I can't replicate it either. The YouTube video claims I double-tap the home button but the second tap is slightly longer? By the end of the first tap it's already bringing me back to the lock screen, i.e. by the time I'm pressing down for the second tap, I'm already being taken back to the lock screen. iPhone 5, updated last night to 7.0 (11A465).
Hmm. Well, there's also 7844610 which was filed in 2004 and does seem pretty similar. In fact their abstracts are identical. That's a little deflating.
The patent whose application was filed in April 2002 is this related one, 7502770, which isn't very similar. I think that's the one you meant.
The patent cites Slashdot comment moderation as an example of how not to assign importance to user actions. Its authors were apparently unaware that the algorithm they described in November 2010 is virtually identical to the way Slashdot has actually assigned importance to user voting on Firehose stories since May 2008 (give or take). I know because I wrote it.
What this patent calls "authority," we call user "clout."
Multiple clouts, actually. Each Slashdot user has a number that describes how valuable the system believes their up/down votes in the firehose are, and it's separate from how valuable their descriptive tags applied to stories are. (Up/down votes are simply tags with special names, making vote-scoring and description-determination very similar under the hood.)
It's been a while since I looked at this code -- I work for sister company ThinkGeek now -- but scanning over our public repository here are some of the interesting parts:
plugs/Tags/tags_updateclouts.pl - the tags_peerclout table is the way that each type of clout is built. It has fixed entries at gen=0, the zeroth generation, which would typically be the Slashdot editors or other users considered reliable and definitive. To build gen=1, the code looks at how many users tagged or voted on the same objects as the gen=0 users did, and assigns the gen=1 users scores based on similarity (or difference). Then from the gen=1 users, gen=2 users are assigned scores similarly, and so on.
The gen=0 entries in that table "designate one or more contributing authorities by delegating to each a specific quantity of authority." I don't think I could describe that better myself.
plugins/Tags/Clout/Vote.pm process_nextgen() - here's where each new generation of user clout is successively determined, for firehose votes in particular. Line 194 invokes the algorithm and line 203 assigns that user their new voting clout. This iterative process is the automated method through which "each contributing authority may in turn designate and delegate authority to one or more additional contributing authorities."
plugins/Tags/Clout/Vote.pm init() - sum_weight_vectors totals the change in clout for each generation, and possible weight decreases exponentially. If you're in gen=1 the maximum weight you can have is only 60% of the maximum from gen=0, etc. The fraction is smaller than 100%, which helps ensure "that the total quantity of authority delegated does not exceed the quantity of authority the contributing authority was itself delegated." When the clouts are used to determine firehose item ratings, "the ratings are combined in a manner that affords a higher priority to the ratings provided by contributing authorities to which a greater quantity of authority was delegated."
All this may have changed since it was written. I don't actually know what's running on Slashdot at this moment. I'm just going by the public repository that I knew was on sf.net, and I don't even know if there's a later version of the code available anywhere.
But I suspect that this system would constitute prior art.
Also, looking over my code from 2008, boy, I really wish I'd put in more comments.
You're just incorrect. You may have been misled by a modern American right-wing propaganda campaign. You should read what actual historians have to say about the idea that the Nazis were leftists.
If you're too busy to read the whole debate, allow me to excerpt:
Having set up distorted stereotypes of “liberalism” and “fascism” Goldberg finds them united by a host of similar projects such as campaigns against smoking (it was Nazi doctors who first established the link between smoking and cancer, and Hitler was a fanatical anti-smoker). These similarities concern peripheral matters. The foundational qualities that separate liberalism from fascism simply vanish from the analysis: political pluralism vs. single party; universal values vs. the supremacy of a master race; elections vs. charismatic leadership; fascism’s exaltation of feelings over reason.
Heh. I quoted statements of fact which were unsubstantiated. That's a problem. You quoted me giving an editorial opinion. That's not.
You edited out the link I provided (which, unlike Herring's, gave more information about what I was saying). And you omitted the sentence where I quoted someone to back up what I wrote.
If I'm being asked to trust what Joe Herring says because of who he is, then of course I need to know who he is. He doesn't present evidence to back up many of his assertions, he just writes stuff and hopes I'll believe it:
The Missouri River Recovery and Implementation Committee has seventy members. Only four represent interests other than environmentalism. The recommendations of the committee, as one might expect, have been somewhat less than evenhanded.
