Well, technically we all "touch" systems at this level, we just don't realize we are doing it. Learning/Using Assembly is like learning/using arithmetic instead of using a calculator. It is very handy and gives you a core appreciation for what is happening in complex problems, however most professionals just plug it into a computer rather than do it because it becomes too cumbersome at a certain level.

This is a pretty common thing. They aren't always looking for someone who is both, but someone who understands both.
There are a lot of EEs who can't figure out how a combustion engine even functions. There are a lot of MEs who can't understand basic circuit theory.
Considering how many times we use dynamos(generators) and electric motors, a complete lack of knowledge of one field or the other is a disaster.

This wasn't an odd requirement. I know several EEs who are self-taught MEs. Typically they are greasemonkeys who like to work on cars. They do very well because of their knowledge. I would bet that the company who had the dual requirement was an Industrial of some type.

In my experience, they do differentiate. An RF engineer might be able to figure out power systems relatively quickly. Sure, waveguide is not a cable, but their knowledge of how to calculate power just requires some quick adjustment of which formulas they are applying in which situations. Most power guys know some RF(because they have RF problems) and most RF guys know some power(they have to power their signal somehow).

A Computer Engineer(CE) typically just knows chip design or similar. How do you apply that to anything else in Electrical Engineering? They don't use circuit theory on a regular basis. They don't do much in the way of complex power calculations.

Quick example: Ask any EE to define "Vp"(Velocity of propagation) and they will will quickly respond. This typically falls across all disciplines and is important to know for a myriad of different reasons. It doesn't come up so frequently for computer engineers.

This is the sad fact. The "Happy Birthday" song shouldn't even be copyrighted.
It is a derivative work on an older song in the public domain(Good Morning To You) and is far too short to receive a copyright.

In other words, imagine if you changed the ending to the alphabet song and then tried to get it copyrighted. That would be laughable, even in our modern pro-IP courts.Yet someone did exactly that decades ago, and then some company has maintained the copyright on the "Happy Birthday" song for all of these years? It is a joke. Fixing this shouldn't even be the first blow for fixing our IP problems. It should just have been challenged in court by someone by now, but the company who "owns" the song only brings it up when they know that it is a large media company who would rather just license the song than try to challenge in court.

Sony didn't try to ban the VCR. Sony invented the VCR.

They turned into "the bad guys" when they became a movie/music company later. At the time, it was Sony vs. the TV networks.

Hilariously, they were the same company that tried to prevent the rise in the CD-R by refusing to allow any of their DVD/CD players to play burned media until well after it was a common practice. This seriously impacted their audio equipment sales and policies like this probably resulted in the company being so financially screwed today. So, Sony has been on both sides. They succeeded by being on the side of piracy(by fighting the networks copyright) and failed by trying to fight it later(as part of the RIAA/MPAA).

The current sequester will indeed cause a lot of problems, and this is rather useless at point that out. The current sequestration requires ALL PROGRAMS to cut 15%. So, the F-35 will have a 15% cut and the guys who maintain the A10s will have a 15% cut, the janitor will have a 15% cut, and the security will have a 15% cut. This is the problem with the sequestration. This was actually on purpose, to make sure that congress actually took care of everything. The thought was that no one would be stupid enough to let this go through, and at the very least the would modify it so that they could cut a weapons research program before cutting the budget for the furnace at the office.

Even if we get past the stupidity of the sequestration, we are still left with the fact that many of the cuts that managers want to make don't align with what cuts congressmen want to make. A great example is that the military knows that operating so many bases is a huge drain on their resources, and it would be much easier to operate a few large bases like Ft. Hood. Unfortunately, a base closure will raise the ire of the local congressman because it hurts the local economy so he fights to keep it. Government organizations have two customers: the public and the congress. They have to make sure that they operate in a way that pleases the public, but then they also have to operate in a way that pleases as many congressmen as possible.

Finally, the bulk of the programs which are being discussed are not the bulk of our spending. DoD and discretionary spending(FAA, Parks, Dept. of etc) only account for about 35% of total spending. Considering that our deficit is about 35%, the only way that this would even balance out is if we zeroed ALL of it. This would mean that every single department of the federal government ceased to exist. No more Departments.(Except for perhaps the treasury). If we did this, we would have no more deficit. Even the most idealistic conservative would agree that this is insane. We can't get rid of the patent office, for example. This entire debate is somewhat pointless.

The only options that would actually be feasible would be some combination of the following: Reducing benefits for social programs, some tweaking of regular government spending, and higher taxes. This isn't an opinion. The only optional part of that is that you might be able to avoid any government tweaks with much higher taxes, but that seems unlikely to pass. This is why the entire thing is so silly. Everyone in Washington knows the score, they just don't want to be the one who has to be the messenger to their constituents.

The truly sad thing about all of this is that Social Security is probably going to get hurt in the process. It is sad because social security has its own paycheck tax(OASDI), and the program has a massive surplus credit. It is just that Washington raided Social Security to pay for other programs, and now that Social Security cannot pay its own way(despite having generated trillions in surplus), people are suggesting that it is a bankrupt program. I don't mention this to make any argument about the program itself, but rather to use it as an example of how much of the argument is manipulated to take advantage of the short memories and general naivety of the American voter. Only in Washington would someone agree to a plan that paid dividends for 40 years but eventually would require interest and go along with it happily until the first bill showed up.

This is honestly patentable. They are patenting the automation of a very complex recurring scheduled order. The milkman is the simplification. This is actually very similar to the types of scheduling systems used at large manufacturers for delivery and shipment of goods.
i.e. They need to receive raw material on a specific schedule without letting it sit for too long and they need to ship it out on a regular basis, all at very specific times and dates.

