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+ - Copper thefts measured in miles around Seattle->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "A couple of interesting developments in the Seattle are this week must have been keeping law enforcement busy. First, a number of outlets are reporting that prosecutors have charged two men with what is being called the largest metal theft in state history — 4.3 miles of copper wire from the underside of an elevated train line over an eight month period spanning 1010-2011."
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The Almighty Buck

The $200,000 Software Developer 463

Posted by timothy
from the of-course-those-are-the-blackmail-rates dept.
itwbennett writes "You can make a decent living as a software developer, and if you were lucky enough to get hired at a pre-IPO tech phenom, you can even get rich at it. But set your sights above the average and below Scrooge McDuck and you won't find many developers in that salary range. In fact, the number of developers earning $200,000 and above is under 10%, writes blogger Phil Johnson who looked at salary data from Glassdoor, Salary.com and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. How does your salary rate? What's your advice for earning the big bucks?"

+ - Poll: How much Astronomy were you taught in school?->

Submitted by Balrogg
Balrogg writes "I've been a lifelong amateur astronomer, and space enthusiast; in recent years, I've been doing increasing amounts of astronomy outreach. Wherever I setup my telescopes, I find that a majority of the people had NEVER looked through a telescope.

There's no reason in the world, you should go through school, never having looked through a telescope.

Every time I ask people about how much astronomy they covered during their schooling, they tell it was either: not covered at all, covered for a few days, or maybe for a single quarter. This includes people of ALL ages, but most disturbingly, people in their teens and twenties.

If students are fortunate enough to have a teacher like my wife, who actually knows (and likes) astronomy, they'll get a LOT of good information crammed into whatever brief time she's allotted to cover astronomy. But even as amazing a teacher as my wife is, that time is simply not sufficient anymore Within the subject of astronomy, there's too much that should be taught.

It has been my experience that ignorance of astronomy is at near epidemic proportions. It is my very firm conviction that EVERY student in this country (and planet, really) should be taught and experience astronomy during their school years. It needs to start earlier, around the 3rd or 4th grade, and be taught not just for one single quarter — but over the course of several years, integrated with Physics, Chemistry, Math, and History.

Carl Sagan once said that learning about astronomy is a humbling and character building experience; I can attest to that fact. Astronomy is a subject that inspires you to branch out to other scientific disciplines: geology, chemistry, biology, physics, engineering, math, etc. Neil deGrasse Tyson frequently talks about how NASAs Moon missions inspired a generation to dream about tomorrow — it certainly did for me. We need a return to this type of thinking, to inspire students and young adults to become engineers and scientists."
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+ - Help the OED Find a Lost Book

Submitted by imlepid
imlepid writes "The Oxford English Dictionary is currently undergoing a complete overhaul which includes a reexamination of the 300,000+ entries and citations for those entries. Understandably for a work witch is over 150 years old, some of the sources have become hard to find. One such example is a book titled "Meanderings of Memory" by Nightlark, which is cited 49 times in the OED, including for some rare words. The OED's editorial team has appealed to the public, 'Have you seen a copy of this book?'"

The clothes have no emperor. -- C.A.R. Hoare, commenting on ADA.

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