hieronymusN

I worked for a large, international financial data company that was busted for something very similar. In essence they had a large amount of contract employees on premises (hired through a temp agency) that had worked for them for years, at desks amongst the regular employees, with the same email addresses as the regular employees, etc. They were indistinguishable from regular employees except they did not get pensions, paid leave, or any of the other perks of regular employees.

When a few were made redundant due to cutbacks, they promptly lawyered up and were able to settle for a year's worth of compensation, which is what they would have received as regular employees.

In short, if you're a contractor but have a desk in the office and an email address with the company in some cases you are more or less an 'employee', and this has been backed up by courts in the US from time to time.

http://employeeissues.com/ic_vs_employee.htm

Employment may be at will, but the courts are full of lawsuits against employers for wrongful termination/dismissal. If you've ever dealt with a large HR dept you know that one of their main jobs is to prevent lawsuits brought/caused by employees.

I think you bring up a good point, and its also worth exploring why "race", "class" and "gender" are such hot button issues in tech. These are issues that many other very large companies (ex: I've worked for large financial corps in NYC that have vibrant & entrenched diversity programs) have dealt with in much more constructive ways.

So why do these topics blow up so big amongst the valley crowd?

There are already very lightweight frameworks like Sinatra in PHP - such as Slim : https://github.com/codeguy/Slim

Personally, few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize' products to my family & friends on my personal social accounts. I am currently in this situation. I have no problem evangelizing on social accounts tied to the company (the company's official twitter, facebook, etc.) or writing posts on the company blog, but I do not use my personal social accounts for company business and don't plan on doing so in the future. Maybe I'm just old, but I need a separation between my business and personal life on the web.

I'm sure the techs who keep the servers running in the Google data centers love having 25% of their bonuses tied to social products they may truly dislike, don't use, etc.

I foresee a lot of very uptight men in India's future, combined with a booming brothel industry staffed by women brought in from outside. Then there is the usual war with China angle which is facing the same demographic issues.

No it doesn't make sense, but its somehow culturally ingrained. Asia has a very different view, such as Japanese Onsen where everyone is naked in the big group pool, but you don't put your head underwater, no sir.

Very true - you can be walking through the Tiergarten in Berlin on a sunny day and stumble across a group of nude sunbathers. You know, just sunning.

There's this whole odd thing recently in New York where people in Manhattan want to do the French air kissing on the cheeks thing. You never quite know who is going to do it, and what the proper response is, and being from Texas its all rather awkward. There are no hard and fast rules anymore, people pick things up from movies and travel.

Off-topic: But I really do love this little gem found on DocumentCloud - http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/10404-chris-kick-ass-...

Basic question: where are the documents themselves? I see lots of 'analysis' and commentary, and some links to 'key documents' but where is the directory of 1,600 PDFs that this site alludes to? I'd like to make up my own mind.

This in particular has tripped me up. I had a relationship with a client that took 45 - 60 days to pay, but they always paid. Things were great for over a year and a half, they had tons of work for me and I made good money. Then all of a sudden 60 days became 90 days. At that point you have already filed a few invoices before you sense a problem and cease work (I was sending them in every 30 days). Basically they went Chapter 11 owing me over $10k - of which I was only able to recover 30% after being very, very persistent with their lawyers.

I found it informative.. in an anthropological sense...

On a mac you might want to try

  cat /dev/urandom | openssl base64 | head -c 12; echo;

Which can give you a nice random string.

You can see this in action almost every day in New York City. On a crowded subway car, if a pregnant woman or very old person gets on the car it is almost always a Hispanic male who jumps up to offer their seat, even if it means standing up for the rest of a long commute.

As a middle aged person who grew up in Houston, I can remember having these basic values (golden rule/help other people) drilled into me by parents/teachers in the 70's.

Somewhere along the way urban life seems to have washed those values away.

It's nice to know that the Sage of Omaha is/was just as prone to irrational behavior as every other CEO.

They will need vastly more rugged versions for your average American. I say this being from Texas.

As noted in the blog post comments, using a CSS compressor for production will tighten everything down for deployment and you get to keep a nice, easy to read file for development by multiple people using different editors in a manner they choose.

This is really tragic. I rely on VLC for all my video viewing needs. It loads video much faster than QuickTime w/ Perian and is much more responsive, not to mention the vast array of file formats it supports. I also like being able to tweak the buffer sizes to optimize playback from my NAS. I'm a little shocked there aren't any Cocoa devs wanting to work on this. Do I need to try and learn Objective-C now? I fear I would only damage the code base.

Not an urban myth - that little joke was pulled more than once in US grammar schools in the 70/80's

CSS frameworks like this can be useful and harmful at the same time, depending on what your goals are. If you need to prototype something fast they can be invaluable. But they can also become a straight jacket and require littering your layout with what are in effect, as nopassrecover mentioned, almost table cells (especially with 960.gs). All these non-semantic divs with proprietary id's break down the concept of separating content from layout. So when you want to move away from the CSS framework in the future (to say, accommodate some specialized ad unit or something) you have to go through the pain of re-writing your layouts. You have to judge how extensible the layout needs to be in the future when deciding to use these or not.