It's not bad, as long as you can manage to claim a spot on the periphery (as I have). If I had to work in the middle of the floor, I think I'd have a problem. I've done this, but as soon as I was offered an opportunity to move, I chose a place out of the mainstream. I'm an electrical engineer, I do circuit, firmware and programmable logic design. When I'm head-down, the office plan makes no difference at all. When I'm less busy, it's not really any more distracting than a cube farm. I am glad, however, for the carpeted floor and acoustic tile ceiling. Downstairs, it's a bare metal high-bay type ceiling and the noise reflected off it is so bad I couldn't stand it (I spent a short time desk-hopping as an experiment).

The only way to fight personal, noncommercial "sharing", is to provide a one-stop download center with reasonable prices. It has worked for Amazon and Apple, but the media companies stubbornly refuse to cooperate and make their complete catalogs available in one place...so Pirate Bay does it for them.

The market is speaking as loudly as it can, but the media companies refuse to listen.

"What is there about you that you would rather I didn't know?"

"I'd be pretty stupid to tell you, wouldn't I?"

With rare exceptions, you can't connect sensors or actuators directly to embedded processors. Someone needs to design those interface circuits. Designs with multiple constraints (low power, small, low cost) willonly be successful if they're carefully designed.
I'll grant you that circuits are used less frequently to do the actual calculations, but there's still a spot for EEs. In the past few decades, though, lots of the computer and networking jobs have gone away. That probably accounts for a big chunk of the missing engineers.

From the active minds of Yanko Design. Creators of impractical renderings for years.

In the late 70s, there was a push to get the US to go metric. Protests from the auto industry that the costs would force them out of business, IIRC, squashed the effort. I don't really understand why we haven't gone metric -- $DEITY knows we all have metric tools to work on our Toyotas, Nissans and Hondas. And the industries (those that are left) have retooled several times since the 70s. It's frustrating being the last holdout, and for no good reason.

I'd like to know how they did that. Especially with a transmitter *inside* the computer...

When will unlicenced use of a gyrocopter be permitted?

The book is almost always better than the movie...:-)

Tolkein - Lord of the Rings - a cornerstone of fantasy - and a Quest
Bernard Fall - Hell in a Very Small Place - those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
Mallory - La Morte d'Artur - or is it "Le Morte"? The Arthurian Legend
Arthur C Clarke - The Sentinel ( aka 2001: A Space Odyssey)
Asimov - I, Robot - the book is better than the movie
Homer - Illiad and Odyssey
Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (yeah, I haven't read it -- I only got as far as "Omnia Gallia in partes tres divisa est.")
Two Years Before the Mast - Havahd boy ships out on a square rigger -- then discovers what work is.
Ransome - Swallows and Amazons - for tweens who yearn for freedom
Kerouac - On the Road

If you're in Software Development: Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month - and make sure your boss reads it, too.
Awww...heck, just pick it up and read it! Or walk into the library and pick a book at random.

I'm betting on a lost anchor or random pieces of cast iron from an old ship.

Is this the guy who thought the ribbon was a good idea?

There will be some whining, but swap in a new hard drive, keep the old one "in case they want to go back", and set up a VirtualBox Windows environment for iTunes and whatever other "Win-only" software they must have.

You'll both be happier in the long run.

// have done this for friends, and they are still happy 3 years later.

'The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,'

Well, golly! Maybe the agency should have looked a little harder at what they were slipping through the "public approval" process. I'm pretty sure *I* didn't vote for the PATRIOT act (which should have expired long ago...camel nose in the tent, though). But in some warped way, I'm sure the NSA feels wronged. Perhaps they need to stop and look carefully at how what they are doing is perceived by the average US citizen, and how that perception came about.

Fat chance of that ever happening...

Interesting timing, considering the recent exposure (and debunking?) of BadBIOS "acoustical networking".