Says who?
This year, despite more than double the usual amount of mountain and high plains snowpack (and the ever-present risk of strong spring storms), the true believers in the Corps have persisted in following the revised MWCM, recklessly endangering millions of residents downstream.
Says who?
Whether warned or not, the fact remains that had the Corps been true to its original mission of flood control, the dams would not have been full in preparation for a "spring pulse." The dams could further have easily handled the additional runoff without the need to inundate a sizeable chunk of nine states.
Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?
No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.
We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.
Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.
He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."
He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."
He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."
He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."
And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.
This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.
You wrote something similar to this in another comment too:
Those climate 'scientists', to be responsible, should be telling us not to take a single step until they can generate the scientific models to assure us that if, for example, we invested $100T over 50 years we would lower the temperature even a tenth of a degree.
You're just wrong here, Steve, on two levels.
One is that you're forgetting that "not to decide is to decide." Everyone knows the predictive models are inexact. Even over the past ten years or so, we've seen the best scientific predictions proved wrong -- global warming is getting much worse, much faster, than the consensus belief in 1999.
Waiting for an arbitrary standard of scientific certainty before changing any behavior is an option the world has, one option among many: the "continue as before" option. What we do know is that that leads to disaster. We may not be able to say exactly when which exact magnitude of disaster will arrive, but it is known to be a catastrophe of global proportions.
And we may not be able to know the ideal time to begin acting for optimum return on our economic sacrifice, but it's pretty clearly in the past: beginning global greenhouse-gas reduction efforts ten years ago would have been better than, say, now.
The other level you're wrong at is that it's scientists' job to give us information about our options. Refusing to tell us that the status quo leads to catastrophe until predictive abilities reach an arbitrary threshold of certainty would be a breach of scientific responsibility. And pretty amoral too, it'd take a Guild of Evil Scientist level of inhumanity to know about impending world destruction and swear a pact not to say anything.
Suppose the approaching danger were instead an archipelago of asteroids whose orbit will approximately intersect the earth in a hundred years. The scientists don't know whether the really big rocks will hit the earth but some of the medium-size ones probably will. They don't have any plans for deflecting them or taking earthbound steps to handle the catastrophe. But shouldn't they tell us what they know? And, as fellow human beings, wouldn't they recommend that the world take the best known course of action at the best possible time?
Getting your commercial license does not take "decades of training"
If only you'd kept reading for just two more words!:)
The most-senior pilots who fly the big jets for the biggest commercial airlines make $200K. They got there by climbing the seniority ladder for 30+ years.
See the links in my original post for more details.
HAH! "for a job that technology has made almost fully automated... the larger the plane, the more they earn - even though it takes little more skill to pilot a jumbo jet."
$200K for the decades of training and experience to know what to do when one of the world's more complicated machines breaks, a mile in the air, with 200 souls on board. "Overpaid"? What a jackass.
His latest movie isn't compelling, and his fact-checkers fell down on the job this time around. It's barely even entertaining. I don't recommend it. That doesn't mean what he reports is untrue -- he talked to these guys, he saw a pay stub.
(Previous efforts have been much more enlightening and educational. I do recommend Columbine, Fahrenheit, and especially Sicko.)
So you accept numbers on a webpage without questioning the methodology? And without questioning the numbers themselves? The line you quote shows a narrow range from $67,613 to $87,893 -- starting salaries are $67,613? Really? That didn't make you blink?
How about the fact that the "AVERAGE" shown is exactly halfway between the lowest and highest salary shown?
Who reported these numbers? Was there self-selection bias? Did someone just make the numbers up? Are there even more than two figures forming this "AVERAGE"? Any idea?
C'mon, critical thinking skills please.
I don't know anything about this site you found, but it backs up what I wrote, saying:
...the top salary level is reached only after many years of service and only at a few of the major airlines. Most airline pilots start out as first officer (co-pilot) with a regional carrier; initially they earn about $15,000 to $20,000 a year. And when they join a major airline, their first position may not be as a pilot, but as a flight engineer. Considerable training is necessary for any type of pilot job, and most airline pilots have to 'pay their dues' by first gaining a good deal of experience either in the military or in other types of civilian piloting.
Obviously the pilots should have paid more attention, but I suspect the reason they were trying to squeeze in a little extra work is that they weren't going to get paid to learn the scheduling system on their own time.
