Privacy: You've got a smartphone. I've got a smartphone. Everybody's got a smartphone. Seriously, if your employer feels at all hostile or big brother, can't you do you personal email, FB, Twitter, etc. on your phone?

Chatter: it's a corporate communication service. It's a given that your company is monitoring it. Hell, that's the half the point of using it. So the complaint here is that Salesforce is using yet another half-assed metric to evaluate employee performance? It can't be worse than a dozen other "measures" of employee performance I've seen over the years. Hell, maybe it's better.

Did you just play politics right after complaining about people playing politics?

Here's a tip for next time: if you had used a semicolon instead of a period, you could have made a statement and then contradicted yourself in the same sentence.

I'll settle for the one that HAS A GUI.

This guy's advice is good for his target services and audience. In particular: he's giving advice with no existing relationship with a programmer, who are going to jump feet-first into elance, guru, odesk, and vworker. These first-time users of the services will be lucky to see a project through to a remotely satisfactory conclusion if they only hire one programmer.

Having been in that position once, I can vouch for what he's saying: you'll be ignorant enough of the criteria you should be using, that it's going to be very useful to hire 2-3 programmers for a small milestone up front. You'll get the guy who completely ignores the spec, and sends you something he cobbled together in 10 minutes. You'll get the guy who eats up the full time allotted, then at the very end cancels the project and refunds the money. And you'll get the guy who's actually a solid, communicative programmer, and gets the job done. Then you go forward with that guy.

It's going to be rare that, on your first use of these services, you can make a decision based on a close call, evaluating code quality, UI design, and so on. No, you'll be evaluating "did the project get completed AT ALL?". And you'll learn a lot about how to find people using these services, and how to write better specs yourself, so that you don't waste everyone's time in the future.

One way or another, that policy's going to have a pretty high turnover rate.

You have to appreciate that on /., a post that simply repeats part of the article summary is modded +2 Informative-- and rightfully so, as it's responding to a post that asks a question explicitly addressed in the summary.

As long as we're sharing our turn-ons, I love it when Slashdot finds new and exciting things to anthropomorphize.

I searched the linked articles, and several articles linked from those, but couldn't find the word "clarify" in any of Yelp's statements. In fact, the only use I found was also in quotes, in the Ars article.

It appears Ars has decided to substitute scare quotes for "commentary." Readers ought to be informed that the "journalist" may be misleading them, because in fact, Yelp's changes (as "reported" by Ars) do not aim to "clarify how advertising affects listing."

(Please note that my last use of quotes was not intended to scare, but to set off language that came from another source. Sorry if I frightened anyone.)

You're just quibbling about details. If they can get 40 interns to do 40 small problems quickly, they can certainly get 40 interns to do 10 large problems even faster. Just like 9 pregnant women can make a baby in one month. Or they can keep the original 9 month schedule, but pool their efforts to create one super-huge baby.

What about more basic rights, like marriage? Yeah, yeah, "mergers" give you all the same benefits. If that's so, why not let them call it marriage?

You ask me, get the government out of this whole marriage thing, and let individuals, their faiths, and their churches decide if they want to let AOL be "wedded" to Time Warner. In the mean time, the government can call AOL and Time Warner "civil partners".

After that, maybe we can end this horrid business of corporations being bought and sold. Disgusting!