Coming from a UX perspective, I've come across more than a handful of gigs where Silverlight experience was specified in the job description. Most of these seemed to be in finance (from what I could gather) and I still cannot for the life of me understand why they would invest resources into critical systems using this technology.

So what you are saying is (and please bear with me):

If I steal a book from a neighbour, it's a criminal offense, but if I steal a book from a bookshop owned by a corporation, it is not a criminal but a civil offense?

or:

If I break the windows of a residential house owned by a person, it's a crime; but smashing the windows of a Starbucks is just a civil offense because they're owned by a non-living entity?

So I can go into any shop that is owned by a corporation (e.g., Walmart) and steal what ever I want and the law enforcement authorities cannot arrest me for theft because the entity being 'injured' is non-living and any such injuries against such entities can only be decided by civil courts?

I guess it would say that your friends and coworkers are thick as shit or really aren't that interested in video games.

But then, you can also ask the AI, "where's the salt?" or other some such question and wait for a sensible response. Or ask it to catch a ball. Or navigate its way through a town, find a nice birthday present, bake a cake, create spontaneous conversations with strangers... Lots of things that I'm sure it would fail at.

I pay a lot more than $25 extra to fly with airlines that don't keep pissing me and my family around with seat re-allocations, and I've often avoided poorer quality airlines offering cheap prices).

Price is a factor but it's not the only one. Availability is also a factor as are length of stop-overs, chance of getting bumped up, total flight length, where I have to transit and so on.

Proviso: I rarely fly in the US and my airlines of choice are Singapore, Emirates and Air NZ (the latter of which are often way too expensive so I prefer to go SK or EK which are so far ahead of US carriers it's not real. It's strange considering the US usually has excellent levels of customer service elsewhere why it's so poor for air travel. I guess I'm lucky in that I can often avoid US airlines if traveling to the US.

2a. What proportion of seized sites have been upheld by a court of law to have unlawful or illegal. (ie, how many seizures were legally justifiable?)

So that his descendants will find it easy to be accepted by MIT in the future? Just guessing...

It's just the British way of doing things.

I've worked for a lot of British companies and on the whole, they pay as little as possible. It's exceptional to start a salaried job on anything other than the minimum of the scale; US companies are much more willing to pay for talent and experience so I prefer working for them.

Although I don't agree with the darkness of your picture, I can certainly understand what you mean. I speak as an ex-research fellow who saw similar things and got primarily fed up with the lack of security and lack of money. So I went into industry as a freelance 'consultant' and while job security is still lacking, the pay is way better and my ideas get treated with more respect because the people I work with are mostly interested in creating the best product. I think a bit of my soul has died since then, but I'm providing for my family and they are a darn sight more important than my career. However, my soul died a lot more in a 5* university dept, trying to hack out a career. I'd give you mod points if I had any.

"Well, when you write "I couldn't even get an interview with them" it sounds like you're really saying "if they won't even interview me, then they surely don't know anything about UX design"." Alternatively (and this was my original belief) I was saying that "I couldn't even get an interview yet Google are happy to fly my to Zurich, I've been working in one of the biggest global agencies for *very* large corporate customers who they're eager to please etc and I'm trusted with tricky projects for them. This is without my experience with Fortune 10 companies and SMEs. Wow, they must have some real rockstars if they won't even give me an hour." But given this type of story, I was curious as to who really was working there. Hence, I looked and thought my previous thoughts. I'm negative probably because of the comments here and other places. I'm not currently in a position to run it myself so I can use or test it with others - all I have are other people's comments and they are generally quite negative here (and other places). Note quite anecdotal but not far off it, however, it's all I have to go on as I cannot find a detailed methodology used in the study from TFA. The team - it's on the canonical design team page. Having recruited in UX in the past (generally quite successfully), it's difficult to see anything that jumps out in terms of experience, qualifications or ability. Most companies are happy to mention this to demonstrate to users that they have good people doing good work but it's more of an introduction to general interests. Home pages: some are okay, but none are stellar in design terms; one home page is a flash nightmare and another one is suspended. In design terms, it's not top rate (not saying I am but I appear to have more experience than anyone and know many freelancers who could do the same even more so).

Yeah, sour grapes. It's gotta be (sheesh, didn't see that one coming Einstein).

The truth is that I'm worried at all. It was a rejection, I've had a few before, I'm getting paid a shit load more doing some genuinely cool stuff elsewhere, am getting pissed off with recruiters contacting me out of the blue with shiny new offers, and am truly enjoying my work.

The experience on the team there really doesn't seem much to write home about, not when compared to the UX pros I've known and worked with. I originally thought that I wasn't good enough - no worries, there's plenty that are happy to pay me - but when this story came up and I was curious why there such a fail in the UX (judging by /. comments) so I looked at the design tea's background.

Try it - look at some genuinely good UXers on linkedin and compare.

A lot of the negativity here doesn't surprise me too much. I'm a UX designer, a professional with ~10 years experience doing successful projects across industry, excellent qualifications and a resume that gets a lot of interest. My clients more often than not re-hire me if they get the chance because my work is definitely good.

I couldn't even get an interview at canonical for whatever reasons. I'm not entirely sure who is working on this stuff there, judging from the fails they're having and from my own UX network, it's not the cream of the crop. Checking out the Design Team page at canonical doesn't show much.

Dude, go and get laid. You need it.

lol! Wish I had mod points for you

No, it did not. The question was NOT whether Apple is a consumer company - it clearly is, of that there is little question. The question is whether the MacPro is a consumer gadget. Quit being thick and answer the question. It's a simple answer and you can stuff your poor car analogies up your arse. It's quite simple: Is the MacPro a consumer gadget? Yes or no. For my opinion, I think it is not. What's yours (just to remind you, the question was about the MacPro, not Apple or Steve Jobs, or the iPhone / iPad / iPod etc. The MacPro alone.

Yeah, lucky old Woz!