Pilots go through years of expensive schooling and have to repay their student loans like everyone else. Their salaries start around $20,000 if they can get hired in a very competitive market.
Remember the hero pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson, saving Flight 1549 and 155 people's lives?
the last talk [Capt. Sullenberger] had with his wife, Lorrie, before the crash... was about money.
Like thousands of airline workers, his salary had been cut in half and he lost most of his pension. At 58, the 29-year veteran faced having to find work outside the industry and possibly having to sell his house.
Many pilots take second jobs. Some are on food stamps:
He took home $405 this week. My life was completely and totally in his hands for the past hour and he's paid less than the kid who delivers my pizza.
I told the guys that I have a whole section in my new movie about how pilots are treated (using pilots as only one example of how people's wages have been slashed and the middle class decimated). In the movie I interview a pilot for a major airline who made $17,000 last year. For four months he was eligible -- and received -- food stamps. Another pilot in the film has a second job as a dog walker.
"I have a second job!," the two pilots said in unison. One is a substitute teacher. The other works in a coffee shop.
Well, this is reported by the Washington Times, so you know it's not biased in the least. OK, let's take a look.
The only substantive abuse claim here is a quote from the NSF's inspector general making a budget request to Congress. The Times article implies that "this dramatic increase," forcing fraud detection efforts to be reduced, refers to employees browsing porn.
But that's not the case, is it. If we read the Times article very carefully, we see that the very first graf references:
Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography
Subsequent references to "the problems," "this dramatic increase," and "the misconduct cases" are all really talking about employee misconduct as a whole, not porn surfing specifically.
Maybe that's why this article is big on rhetoric and small on actual cases. One lengthy case is detailed on the article's first page. How much did that case cost taxpayers? "Between $13,800 and $58,000." Out of the NSF's $6.49 billion budget. That's 0.0006%.
How often is "often"? Six times as often as before. Misconduct cases -- not porn specifically -- went from 3 in 2006, to 7 in 2007, to 10 in 2008. The Times hints repeatedly that this is a huge problem, but despite its lavish use of adjectives -- "pervasive," "swamped," "well-publicized" -- it has to report that the actual number of porn-related misconduct cases in 2008 was seven.
Slashdot's headline "Porn Surfing Rampant" is exactly the kind of exaggeration that the Washington Times was hoping secondary media would slap on this story. "Rampant" is just not true, there's no possible way seven cases in a year can be described that way.
If each case was as bad as the one "between $13,800 and $58,000" case that was identified, those seven cases probably cost 0.004% of the NSF's budget.
But the Times article gets worse, moving from exaggeration to outright lies. Later, its author Jim McElhatton writes:
The foundation's inspector general... told Congress it was diverted from that mission by the porn cases.
That's a flat-out lie. The OIG told Congress it was diverted by "employee misconduct," not porn. Here, read the actual budget request. (Full quote below.)
There is one paragraph in a 7-page report that references employee misconduct, and nowhere are "porn cases" referenced. Surely some of the cost to the agency was specifically from porn-surfing misconduct. And some was not. How much? We still don't know.
Look, any major institution, private or public, that employs a large number of people and gives them access to the internet, is going to have a few employees who abuse that access. It's ridiculous to think otherwise. Employees are capable of wasting time in a wide variety of creative ways. I daresay some employees in the private sector are wasting time reading Slashdot right at this very moment when they are nominally getting paid to do other things.
Republicans aren't fans of science; we know that. Smearing the NSF in the media by associating their name with porn for a news cycle is a fun yuk I suppose, but for conservatives it's another shot fired in the culture war. I find it depressing. There's actual news out there; this is at best People magazine type crap.
And it's ironic that this gets spread over the internet that the NSF helped create, and the story is brought to you thanks to the Freedom of Information Act that was passed by Democrats over the objections of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Scalia.
Finally, as someone who 10 years ago was writing stories for Slashdot
Trees have a finite lifespan, and, as noted, when they die they (barring very rare circumstances) release the carbon back into the atmosphere.
If the median tree carbon content is 5 tons and life is 50 years, each tree sequesters 250 ton-years of carbon.
