My job did that too. If you're here 1-5 years you get 120 hours of PTO, usable in four hour blocks. This year they changed it to be where you can use a max of five days with less than two weeks notice ("unscheduled"). I was sick two days, came in late due to migraine causing blurred and double vision (gotta see to drive.), had a doctor appointment with entered in with 13 days notice that i needed off early for, and had to take my wife to ER twice (embolism complications, and the second time i came in and still put in six hours before my shift ended). I was written up for that, even though the rules state that the limit is for max of five days (defined as 8 consecutive hours), three instances were not entire days and two instances weren't even the 4 hour minimum for PTO (didn't stop HR from subtracting from my PTO pool though). Oh the 13 day notice on the doctor visit, they counted from when my supervisor entered it in the system, not when i told him. Most recently found out HR applied my last amount of PTO in a way i couldn't see (system cannot show it to me, only my supervisor could see) for a day when i had to leave 1 hour and 45 minutes early. I had worked more than my alotted time earlier in the week, plus we were in an OT freeze. Since PTO is used only in four hour blocks, four hours were subtracted, but the pay system didn't apply it because i had worked the number of hours i was scheduled for. PTO can be abused by HR in fun and creative ways.

My brother is a nurse and lost a job due to illness. His job had a rule that after 3 day out for illness you have to furnish a doctor's note. He had a staph infection eating his spine, and on the forth day was still in the hospital on pain killers and out of it. He wasn't able to be coherent, and didn't have feeling in his legs back yet. No way to get a note to his workplace. He was released from the hospital on the sixth day, with a note but came home to a letter that he was fired.

My set has screw drivers, small pliers, a pair of dikes, crimper for putting on connectors, xacto knife, small hammer and mallet, chip lifter, soldering iron, RS232 to USB adapter (beware. Not all are equal, many don't allow you to issue a termination signal, vital for doing some stuff on Cisco units), PoE tester and a Ethernet port tester. My systems at work will have ports die every now and again, so that's where the testers come in. The hammer and mallet are for dent removal or straighten tabs (equipment sometimes comes in a bit tweaked in shipping or mishandled by warehouse folk). Chip lifter is an awesome little mini prybar for getting things open. I have only popped open a handful of ICs with mine, but cracked open countless other things. Using this stuff, i have cobbled many working systems out of total trash.

So, the person to create is only the latest to claim it as their own? If so, then I now can patent a website that allows you to enter text into a box, and then see a list of web pages that are someway related to the given text.

Really what benefit does that provide? Is it really all that important to remember each and every inventor? It is more work to remember the incorrect inventor, than to just simply not remember at all. Anyone who really does need to know, is better off knowing the real people

Classes started yesterday, and I'm in my senior year at uni, and one of my classes has now been restructured to teach better about pair programming. I really don't understand what the big deal is. If I am programming in a pair, I want both people to have keyboards, and throwing code at the project at the same time.

Really, that's a surprisingly low number. My parents live on the outskirts of St Louis, and where they are 1.5mbit DSL is the fastest available, making them part of the "19 Million without broadband access" because it is being defined as 3mbit. You'd figure there'd be more people who have broadband, just it isn't 3mbit. Hell, I'd buy that there are 19 million who are in the 1-2mbit class, before I'd think that there are 19 million who have speeds slower than 3mbit.

I should note that it helps if you sit just far enough away to where your good arm can reach across to get to the entire keyboard. I didn't need any special scripts or anything.

I had something similar happen to me a while back, where a workplace accident made my right arm useless for about a year. I ended up just learning how to type on a regular keyboard. Having control, alt, and shift on both sides greatly help, because with use of pinky or thumb, you can hit pretty much everything. Even normal two handed actions like Control Alt Delete aren't impossible.

