You know that in astronomy several amateurs have made major discoverys? And a Scientist is just an engineer who lacks thumbs :-)

In what country in both the USA and the UK (The main English speaking country's) its not illegal to call your self an engineer if you don't have a Ceng or pE

Actually not the reason people where lab coats is to stop thier clothes getting dirty/ruined by chemicals etc also there is a status thing going on as blue collar workers will probably be in overalls a white coat marks you out as a "professional" why do you think Abby wears a lab coat in NCIS - part of its is to mark her out as senior.

And its been around for ages i was hired onto a BT billing dev team as a devops guy as I was a SYSAD on primes I was the insurance policy in case the actual operators wouldn't play nice :-)

Oh dear employing to many COBOL programmers and MBA's :-)

a lot of American renters seem to have this sense of entitlement - id love to live in central London but i cant afford it so i commute i dont go smashing windows in knights-bridge and have Boris Johnson wring his hands on my behalf

And it has a wider social benefit in taking cars off the road reducing congestion and pollution - if i where Google id be tempted to offer interest free loans an tell people go down the ford dealer and get your self a mustang super snake and if your an engineer and dont appreciate some nice automotive muscle we we shouldn't have employed you hears for performance improvement plan.

i was talking to a member of the renal team in my home town and she wryly commented that the low salt idea has been well marked - the trouble is all these low salt foods replace salt with other chemicals which are worse :-)

a lawyer or medical professional for the same experience

so what property do you demolish to build these new offices - not going to be popular if Google demolishes a load of affordable housing in NYC or SF. Interesting that in London Google is building new offices round the back of St Pancras which was a sketchy area until recently

Paris is one example.

You'd dump a deal worth billions over a few hundred bucks - man if I where on the other side I woudl see that as a sign of weakness just pony up the cost of a ticket to Spain and put it on the table - "right shall we continue or are you not serious"

Proper mic's get expensive quite fast.

yes that "lost iphone" caused a but-load of hurt for a number of people - at at least gawker could play there "we are journalists card" to mitigate some of the legal come back a member of joe public not so much.

Really do as I suggest and read up on the USA's industrial history I wont mention which tech company who double crossed a union buster who was later found dead in a motel room?

Compered to the stealing of vested options by silver lake partners MS is small beer.

I have worked for a company whose internal investigation team was so feared that people would resign out of fear if one of their staff was even investigated - and this department now have to follow the same or better procedures for a formal police investigation because of past misdemeanors - reed Bruce Scheniers resignation statement and see how carefully talks about one particular division.