Now we can start comparing opportunity costs. What do we lose by planting the tree, as compared to other actions or inaction? Potential land-use costs? Labor costs? Could the carbon sequestration and other benefits of the tree be achieved more cheaply in other ways?
...including conservation? Multiply the kilowatt savings of a more-efficient refrigerator by its expected lifespan and carbon-per-kilowatt-hour and it may turn out to be a better use of resources to build refrigerators than plant trees. What resources are required to build a wind farm that produces carbon-free energy for 50 years?
I'm not an expert but the numbers are so large that I doubt tree-planting will accomplish much. Humans add about 5 gigatons of carbon a year to the atmosphere. Let's say an average tree masses 10 tons, half of which is carbon, in 1000 square feet, for 50 years. Sequestering 5% of our carbon emissions would mean planting 100,000 square kilometers of forest every year -- the entire state of Virginia. For years 1-50. In year 51, now that you've covered an area half the size of the U.S. in trees, you need to redouble your efforts because the first year's are dead and decaying.
That's a lot of work to cut net emissions by five percent. I'll bet there are much more effective ways.
From what we know so far, apparently the botnet was created by a trojan and does not spread.
I'm a Mac user who doesn't run applications downloaded from completely untrustworthy sources like pirate p2p networks and you're correct -- I don't need a virus or malware checker.
Slashdot Mirror
As the linked article points out, that $15 billion is a simple correlation based on diabetes alone.
When cost savings are almost erased by one disease, maybe someone hasn't thought through the unintended consequences.
I can't replicate it either. The YouTube video claims I double-tap the home button but the second tap is slightly longer? By the end of the first tap it's already bringing me back to the lock screen, i.e. by the time I'm pressing down for the second tap, I'm already being taken back to the lock screen. iPhone 5, updated last night to 7.0 (11A465).
Hmm. Well, there's also 7844610 which was filed in 2004 and does seem pretty similar. In fact their abstracts are identical. That's a little deflating.
The patent whose application was filed in April 2002 is this related one, 7502770, which isn't very similar. I think that's the one you meant.
I think I may want to contest this patent.
The patent cites Slashdot comment moderation as an example of how not to assign importance to user actions. Its authors were apparently unaware that the algorithm they described in November 2010 is virtually identical to the way Slashdot has actually assigned importance to user voting on Firehose stories since May 2008 (give or take). I know because I wrote it.
What this patent calls "authority," we call user "clout."
Multiple clouts, actually. Each Slashdot user has a number that describes how valuable the system believes their up/down votes in the firehose are, and it's separate from how valuable their descriptive tags applied to stories are. (Up/down votes are simply tags with special names, making vote-scoring and description-determination very similar under the hood.)
It's been a while since I looked at this code -- I work for sister company ThinkGeek now -- but scanning over our public repository here are some of the interesting parts:
plugs/Tags/tags_updateclouts.pl - the tags_peerclout table is the way that each type of clout is built. It has fixed entries at gen=0, the zeroth generation, which would typically be the Slashdot editors or other users considered reliable and definitive. To build gen=1, the code looks at how many users tagged or voted on the same objects as the gen=0 users did, and assigns the gen=1 users scores based on similarity (or difference). Then from the gen=1 users, gen=2 users are assigned scores similarly, and so on.
The gen=0 entries in that table "designate one or more contributing authorities by delegating to each a specific quantity of authority." I don't think I could describe that better myself.
plugins/Tags/Clout/Vote.pm process_nextgen() - here's where each new generation of user clout is successively determined, for firehose votes in particular. Line 194 invokes the algorithm and line 203 assigns that user their new voting clout. This iterative process is the automated method through which "each contributing authority may in turn designate and delegate authority to one or more additional contributing authorities."
plugins/Tags/Clout/Vote.pm init() - sum_weight_vectors totals the change in clout for each generation, and possible weight decreases exponentially. If you're in gen=1 the maximum weight you can have is only 60% of the maximum from gen=0, etc. The fraction is smaller than 100%, which helps ensure "that the total quantity of authority delegated does not exceed the quantity of authority the contributing authority was itself delegated." When the clouts are used to determine firehose item ratings, "the ratings are combined in a manner that affords a higher priority to the ratings provided by contributing authorities to which a greater quantity of authority was delegated."
All this may have changed since it was written. I don't actually know what's running on Slashdot at this moment. I'm just going by the public repository that I knew was on sf.net, and I don't even know if there's a later version of the code available anywhere.
