You may notice I never suggested the OP join a union. I mentioned that the union would be interested in how he's being classified at an agency that undoubtably has some union employees.

Server? Get it right and apply only security updates. Work desktop? Change it up every once in a while as long as stability isn't sacrificed. Don't spend so much time tweaking that you lose a lot of time actually doing your work. Home workstation? Play with it. Try things out. See which updates are worth putting elsewhere. Game system? Make sure it supports the games you want to play and isn't an easy security target. Work phone? Get security updates, but don't update it to odd things that your IT department is going to hate you for. Personal phone? Well, who cares as long as it's as dependable as you need it to be?

People with green cards wouldn't need amnesty for being illegally present. Their green card is part of the paper trail of a legal immigrant.

If you're through a consulting company that sells your time to the state and managed like an employee then you're not an employee of the state. You're an employee of that consulting company. The arrangement between the state and your employer is one thing, and your arrangement with the consulting company is another. Your company can't sell your time on a regular schedule to the state and then tell you you're a contract employee. That doesn't mean the state can't contract for a company's employees to be assigned to work on-site at the state's offices, though.

If you're on contract with the state directly, then they should treat you like a contractor. If they manage you as an employee, they need to employ you internally. If they want to keep you as a contractor, they should give you those freedoms.

You need to know that this isn't just about you. Allowing yourself to be treated as an employee and compensated as a contractor weakens everyone else's position, too. In fact, there's probably a union like AFSCME that would be very interested to talk to you about this.

A four-hour hold for evaluation is not what most people would call a "sentence".

8500 of those, including manufacturing processes for those phones. They also bought perpetual licenses for every other patent Nokia has outside of the NSN stuff. MS also gets the protection of 60 or so cross-licenses Nokia had with other companies like Qualcomm, Motorola Mobility, and Motorola Solutions. Here's an article about those patent licenses and purchases.

In case "Motorola Mobility" doesn't ring quite the right bell, that's the portion of Motorola that Google bought and then sold to Arris Group and Lenovo as two separate pieces, keeping a third piece and all but about 2000 patents.

This significantly weakens the case of any Android phone manufacturer trying to settle patent suits against Microsoft in a patent-for-patent cross licensing swap. The patents Microsoft actually owns are one thing. The massive number of patents they already have a license to that could otherwise be used MAD-style in a back-and-forth license fee case are another entirely.

Sailfish and Symbian are both proven phone OS options. Nokia has strong ties to both. I wouldn't be surprised to see either one, although Sailfish has the advantage of already supporting most Android apps.

I think Microsoft knew they could never compete in the space long-term but wanted a big patent pool tied intimately to the phone industry. Their money-making strategy in the phone space was not to get Windows to actually be competitive. It was to sue and settle for royalties against all those Android phone makers.

Contractor vs. employee classification can be abused, but calling someone who chooses when to pick up a rider and at what rate a contractor is not a shenanigan. It would be a farce to call that driver an employee. Actually the taxi drivers who often are listed as contractors but work assigned schedules for specific rates set by the company are much closer to employees, and that's the "traditional" model.

In Houston I have a choice of dozens of retail electric companies, but only one cable company (two if you count AT&T).

Contract law is law. Also, there's actual copyright statute that says you can't create and distribute a derivative work. This has often been interpreted by the courts to mean you can't make a tool that easily enables others to do so. While running this on your own copy of something is not against statute, it may be a breach of contract.

If you think that statutes are all of the law, then you don't understand the concept of law in pretty much the entire former English colonies, most of which operate at least partly under common law and precedent.

You own it if you write it, if you pay someone under contract to write it for you to own, if you purchase the ownership and copyright interests in the code, or if the copyright is assigned to you.

You don't own Photoshop. Adobe does.

A program that could process 100 MB of data in five seconds can now process 500 MB of data in five seconds. That's a 400% increase in the amount of data it can process per unit of time. People are just really bad at wording this sort of thing for some reason. I think that reason is probably that math and language are taught largely independently and as if one never interacts with the other.