Did parent and GP even read the TFA? Haha, rhetorical question.

Morons.

All of this is useful to the average user, how?

The Windows-firefox-with-silverlight-on-wine option seems to work for a lot of people, but unfortunately it does not work well on AMD Radeons.
Mine has a very noticeable drop in framerate.

Nope, just late.

Nope, that would be Redmond bar owners. The literal bridge to the eastside over here spans a yawning metaphorical cultural gap between the Eastside and Seattle.

Nope.
(Goes to the corner and hangs head in shame)

TL;DR If you aren't a Gates, Jobs or Zuck, you are better off finishing school.
Three points :

• Your understanding of the term "web developer", is flawed. Its a very specific, narrow field, which you want to generalize more. The "web development" stack consists of a front end, AJAX & JS heavy UI that the customer sees, supported on a scalable, back end service, interspersed on a middle layer that has business logic. When I joined the company I am working for now, as an intern a year back, I did not know any of the languages used in the stack. (JS, Perl/Mason or Java). My point being, I had the fundamentals; with those in place, I know I can practically do any work in the field, given a company ready to invest in me.
• It is easy to get distracted with the shiny bells and whistles that you see as UI work on the net, but bear in mind, with the browser wars coming to an end, front end work is just converting a design template into working HTML + JS. Without knowing the underlying concepts that make these up, you are going nowhere. When I learnt JS as an intern, I was looking at a code base that was a model of how-to-write-js. I had always been of the (naive) opinion, that software engineering and OOP were overrated, until I saw that code. Without the knowledge of the theory it stands upon, I wouldn't have been able to understand, or even comment upon, how good the code was.
• Think of it purely in terms of competition; you are competing with engineers who are standing on the shoulders of giants (the theoretical foundations that has gone into CS for the past half a century). There are only about 8 people that I know, who were successes outside of this traditional setup, and the world knows about them.

Until they learn, and so it goes, round and round... :)

No mod points, but props to parent.
The definition of an American Citizen (vis-a-vis any terrorist) is not having a paper saying you are that, but, putting country above whatever distorted view that you have. David Headley, orchestrated the 26/11 attacks on India, but he was an 'American Citizen'. I wouldn't get my panties in a bunch about someone like that. And no, there is no slippery slope here, you have redefined your moral compass and made it equivalent with a legal paper; the legal paper which was supposed to be the proof of said moral compass. Not the other way around.

Maybe earlier. Now, they are the tryouts for a permanent job. If your smartest interns don't like the program, that means they are going to work for your competition.

I work as a software developer for a small e-commerce firm, named after a large river. The most common use case for me, is to have my laptop docked to a larger screen, where I have some applications running on my laptop screen, this could be a browser window on a laptop screen, e-mail client etc., and have my ssh windows open on the bigger screen, since code is more important to me, it gets the larger screen real estate. Linux, (maybe not Unity) but KDE, SUCKS MY BALLS for this. This is the most common use case for EVERYONE working in my company, and Linux is completely unusable for this. 1. lightdm, the display manager, will not understand the desktop monitor settings. 2. The extended desktop setting is broken. On the OPEN SOURCE, Intel driver. Just in case someone started bitching about drivers. 3. If you force it into your required setting, with the bigger screen as your main display, and the smaller screen as extended to it's side, the brilliance that Linux is, will show a blank screen if you aren't connected. Basically, if you are connected things can be OK for one big screen, if you are not, it will still try to push display to the bigger screen, even when you ARE NOT connected. I have many more grievances against extended displays on Linux, but I will stop here. Basically, Linux on multi monitor set ups, is a non-starter. Note : I might have used Linux as a stand-in for KDE, so this might just be a rant about KDE, but I tried XFCE on my home laptop. The out-of-box experience is so 90's that it beggars belief. Win7, it pains me to say, is smooth as butter on this. Every imaginable configuration, is done as intuitively as possible. The Win+P shortcut brings up an easy mode switching popup. The advanced configuration screen under Screen Resolution, is super easy to figure out as well. Also, the grand-grand-parent poster, is absolutely wrong about the Window Manger being linked with the application in Windows. From Vista, Windows has had a compositing manager, no dirty rectangles, tearing the screen because of one misbehaving application. Yes, I understand the reasons for why Linux/KDE isn't able to do this, lack of vertical integration, no driver support, blah blah, but really, how can I evangelize about Linux, if it cannot do something as simple as extending displays correctly and easily?

With all due respects to the geeks and nerds in the /. community, I do not think Ubuntu or any other distro will ever achieve the popularity their ease of use deserve, simply because they are too damn difficult to install. The install process is extremely smooth, but until the process of creating the ext3/4 partitions is eased up/ automated / GUIed, no linux distro ever will achieve the popularity that we want them to. It was only yesterday when I was installing Natty on a fellow computer science Master's student's laptop that it truly struck me how messed up that process is. First the install had to be aborted and gparted had to be started. Then since there were four primary partitions which came with the manufacturer (HP), we had to remove one, and then find that gparted had problem reading the 250 GB main partition which we wanted to split. So chkdsk /f was run on that which took about an hour. After all this we managed to create the partition and install it. It is truly amazing that this problem is never given its due importance. Using GPartEd itself is not too easy for a newbie, hell its f***king hard. Add to that the chances of the great disasters waiting to happen on a wrong format/partition creating going wrong, its a miracle there are so many people who actually use GNU/Linux at all!