He didn't have the chance to. UK blocked his exit before he could leave. As soon as they found he was going to do a runner, they blocked his exit from the country, and he fled to the embassy. Ecuador announced he was at the embassy and had applied for asylum before he could leave.

in the '90s, Modding was huge, and then for a while, game devs started to put the kibash on modding. Look at the Need for Speed series. The first 5 entries in the series were known for their mod support. They even released tools to assist with this. Due to that support, the series had a huge fanbase. NFS6: Hot Pursuit 2 comes along in 2002, with lack of modding support, and sales aren't what they used to be. Up comes Underground, and all the other games, and the sales still arent' what they used to be. The community around the NFS games seem to die about a year or so after release, which is funny because there still is some stuff going on for NFS3: Hot Pursuit, NFS4: High Stakes, and NFS5: Porsche Unleashed (I recently saw work by people to get those working under MacOS, which is really a niche group). I guess that is why EA is now releasing 2-3 NFS games a year. Switch things over, a few companies like Valve, and a bunch of Indie games are supporting mods and are selling like hotcakes. Look at what DayZ did for ARMA II. ARMAII was a little known game, on the market for nearly 3 years before DayZ was released, and within the first 2 months DayZ was available, over 300,000 copies of ARMA II were sold. Team Fortress 2 has a fair amount of mod support, and still has a huge community based, despite being five years old. TF2, now has gone free to play, but is still one of the company's largest earners mostly in part to the joked "hat based economy" (people buying add ons, much of which now come from the community) Minecraft, which has tons of mods, has sold over 7.1 million copies (not counting Xbox, iPhone, or Android). So, from what I see, modding is really the key to a game having a lasting impact. I don't understand why EA and other big players don't realize that.

Then how come several other major game companies have come out against Windows 8. For instance, Notch of Mojang, the creator of Minecraft, hates Windows 8, and at the same time also dislikes steam and refuses to sell Minecraft via Steam. Also, how does it make Steam obsolete? When EA came out with the Origin appstore, Steam was still able to thrive. Apple came out with the Mac App Store, and then Game Center, both of which compete with Steam (Game Center directly so), but it hasn't hurt Valve any. Desura, a game platform similar to Steam beat Valve to the punch on Linux support, but really that has only helped boost Valve. Plus there are others like direct2drive, Impulse, etc. Despite all the competition, Steam isn't even slowing down, and there are several reason why. 1: Many companies have not liked the terms Microsoft has for publishing via their marketplaces (such as paying to certify every release and patches, which can cost $40K a pop). 2: Most of the competition, and will also include the Windows store, are not multiplatform, and when they do support other OS's, their support sucks. People like buying a game once, and then being able to play it on both Windows and Mac (and later Linux). If you buy an app on the Windows store, you can only use it on Windows. Have a mac in the house, or a Linux box that you also play on? Sorry, gotta buy the game again elsewhere. 3: Many companies have been grumbling for a while that MS is crippling those who don't want to use Direct X. Any time a commercial game gets sold, the devs have to pay for Direct X licensing if they want to use Direct X. Problem is, Microsoft only supports OpenGL v1.1 in Windows 7. OGL1.1 came out in '97. The latest spec is version 4.2, and has huge improvements (as can be expected with 15 years of technology advances). Also, not all versions of Windows 8 will support Direct X (Specifically, the ARM version). OpenGL is well liked because it is cross platform. You make a game using OpenGL, and you can make it work on PS3, all the current Nintendo systems, Android, iOS, Mac OS, Windows, etc. Direct X is limited to Windows, Windows Mobile, and Xbox. Windows may rule the desktop, but not everyone games on the desktop, so Windows centric options aren't the best choice.

Right now it is a small percentage of desktops (~1.6% according to recent studies), there is a relatively sizable portion of people who would migrate away from Windows if there was more gaming support (Now, when I say relatively, it wouldn't be any earth shattering numbers, but potentially enough for Linux to crack the 2% mark)

But considering that it is one of the largest PC gaming companies, and controls the largest PC gaming download service, it will have some effect. Plus there are plenty of games currently sold via Steam that do have native Linux versions. I see it as a big thing for Indie gaming, if nothing else.

Not totally free to play. They can be pay to play, but they at least have to have a demo.