. Ditto for HDTV. And adoption of one will drive adoption of the other. Until now, there has been very little reason to get a HDTV, since there's so little content that really benefits from it. But once there's real content, a lot of people will upgrade, pushing the prices down further. And when the prices get into the reasonable consumer electronics range, the sales will probably take off just like they did for DVD players when they got cheap.
2- The component suppliers are subsidizing the cost of the parts with profits made from developed countries. One condition of this arrangement is that the $100 laptops cannot be sold here and undercut the profits.
This is the first reasonable answer I've seen to this question.
I wonder if another part of the answer is that if they are available in developed countries, it would make it harder to detect and combat the inevitable black market for them.
That said, I wish they would sell them in the developed world for cost + $100, and donate one for each purchase.
The web should continue to stay one URL leads to one document
you hit the nail on the head here -- one URL, one document. but web applications aren't documents. you could just as easily say that POST breaks bookmarks or something similar.
in fact, most AJAX is used for stuff that shouldn't be crawled or scraped anyway. it would be much better if people published their APIs so you could just fetch the XML and process it directly, if there was a need to accommodate non-browser UAs.
Please don't listen to people like this -- they are completely wrong. Advancement, growth, respect and other quality-of-life factors have a larger bearing on employee satisfaction and retention than sheer dollar value. This is particularly true for older, more experienced staff.
Money's nice, and it does play a factor. But giving people a decent amount of vacation (and letting them take it), giving them control over their environment and work practices, giving them funding to go to conferences, take classes, etc. will generally give you better bang for your buck. Clear advancement is also good. One thing my department does is have each work group (~10 people) have one position that's roughly equal (in pay and rank) to the supervisor. It gives us a place to promote really good people who don't want to become managers/supervisors. It has the side effect of having those positions be obvious people to be mentors, lead the toughest projects, etc. -- which adds to the respect column.
Now, another poster talked about motivational trinkets. Those definitely don't equate to real respect, and everybody knows the difference.
With no Microsoft-centric frame of reference, Microsoft cannot look good.
Unless you've so thoroughly bought into the Windows environment, you cannot fail to see it for what it is: a deeply flawed, stagnant system. Network effects and Microsoft's (continuing) predatory monopolistic behavior are the only real reasons to use it.
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But it doesn't matter if everyone knows the risks of second-hand smoke. Everybody knows the risks associated with being shot with a pistol, but that doesn't exempt you from liability if you let people shoot pistols in your bar, regardless of the warnings involved.
I don't believe we should try to create a world without risk. But we should try to prevent people from being negligent and reckless, or at the very least hold them liable if they are and injure people.
-Esme
The social contract absolutely includes acceptance of responsibility for reasonable risks. I don't think a bar owner should be liable for every bump and splinter a patron receives in a bar. In fact, I don't think they should be liable even for electrocutions and broken noses, if they made a reasonable effort to make sure their wiring was safe and discouraged fights. But I don't think smoke is a reasonable risk -- a significant number of people develop cancer or respitory problems when habitually exposed to it.
I think it would be good to come to a consensus about what level of risk is reasonable. We obviously let people fly planes and drive cars even though they result in numerous deaths every year. If smoke fell within the acceptable risk levels, I'd be OK with that. But we haven't reached any kind of consensus about what levels of risk are acceptable, and the opponents of smoking bans mostly seem to say that smoke is OK because we've always lived with it. I don't think that's a valid argument -- when we learn about risks, we should evaluate those risks based on the evidence, not just accept the status quo.
To go back to the roller coaster example: I don't think the owner should be liable for a ride that's safe for ordinary people, but unsafe for people with heart conditions (they shouldn't even need signs, as long as the owner is correctly representing how fast/violent/etc. the ride is). But the owner should be liable if it's unsafe for a significant number of healthy people, even if they post signs. A good example of this is Disney's Indiana Jones ride, which caused spinal injuries for several healthy people before they altered the ride. It doesn't matter that Disney had signs saying the ride was rough, they're still liable for injuring people who had a right to expect that they wouldn't receive severe injuries from an amusement park ride.
-Esme
For the same reason they would be liable for damage resulting from not correcting faulty wiring or tolerating fighting: negligence. The medical evidence for the dangers of second-hand smoke is very clear. Just because we didn't know any better until a couple of decades ago (and consequently have a culture of tolerating smoke), doesn't mean that smoke shouldn't be treated like the carcinogen it is.
Whether or not the patrons or employees are required to be there is immaterial. Maintaining a public place is an implicit acceptance of a social contract, which includes accepting liability for negligence.
-Esme
I don't have any problem with these policies, as long as you also support the common sense measures for redistributing the externalities:
(Though I suppose the second one is moot, since most libertarians aren't fond of public health care anyway.)
Not that I'm interested in being treated like an infant, I mostly just don't want to be financially exploited by people who are negligent or reckless (respectively), and leave the state to pick up the tab.