But I suspect that this system would constitute prior art.
Also, looking over my code from 2008, boy, I really wish I'd put in more comments.
You're just incorrect. You may have been misled by a modern American right-wing propaganda campaign. You should read what actual historians have to say about the idea that the Nazis were leftists.
If you're too busy to read the whole debate, allow me to excerpt:
He says the Nazis were left-wingers [americanthinker.com]
Actually it is rather common opinion among historians, that the far-left and far-right meet at the far end
Wrong.
By calling him a right-wing nut, which implies there's no basis for strict constructionism
Wrong. (I stopped reading there.)
Heh. I quoted statements of fact which were unsubstantiated. That's a problem. You quoted me giving an editorial opinion. That's not.
You edited out the link I provided (which, unlike Herring's, gave more information about what I was saying). And you omitted the sentence where I quoted someone to back up what I wrote.
Ooooookay.
If I'm being asked to trust what Joe Herring says because of who he is, then of course I need to know who he is. He doesn't present evidence to back up many of his assertions, he just writes stuff and hopes I'll believe it:
Says who?
Says who?
Says who?
Who the hell is Joe Herring and why should I trust anything he writes? Did Slashdot review his scholarship here and give it a stamp of approval, or was it just put up on the website, leaving it to the readers to decide whether it's B.S. or not?
No qualifications or expertise are claimed for Joe Herring on the website. In fact no information on his background is given except that he is "from Omaha, NE." This is highly unusual for a publication that hopes to be taken seriously. We don't even know if that is his real name.
We are left to judge the value of this Joe Herring essay by his previous contributions and by the reliability and reputation of the website that publishes his work.
Joe Herring is, in short, a right-wing nut.
He claims all leftists -- all! -- want to overthrow the Constitution: "The continuum on the left that ranges from the 'wouldn't it be nice if we all just smiled' types to the hardcore authoritarian communists may disagree about methods, but sadly, all agree on one thing: if their utopia is to come about, the Constitution -- and the form of government derived from it -- must be replaced with...something."
He says the Nazis were left-wingers: "The Left will not willingly lay claim to the true legacy of socialism, so we will have to hang it around their necks."
He believes that the true goal of health care reform, renewable-energy subsidies, and regulations on Wall Street is for "the left" to seize power and exterminate half of the human race. Really: "As the federal government asserts control over health care, energy production, and the financial markets, the trinity of power is within the left's grasp. Unless driven back from their goals -- and quickly -- the likelihood grows daily that more than four billion of our 'species' will be joining the table scraps and yard clippings on the compost pile."
He thinks the problem with Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year, "death panels," is that the right wasn't lying hard enough: "To describe this board as a 'death panel,' as Rush Limbaugh has, is to underestimate its power and misconstrue its purpose."
And five minutes with Google reveals that American Thinker is a source that, shall we say, lends no additional credibility to Joe Herring's contributions. Take global warming as a typical example. They printed essays claiming to have found a "smoking gun" that disproves global warming (wrong). Then they found another single argument that by itself disproves global warming (still wrong). They argue that global warming is a Nazi lie.
This "intentional flooding" piece looks like yet another right-wing hit job on leftism. I would be happy to entertain the idea that misguided environmentalism is partially to blame for one disaster or another, but I would like to hear a reasoned argument from someone who's not a nut.
It wasn't your submission that was used. I shared it with the Slashdot author folks a few hours before you submitted. They penned their own writeup. :)
reminds me of the onion
Those climate 'scientists', to be responsible, should be telling us not to take a single step until they can generate the scientific models to assure us that if, for example, we invested $100T over 50 years we would lower the temperature even a tenth of a degree.
You're just wrong here, Steve, on two levels.
One is that you're forgetting that "not to decide is to decide." Everyone knows the predictive models are inexact. Even over the past ten years or so, we've seen the best scientific predictions proved wrong -- global warming is getting much worse, much faster, than the consensus belief in 1999.
Waiting for an arbitrary standard of scientific certainty before changing any behavior is an option the world has, one option among many: the "continue as before" option. What we do know is that that leads to disaster. We may not be able to say exactly when which exact magnitude of disaster will arrive, but it is known to be a catastrophe of global proportions.
