What a wonderful policy! At many workplaces in the US, it's the younger employees who haven't earned a lot of vacation time yet who have kids under 12. That's another reason they go to work sick: they want to save their sick days in case they need to stay home with a sick child.

They switched to this combined PTO system at my husband's workplace shortly before he was hired. They used to just let people take as many sick days as they needed, but people started abusing the system. Since so many of the employees there have been working there for 10+ years and have tons of vacation time and their kids are all grown, they didn't mind. Most of them had more PTO banked than they could use.

But new hires, like my husband and most of the people in his group, get screwed. They get 10 days PTO for the first 4 years & that has to account for vacation & sick days. What ends up happening is that the younger folks go to work sick, especially in the beginning of the year, because they have to save up the sick & vacation days for if they really, really need them.

For example, my husband went into work sick today because the entire workplace has to take a mandatory holiday from Dec. 24 through Jan. 2. If you have PTO to use on those days, great. If not, too bad! And if you have customers who need work done during that time? Too bad! We are a large, inflexible company! We do not accommodate the petty requests of individual departments, no matter how profitable they are!

I don't know about a "Slashdot omelet," but I've been enjoying this recipe for Slashdot chai for years now. I haven't been able to find the original comment I copied it from, but to that long-lost Slashdotter who posted the recipe in the first place, thanks for the many cups of spicy chai I've enjoyed.

This gives me a great idea. You know the little symbol that marks tuna as "dolphin safe"?
They should have one for tilapia that says "No shit!"

This. I'm on the board of a local recreation association, and we researched monitoring options for months for our recreation area, and in the end, we settled on the deer camera. Inexpensive, weather-resistant, long-lasting.

All they need is a good supply of molded protein. With a little ingenuity, you can even make a birthday cake out of it!

So is there anything you need to do just in case your device is on the list? Upgrade to iOS6 if you can, I'd assume.
For older devices that can't upgrade (thinking of my original AppleTV here), is there any risk? Is it likely someone would use your UDID to simulate being you so they can jailbreak their devices?

Someone pointed me toward this article on another /. thread about the incident. Apparently, their testing program got packaged in with the code when it was deployed, and it's that test program that wreaked havoc.

The Knightmare Explained from Nanex Research: http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3525.html

Thanks for the link. That does explain why it took so long to shut it down.
This is exactly why I freak out a little every time I package a new set of upgrades for a client - even if it's been QA'd, double and triple-checked, I still worry that some file is going to be out of place and blow everything up.

The articles I read about this incident made it sound more like human error. Knight was informed about the malfunction within minutes of it happening. Normally in a case like that there would be some failsafe switch built in to the software so they could halt trading. But absent that switch, they still could have intervened and shut it down in a non-nice way. The fact that it took them 15 minutes - an eternity in the realm of high-frequency trading - means that either nobody at Knight knew what to do when something went wrong, or else someone was in denial about the problem. Either way, that's a people problem.

I read The Fourth Turning back in the '90s. This book by two historians also espouses a cyclical view of history. Their hypothesis is that these cycles are driven by the given generational makeup of a country at any given time.

What I find interesting about this mathematician's predictions is that they pretty closely match Strauss and Howe's.

=^..^= Iz not evil, i swears! Iz just want u 2 lub meh!

It's not just a bunch of text, it's a square with some words in it!

If this subject interests you, here's a post that got a lot of attention earlier this year: Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus shun HTML, causing the infographic plague.