-Esme
Inertia. I telecommute full time from Florida (and previously from England) to California. My employer kept reporting my income as CA income. I don't think there's any definite policy on it, though. I wasn't able to get a straight answer from anybody I talked to, and the wording of the tax pubs all lean towards reporting income as CA income. So it was up to me to convince them my income shouldn't be taxable by CA since I performed my work somewhere else.
I got my employer to amend my W2. So now CA seems fine with me not paying them state taxes. Though I don't know how CA and NY law differ.
-Esme
This is the letter I sent to my senators and rep today:
I joined the ACLU, and my wife joined the EFF. What did you do?
-Esme
And eventually, a new version of Windows will come out, and then just don't learn it. That really helps. The last version of Windows I used heavily was '98. I have used XP a bit, and probably enough to fix most problems users are going to run into, but they don't have to know that.
More to the point, especially when they are calling with virus/spyware/instability problems, tell them you switched to Macs because they don't have those problems. I've found friends with Macs don't need support as much.
-Esme
-Esme
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you. But not for pr0n. But I would bet that being able to get it in the privacy of your home, nearly instantly is worth a lot of money to some people. Sure there's free pr0n around, but I imagine the pay-content is going to be higher quality.
-Esme
it's blu-ray.
This just made my life much easier.
Like most big orgs (I work at a university library), we are officially a windows shop. Mac (and even Linux) desktops are allowed in special circumstances, but officially frowned upon. So every time I want a new machine, I've had to either a) find an alternate funding source like grant money or b) do a lot of justifying my desire to have a Mac and reassuring management that I can really interoperate with the windows world. Being able to say that I can just boot into XP if something doesn't work in MacOSX makes this much, much easier.
And there are a whole lot of non-technical users who would love to use Macs, but couldn't justify them or satisfy their manager that they could work with windows (without any support, of course). Now they can also use the "I'll just boot into XP if there are any problems" line, too.
So I think this is going to be a great boon for Apple. Their hardware prices are very competitive with the systems that big enterprises buy from Dell and the like. This will give a large number of enterprise users the ability to switch. This could be the wedge that Apple has been needing to break into the Enterprise market. I was at O'Reilly's Etech conference last month, and was surprised by how many people had PowerBooks (80% of the laptops, I'd guess). So I think a lot of decision makers have already switched.
-Esme
it's not that there are a lot of apps that don't use the web, it's that they should be isolated from each other. my web browser generally only needs to write files in one or two directories (cache, downloads). ditto for my email client. my browser shouldn't be able to delete my email. my email client shouldn't be able to wipe my whole home dir. etc.
people like to say that linux and macosx are inherently more secure than windows because of user separation. but all of the data i care about is owned by my user account and could be deleted by my browser or email client (given the right vulnerability), because they both have uneccessary access to the filesystem.
-esme
I once had a co-worker who said he wanted a voice-controlled home automation system, and that he'd name it "Dumbass". So he could walk in and say "Hey, Dumbass, turn on the lights!".
-Esme
But the weak form of this (everybody should be using the same set of complementary tech, except in cases where there is a clear technical justification for it) makes a lot of sense. In particular, letting different people use different tech that are basically equivalent (like Java/C#, JSP/ASP/PHP, Perl/Python/etc.), just because different people like different stuff or want to try out new toys, can make your life much harder.
So if your company wants to make commitment to a set of tech (like Java, or .NET, or whatever) and try to use that in all the cases where it makes sense (even if there are other tools that could do the job just as well), I'd say that's a good thing.
-Esme
would be to simply be a broker. I think Google is one of the few web companies that people would trust to do something like Passport -- give your bank and address details to Google, and then give your Google/GMail account credentials to other websites so they can access them.
Passport, evil though it was, really addressed a real need. Constantly entering address and credit card details is a real barrier (for me at least) to buying from new sites. From that point of view, it might tie in nicely with Froogle, since they'll already be working with those sites for data interchange.
-Esme
It's about time somebody started charging bulk emailers a small fee per email received. Until we start charging all bulk emailers, we're never going to end spam.
-Esme
Sorry, but empiricism works. Even people who profess other epistemologies, are actually using empiricism 99% of the time. For example, faith-based bridges are extremely rare. The only reason for other epistemologies is to comfort people when they fear the finality of death.
The psychologists, neurologists and other cognitive scientists know a lot about how people think and behave. Not all areas of this field are mature yet (it is a very young field), but it's certainly mature enough for marketers to use the findings to manipulate consumers.
Now I agree with you that it's elitist to label people idiots because they don't understand relativity, or evolution, or any other scientific theory that isn't relevant to their daily lives. But what gets taught in schools is another matter entirely.
To return to the topic at hand, the reason why evolution should be taught is because it is the overwhelming consensus of biologists. In our science classes, we don't teach children that the earth might be flat, or any of the other falsified, discarded scientific theories. Creationism, by any name, should be no different. People can believe whatever they want on their own time. What we teach them in school should reflect the established consensus of science.