And we may not be able to know the ideal time to begin acting for optimum return on our economic sacrifice, but it's pretty clearly in the past: beginning global greenhouse-gas reduction efforts ten years ago would have been better than, say, now.
The other level you're wrong at is that it's scientists' job to give us information about our options. Refusing to tell us that the status quo leads to catastrophe until predictive abilities reach an arbitrary threshold of certainty would be a breach of scientific responsibility. And pretty amoral too, it'd take a Guild of Evil Scientist level of inhumanity to know about impending world destruction and swear a pact not to say anything.
Suppose the approaching danger were instead an archipelago of asteroids whose orbit will approximately intersect the earth in a hundred years. The scientists don't know whether the really big rocks will hit the earth but some of the medium-size ones probably will. They don't have any plans for deflecting them or taking earthbound steps to handle the catastrophe. But shouldn't they tell us what they know? And, as fellow human beings, wouldn't they recommend that the world take the best known course of action at the best possible time?
$200K for the decades of training and experience
Getting your commercial license does not take "decades of training"
If only you'd kept reading for just two more words! :)
The most-senior pilots who fly the big jets for the biggest commercial airlines make $200K. They got there by climbing the seniority ladder for 30+ years.
See the links in my original post for more details.
HAH! "for a job that technology has made almost fully automated... the larger the plane, the more they earn - even though it takes little more skill to pilot a jumbo jet."
$200K for the decades of training and experience to know what to do when one of the world's more complicated machines breaks, a mile in the air, with 200 souls on board. "Overpaid"? What a jackass.
His latest movie isn't compelling, and his fact-checkers fell down on the job this time around. It's barely even entertaining. I don't recommend it. That doesn't mean what he reports is untrue -- he talked to these guys, he saw a pay stub.
(Previous efforts have been much more enlightening and educational. I do recommend Columbine, Fahrenheit, and especially Sicko.)
on *AVERAGE* the pay is around $70k
So you accept numbers on a webpage without questioning the methodology? And without questioning the numbers themselves? The line you quote shows a narrow range from $67,613 to $87,893 -- starting salaries are $67,613? Really? That didn't make you blink?
How about the fact that the "AVERAGE" shown is exactly halfway between the lowest and highest salary shown?
Who reported these numbers? Was there self-selection bias? Did someone just make the numbers up? Are there even more than two figures forming this "AVERAGE"? Any idea?
C'mon, critical thinking skills please.
I don't know anything about this site you found, but it backs up what I wrote, saying:
...the top salary level is reached only after many years of service and only at a few of the major airlines. Most airline pilots start out as first officer (co-pilot) with a regional carrier; initially they earn about $15,000 to $20,000 a year. And when they join a major airline, their first position may not be as a pilot, but as a flight engineer. Considerable training is necessary for any type of pilot job, and most airline pilots have to 'pay their dues' by first gaining a good deal of experience either in the military or in other types of civilian piloting.
Obviously the pilots should have paid more attention, but I suspect the reason they were trying to squeeze in a little extra work is that they weren't going to get paid to learn the scheduling system on their own time.
Pilots go through years of expensive schooling and have to repay their student loans like everyone else. Their salaries start around $20,000 if they can get hired in a very competitive market.
Remember the hero pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson, saving Flight 1549 and 155 people's lives?
the last talk [Capt. Sullenberger] had with his wife, Lorrie, before the crash... was about money.
Like thousands of airline workers, his salary had been cut in half and he lost most of his pension. At 58, the 29-year veteran faced having to find work outside the industry and possibly having to sell his house.
Many pilots take second jobs. Some are on food stamps:
He took home $405 this week. My life was completely and totally in his hands for the past hour and he's paid less than the kid who delivers my pizza.
I told the guys that I have a whole section in my new movie about how pilots are treated (using pilots as only one example of how people's wages have been slashed and the middle class decimated). In the movie I interview a pilot for a major airline who made $17,000 last year. For four months he was eligible -- and received -- food stamps. Another pilot in the film has a second job as a dog walker.
"I have a second job!," the two pilots said in unison. One is a substitute teacher. The other works in a coffee shop.
Well, this is reported by the Washington Times, so you know it's not biased in the least. OK, let's take a look.
The only substantive abuse claim here is a quote from the NSF's inspector general making a budget request to Congress. The Times article implies that "this dramatic increase," forcing fraud detection efforts to be reduced, refers to employees browsing porn.
