To give the benefit of the doubt, the numbers on a spreadsheet at a payroll office would probably include stuff that doesn't show up in starting salary... social security taxes, UI taxes, health insurance, and all sorts of other benefits. I've often heard that an employee's actual salary is only half the businesses' cost of hiring them.

The USAF is reducing their forces and kicking out thousands of communications maintenance troops with more than a decade of experience. They're so aggressive about drawing down that they are going after people with very minor 'quality of force indicators', including difficulty with PT tests. Some of these people had already completed the cyber curriculum or were looking to cross train into the new "cyber operations" career field.

The military will hire people with network exploitation skills as contractors or full time civilians, or they will recruit from their communications troops and through a bunch of money at them for additional training. Right now the individual services have some interesting doctrine being written, but there are very few discussions about their actual strategy for constructing military units in anything but the traditional way of military members sent to schoolhouses supplemented with commercial training.

The 'good idea faeries' at the DoD talk about recruiting experts who already do this stuff every day to keep US cyberwarfighting ahead of our enemies yet there hasn't been a single actionable plan to actually recruit these people as military members.

I think the biggest problem with the minimum wage employment scene is that it incentives McDonalds to hire two part time workers instead of one full time... and then commit wage theft.

You don't need to go to a drug dealer for that, you can do it right from the comfort of your home!
"A novel and straightforward synthesis of pseudoephedrine from readily available N-methylamphetamine is presented. This practical synthesis is expected to be a disruptive technology replacing the need to find an open pharmacy. "

"You hold a [search warrant] on everyone on Earth and call it protection," he says. "This isn't freedom, this is fear."

Delicious.com, formerly del.icio.us, is quite close to this. Interestingly enough it was bought by Yahoo...

At least it's not Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu!

FNORD!

I find that the best place to contribute is on simple.wikipedia.org. The community of editors is much more welcoming and there's a lot of work to be done there that really only requires a basic understanding of the subject and written communication skills. I've yet to see an edit war on Simple, but then again I haven't gone looking for one either...

If protecting victims of childhood sexual abuse is a priority for you, you might want to give this petition a look...