The difference is that Amazon is doing this for end customers. This is similar to other services(the milkman) with added complexity that honestly requires a great deal of design to execute. They are patenting the entire process so that they don't have a competitor come in and copy their implementation after millions of dollars are spent on design and implementation(which is the EXACT REASON PATENTS EXIST).
I agree that most patents are egregious nowadays, however this is special. The purpose of patents is to encourage innovation by protecting companies that invest in innovation from getting copied, thus destroying any incentive for investment. Apple doesn't deserve patent protection because all of their patents were for things that cost trivial amounts of time and money to implement. This is going to require a large investment(of resources and money), and it could honestly backfire in Amazon's face.

Clearly, because Pandora has had such a booming business model while the record companies have been reporting such record losses?

This would all be easier to swallow if Pandora wasn't barely profitable.

because of technology. Technology has made many careers obsolete or obsolescent. Did you realize that there used to be an entire profession dedicated to producing replications of documents? We still have some people who do this job, but when the local printing press became obsolete the printers moved on and found other work. We don't pay nearly as much per copy today as we did in the past, and we don't pay it to the printer. This applies to so many technological advances.

Technology has outpaced the music industry. It is unfortunate, music enjoyed a golden era. Moving on

It was played 1.5 million times, but that isn't 1.5 million people who wanted to listen to her. That is 1.5 million plays because it matched a station. Consider that she is a cellist and a has a rather eclectic style, I would imagine that anyone who created an "Amanda Palmer" radio station heard her quite a bit.

This is the problem with using her Pandora plays as a "counter". How many of those were skips/ thumbs downs/ etc? Pandora frequently will loop a few select artists if they fit into a narrow bandwidth of music. That doesn't mean that people are demanding her music at that particular level. She may just show up a lot for anyone who creates a classical station and thumbs up more contemporary pieces.

Further, she has been #1 on the Itunes classical charts a number of times. I wonder if all of that Pandora exposure from her 1.5 million plays contributed to that success? Can't be, people were buying her tracks on iTunes for no reason. She is just that fucking popular.

But I spent the weekend trying to figure out why my Xbox suddenly quit communicating with my TV. Turns out that Microsoft pushed a new version of HDCP(a cracked encryption methodology) to encode NETFLIX in some weird attempt to protect all media all the time. Of course, this entire action makes no sense at all. It doesn't protect content from being pirated, and it doesn't make anyone's life any easier(mine, Microsoft's, or Netflix's). It was simply some idiots idea. That idiot worked for a major movie company. He required it in the contract with Netflix/Microsoft. They obliged because it was a minor issue.

Why do I mention that on a comment about Jonathan Coulton getting ripped off by Glee? Media companies are giant corporations who see the law as something to be abused only to protect themselves. It doesn't have to make sense or even be consistent. If the situation was reversed, he would be sued. In this situation, he has no recourse. It will never make sense if you try to think about it from the perspective of a rational and reasonable individual.

This will, unfortunately, always be the way of things. Unless lawmakers suddenly have some reason to drastically restructure the legal system to protect sanity, reason, and the individual over the monetary interests of their most important supporters we will never have a 'fair' system. Considering that no state in the history of the world has been able to avoid the egalitarianism and quid pro quo nature of Mandarin-type social levels, I doubt we will be able to achieve such a drastic technocratic change any time soon.

The "FBI" didn't wipe his computer. He simply asked his co-workers for some help. Apparently neither he nor they were particularly tech-savvy so he took it to a computer shop. He probably asked the shop owner to remove "all of my kid's games and stuff". I imagine that this spyware tries to mask itself so that kids cant just find it and uninstall it. The shop owner probably just uninstalled all of the "games and stuff" and then returned it.

The problem is that a person who was so confused by removing software that he had to go to a "computer shop" is trying to tell you what he did. He didn't get the FBI to clean the machine, he simply asked his co-workers who didn't know either. This also happened in Saipan, not New Jersey. The FBI has a small office, not a high tech lab.

The FBI agent screwed up by not notifying authorities immediately(he tried to solve the case himself), but he was probably concerned that the evidence wouldn't hold up in court. Lucky for everyone, the Judge seems like he was willing to stretch the letter of the law to punish a clearly guilty man.

Hope the explanations helped. I was just trying to make sure people understood as quickly as possible. I mostly just wanted to get the word "Lagrangian" into the discussion and displayed as quickly as possible. I figure people can "google" Langrangian. It is a bit difficult to google "L2". It reads like gibberish.

So, there were some technical errors. Also, some of the Langrangian points are more stable than others. This was just a "quick primer"

Maybe someone should explain L2? LaGrangian points are not exactly common things discussed over coffee, and the importance of the Earth/Moon L2 isn't going to be readily understood by most people.

L2 is referring to the L2 Langrangian point

Quick Primer:
Any time two planets interact with each other there are 5 points where gravity is essentially zero. These can be though of as eddies in a stream. These are known as "Lagrangian Points". They are referred to as L1, L2,...L5. L1 is the point between Earth and the Moon. L2 is the point behind the moon. L3 is the point behind the Earth. L4 and L5 are not in a direct line between the two bodies. They exist at a 60 degree angle off of the first 3.

These Lagrangian points exist between ANY two gravitational bodies. The greater the gravity, the larger the 'hole'. Anything that falls into this 'hole' stays there. This makes it ideal for a satellite or similar. It wouldn't drift away. Just like the eddy in a stream, the external current keeps forcing everything back into the hole.