But that's not the case, is it. If we read the Times article very carefully, we see that the very first graf references:
Subsequent references to "the problems," "this dramatic increase," and "the misconduct cases" are all really talking about employee misconduct as a whole, not porn surfing specifically.
Maybe that's why this article is big on rhetoric and small on actual cases. One lengthy case is detailed on the article's first page. How much did that case cost taxpayers? "Between $13,800 and $58,000." Out of the NSF's $6.49 billion budget. That's 0.0006%.
How often is "often"? Six times as often as before. Misconduct cases -- not porn specifically -- went from 3 in 2006, to 7 in 2007, to 10 in 2008. The Times hints repeatedly that this is a huge problem, but despite its lavish use of adjectives -- "pervasive," "swamped," "well-publicized" -- it has to report that the actual number of porn-related misconduct cases in 2008 was seven.
Slashdot's headline "Porn Surfing Rampant" is exactly the kind of exaggeration that the Washington Times was hoping secondary media would slap on this story. "Rampant" is just not true, there's no possible way seven cases in a year can be described that way.
If each case was as bad as the one "between $13,800 and $58,000" case that was identified, those seven cases probably cost 0.004% of the NSF's budget.
But the Times article gets worse, moving from exaggeration to outright lies. Later, its author Jim McElhatton writes:
That's a flat-out lie. The OIG told Congress it was diverted by "employee misconduct," not porn. Here, read the actual budget request. (Full quote below.)
There is one paragraph in a 7-page report that references employee misconduct, and nowhere are "porn cases" referenced. Surely some of the cost to the agency was specifically from porn-surfing misconduct. And some was not. How much? We still don't know.
Look, any major institution, private or public, that employs a large number of people and gives them access to the internet, is going to have a few employees who abuse that access. It's ridiculous to think otherwise. Employees are capable of wasting time in a wide variety of creative ways. I daresay some employees in the private sector are wasting time reading Slashdot right at this very moment when they are nominally getting paid to do other things.
Republicans aren't fans of science; we know that. Smearing the NSF in the media by associating their name with porn for a news cycle is a fun yuk I suppose, but for conservatives it's another shot fired in the culture war. I find it depressing. There's actual news out there; this is at best People magazine type crap.
And it's ironic that this gets spread over the internet that the NSF helped create, and the story is brought to you thanks to the Freedom of Information Act that was passed by Democrats over the objections of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Scalia.
Finally, as someone who 10 years ago was writing stories for Slashdot
Trees have a finite lifespan, and, as noted, when they die they (barring very rare circumstances) release the carbon back into the atmosphere.
If the median tree carbon content is 5 tons and life is 50 years, each tree sequesters 250 ton-years of carbon.
Now we can start comparing opportunity costs. What do we lose by planting the tree, as compared to other actions or inaction? Potential land-use costs? Labor costs? Could the carbon sequestration and other benefits of the tree be achieved more cheaply in other ways?
...including conservation? Multiply the kilowatt savings of a more-efficient refrigerator by its expected lifespan and carbon-per-kilowatt-hour and it may turn out to be a better use of resources to build refrigerators than plant trees. What resources are required to build a wind farm that produces carbon-free energy for 50 years?
I'm not an expert but the numbers are so large that I doubt tree-planting will accomplish much. Humans add about 5 gigatons of carbon a year to the atmosphere. Let's say an average tree masses 10 tons, half of which is carbon, in 1000 square feet, for 50 years. Sequestering 5% of our carbon emissions would mean planting 100,000 square kilometers of forest every year -- the entire state of Virginia. For years 1-50. In year 51, now that you've covered an area half the size of the U.S. in trees, you need to redouble your efforts because the first year's are dead and decaying.
That's a lot of work to cut net emissions by five percent. I'll bet there are much more effective ways.
We have a hardware load-balancer and a software reverse proxy (varnish) in front of our apache.
I kinda doubt this would work on us.
Note, I am not inviting anyone to try. It might work great for all I know :(
Slashdot has always had an agenda of open source.
(...we're for it.)
From what we know so far, apparently the botnet was created by a trojan and does not spread.
I'm a Mac user who doesn't run applications downloaded from completely untrustworthy sources like pirate p2p networks and you're correct -- I don't need a virus or malware checker.
We love you man.
No.