-Esme
But I've been doing what I love for years, and getting paid pretty decently to do it.
I graduated with a degree in English (go ahead and laugh, I use it every day to distinguish myself as the programmer who can write and speak articulately), and kind of floundered for a while not knowing what to do. I got a job as a glorified secretary at a small company, and wound up being the Computer Guy because I was the only one who knew anything about Linux when the previous Computer Guy (his name was actually Guy) quit. Of course this was in addition to my old job.
The job got worse and worse, more and more overtime, etc., but I stuck with it because my wife was in grad school and we needed the money. But one day I realized it was going to ruin my life and decided to make a change. I found a job at a place that shared my values (a university). It was less money, and still glorified secretarial work.
But, at least in my case, it mattered that I was articulate and had ideas to contribute about policy decisions. When there were gaps when people left, I was allowed to take on new responsibilities -- and get training and support to help me along the way. I got noticed by the head of the web development group when I volunteered to write a simple Perl CGI to replace the university's crummy static campus map website.
And it's been a pretty easy road since there. I've gotten to work on a lot of interesting projects. They let me switch to telecommuting full-time when I moved to England for a couple of years (the wife had a post-doc), and then to Florida (tenure-track!).
The lesson I've taken from all of this is: don't just slave away thinking your sacrifice will pay for your family. A crappy work situation can make your life miserable, even if you've got the house, the cars, the 2.5 kids, etc. paid for. Find a place to work that values you, and it'll all work out. Maybe not as well as it did in my case, but better than just sucking it up and staying on the treadmill.
And if you wanted to plan ahead, it could be even easier. You could figure out what the lucrative positions were ahead of time and get the education and contacts to get those jobs in the first place.
-Esme
EPIC has a website about this, too. Not much can be done about it on the consumer end, except setting a password that's not your mother's maiden name or any of the other standard identifying info available to marketers.
-Esme
One of the threads that comes a lot when linux usability is discussed is that it might be harder to learn, but linux makes people more productive. Another variant of this is that other systems might be best for some people (even most), but linux is adapted to certain types of users. At root is a belief by many linux users that there is no single system that works for everyone -- that some people will want different ways of doing things.
One way to look into this would be to administer a survey to the usability subjects, that went beyond the standard questions. Either one the PhD student developed, or some of the standard personality tests that psychologists use. Maybe this could provide some insight into why different people prefer different modalities, if there was any correlation between the personality tests and system usage.
-Esme
True enough. But there is a small number of people with HDTV who will see a difference right now. I'm guessing that these people are also the ones who buy a disproportionally large number of movies, spend the most on their sound setups, etc. So catering to them would make good sense.
So maybe instead of offering a pan-n-scan and a widescreen version, they offer a pan-n-scan dvd and a widescreen bluray. Or maybe it comes out on bluray a few weeks before the regular DVD (and maybe those few weeks are right before xmas...).
I think there are a lot of things like this that will drive bluray (or whatever) adoption. And once a significant number of people adopt it, the player prices will come down. Ditto for HDTV. And adoption of one will drive adoption of the other. Until now, there has been very little reason to get a HDTV, since there's so little content that really benefits from it. But once there's real content, a lot of people will upgrade, pushing the prices down further. And when the prices get into the reasonable consumer electronics range, the sales will probably take off just like they did for DVD players when they got cheap.
-Esme
This is the first reasonable answer I've seen to this question.
I wonder if another part of the answer is that if they are available in developed countries, it would make it harder to detect and combat the inevitable black market for them.
That said, I wish they would sell them in the developed world for cost + $100, and donate one for each purchase.
-Esme
you hit the nail on the head here -- one URL, one document. but web applications aren't documents. you could just as easily say that POST breaks bookmarks or something similar.
in fact, most AJAX is used for stuff that shouldn't be crawled or scraped anyway. it would be much better if people published their APIs so you could just fetch the XML and process it directly, if there was a need to accommodate non-browser UAs.
-esme
Please don't listen to people like this -- they are completely wrong. Advancement, growth, respect and other quality-of-life factors have a larger bearing on employee satisfaction and retention than sheer dollar value. This is particularly true for older, more experienced staff.
Money's nice, and it does play a factor. But giving people a decent amount of vacation (and letting them take it), giving them control over their environment and work practices, giving them funding to go to conferences, take classes, etc. will generally give you better bang for your buck. Clear advancement is also good. One thing my department does is have each work group (~10 people) have one position that's roughly equal (in pay and rank) to the supervisor. It gives us a place to promote really good people who don't want to become managers/supervisors. It has the side effect of having those positions be obvious people to be mentors, lead the toughest projects, etc. -- which adds to the respect column.
Now, another poster talked about motivational trinkets. Those definitely don't equate to real respect, and everybody knows the difference.
-Esme
Unless you've so thoroughly bought into the Windows environment, you cannot fail to see it for what it is: a deeply flawed, stagnant system. Network effects and Microsoft's (continuing) predatory monopolistic behavior are the only real reasons to use it.
-esme