Same in NC. Heck, the only time I even have to go in the DMV anymore is for new things and license renewals. Duplicate licenses, registration fees, etc are all online.

Yes, they really should have just lobbed hundreds of missiles randomly over the border and been done with it. That would have been much less indiscriminate.

And so far their "wanton indiscriminate killing" seems to have gotten pretty lucky, in that more Hamas militia members have been killed then civilians...either that indicates a much larger Hamas force in the area (ie, high 'militia' to civilian ratio) than Hamas, the media, or Israel has indicated (and also that Hamas for once is not claiming any number of it's members are civilians) or it's just pure dumb luck that the "wanton indiscriminate killing" only penetrated far enough into the country to see 500 people and a high number of those were militia.

Because that cuts the margin. Gamers stress machines, so they would have to choose to either continue loading in the extremely crappy motherboard and RAM they use and deal with the complaints as the system keeled over in no time, or they would have to upgrade to decent motherboard and RAM combinations reducing their margin even further. Add to that the fact that 3 years of gaming on mid-range equipment is going to have a much more drastic effect than 3 years of MS office on a low range and your talking higher costs in the warranty and support arena too...

Not at all. I know plenty of people at my current workplace who couldn't even name the equipment on our production floor if they saw it (we have only have 3-4 steps in our main production process). Not too long ago I overheard a coworker ask someone to draw them a map to get to a cabinet on the opposite side of the production floor because they couldn't follow the verbal instructions (we only have 3 main areas, and they are rectangular so "middle of far wall of X area" should have been enough).

In a manufacturing plant your operations staff, R&D, Quality, and logistics staff generally have a good idea (some better than others) how things work. Maintenance and engineering also have an idea, but it's a little more removed (they allow "you should be doing it this way" to color their perspective). IT is the only group (unless their is also a Plant Automation group and Process Improvement group) that has to understand a good portion of all of these perspectives (at least, a good IT group). And most of your finance, sales, marketing, and HR departments will not know, though one or two members may as part of their job description and several others may have some knowledge due to curiosity.

The same is true in many businesses (though the functions of operations, quality, logistics, etc may be different in places such as a software publisher, etc).

However I would not say this is the function of a "Software Engineering". Outside of IT groups the major role that has to have this understanding is Software Architects/Designers. Your standard "Software Engineer" at a software development company has to have some understanding of the architectural vision or design and an idea what they are trying to accomplish, but that is where it generally ends. They do not work in the environment they are building software for and do not spend the same level of time supporting and learning the process they are trying to improve.