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An anonymous reader shares a report: A new NPR/Marist poll finds that 1 in 5 jobs in America is held by a worker under contract. Within a decade, contractors and freelancers could make up half of the American workforce. Workers across all industries and at all professional levels will be touched by the movement toward independent work -- one without the constraints, or benefits, of full-time employment. Policymakers are just starting to talk about the implications.

[...] It's not just business driving the trend. Surveys show a large majority of freelancers are free agents by choice. John Vensel is a contract attorney at Orrick who grew up a few miles from Wheeling, on the other side of the Pennsylvania state line. In his 20s, he was a freelance paralegal by day and a gig musician by night. "I actually wanted to be a rock star," he says. But these days there are no edgy vestiges of a former rocker, only a 47-year-old family man cooing over cellphone photos of his children, Grace and Gabe. In the two decades in between, Vensel worked full-time corporate jobs. But he was laid off in 2010, on the eve of his graduation from his night-school law program. He graduated with huge piles of debt, into one of the worst job markets. For a time, Vensel commuted three hours round-trip to a full-time job in Pittsburgh. But more recently, he quit and took up contracting to stay near home in Wheeling.

Amoeba Protozoa has the first Quickie for the day: The Linux Image Montage Project needs logos to create a montage poster. If you have a Linux related logo, send it to them. mazeone sent us a link to the always excellent NTK which has a great note about Bruce Perens at the start, (And yes, I read NTK too ;) And now a whole bunch of fun little links that have been building up: PopeClayton sent us a link to a Homer Simpson Fortune File. cpfeifer sent us a link to another O'Reily Book Parody. Zibalatz sent us a link to a MacBeth Star Wars Parody. rpm sent us a link to the Magic Nipple. It predicts the future. Sorta. Now we have a few more Porn Parody sites: desertAngel sent us Amish Porn and Gambit32 sent us telephone sex. Both are hilarious. The Only Anonymous Coward sent us a link to an emergency Security Alert: apparently a dangerous bug was found in GNU acronym. An anonymous reader sent us an important page: a Guide to Babes for Geeks. Follow these to the letter. Oh wait, most of us probably already do. That might explain my social life anyway.