With your current background, you could get a job in technical writing. Every firm that does engineering needs people like you who:

* Understand the subject matter
* Can write about it readably

Exactly. An English major already has a leg up provided they can communicate in writing. And the more engineering classes you can take related to the field your company works in, your writing's only going to improve as you're able to understand the engineers better and write fairly decent documentation.

Heck, get a job in communications with a company that does STEM work you like - sure you'll write PR and all that in the beginning, but that's the point - skills like communications are VERY valuable, and if you can better yourself by understanding more about what the company does by taking classes in the field, you can only go up from writing marketing copy to documentation, both internal and external.

If you can augment it to interfacing with customers, you're instantly a manager - able to take vague notions of what customers want and translating them into nice neat requirements that the engineering team can understand.

Practical arts skills like languages are typically undervalued everywhere, but are extremely useful. Businesses need to communicate, both internally and externally so you've already got positions you can slot yourself into. Just find a company doing the STEM things you like and try to fit yourself in.

Anti-trust concerns usually do benefit the consumer in the short term. And as the article points out, the jury specifically wrote that the features have an immediate benefit to the consumer.

Usually anti-trust problems are not immediately bad for the consumer. In the short term the consumer sees a lower price, easier access, and other conveniences.

In the long term the market ends up with monopolies and oligopolies, a loss of vibrancy, a slowdown in innovation, less desire to follow expensive advances, and worse customer experiences. Think of your local telco and cable companies as prime examples.

Or in this case, rendered utterly irrelevant.

Because iTunes sells unprotected music. Just like Amazon and many other music stores. iTunes is still #1, but their market share is sliding.

The iPods are on life-support - they don't make Apple much money anymore but Apple keeps them around because there's still a tiny demand for them.

And streaming services have basically taken over music sales - sales from iTunes and other stores is far lower nowadays while streaming services like Pandora and others are rising.

Whatever harm iTunes did, seems to have resulted in a far more vibrant marketplace now than it was years ago.

When you say pencil, I'm pretty sure you mean "graphite". A lovely and useful substance, to be sure, but not especially close to graphene.

Actually, graphite is merely disorganized graphene - the layers of graphene in graphite are in general layers (which let you lay down a line fairly easily), but they're not particularly big nor particularly long - it's really a disorganized heap of graphene molded together. When you write with a pencil, the line is composed of a lot of little pieces of graphene.

Heck, one of the first production methods involved regular tape and pencils - the pencil was rubbed onto paper and tape applied to the spot which lifts off the graphene.

Language also embeds within it history. And history is important for many reasons (many of which are related to "if you don't study it, you'll repeat it").

Europe's an interesting study - you have the Barbaric English, the Germanic Germans, the Romantic French/Spanish/Italians, and so forth. All of which reflect the interesting history and empires of Europe. (Romantic - sure we like to think of the French as good at love, and that may be the origins of the word "romantic" in English, yet it refers to the more practical Roman Empire roots which is why they're quite similar today, despite millennia of independent evolution).

Heck, the modern day is shaped by culture too - internet memes manage to worm their way into our language. The rise of smartphones brings about the rise of the use of the word "selfie" (despite cameraphones being popular prior to the smartphone, and many often had mirrors to enable selfie taking, the word itself pretty much arose post-iPhone).

Language is culture. If you want to learn a language without culture, you need to go for an artificial one. Learn Klingon. Or Esperanto.

Even in the Internet age language is evolving to accommodate new aspects of internet culture that crop up. To claim it all as empty and vapid really denies the fact that languages evolve because of the culture of the day.

It takes about 15 years of steady progress to get from "shitty ______ car" to "I'd consider ______ cars these days"

The Korean cars are very acceptable in quality, and the price difference between them and the Japanese of similar models is almost enough to make the switch.

For a manufacturer perhaps. For a consumer who got bitten by buying a "sh*tty car" well, it can take far longer to never.

I know back in the 80s when Hyundai first went into cars and introduced the POS Pony to North America. A car that would only start if you managed to twiddle the radio knob, the phase of the moon was right, it was sunny outside and you blinked the headlights 3 times. And maybe even honked the horn.

Oh and yes, sunny day required. If there was a hint of moisture, it would stall.

These days though, Korean cars aren't too shabby - they took a lot of design cues (and designers) from Europe, a few engineers from Japan and end up producing decent looking and performing cars with quite high quality.

Eminent domain those house and get some more lanes in.

Probably better to put a new highway in off to one side or another, considering it's LA go with both.

Actually, LA is the #1 example of trying to out-build congestion. And traffic engineers have observed and pretty much concluded that traffic expands to fill all lanes. Build another lane and it's full and congested in relatively short order.

So no, trying to build more lanes of traffic just leads to ever worse traffic in the end as it expands to fill the new space up. The goal instead is to try to promote more efficient use of the road - a whole city block of (single occupant) cars can be cleared up by one bus carrying the same number of people.

Very forward looking behavior from apple. You're going to need 64 bit to use more than 2GB of ram without major pain (32 bit addressing is a bitch and workarounds are slow) By the time the rest of the industry is going to be faced with the inevitable transition apple will already have years of experience with 64bit in their mobile platform.

Actually, Apple didn't do it for memory, they did it because AArch64 is a more efficient architecture. I.e., it's a lot faster. ARMv8 over ARMv7 running 32-bit code is only around 10-20% faster. But run the same code in 64-bit mode and it screams.

It's how people got the "2x faster" figures on the A7 SoC - in 64-bit mode things are way faster on the A7 than if you ran it in 32 bit mode.

Android will get similar speedups once it's fully 64-bit...

Samsung is a Korean company and manufacturers ICs in Korea.

Actually, Samsung owns a fab in Texas that makes Apple SoCs - and that's all it does.

And that's been the case for a few years now, even through the Samsung-Apple patent spat.

It's a complex relationship, to the say the least -

Except that Interac has been doing realtime debit transactions for many years, across all Canadian banks, both at point of sale and at ATMs. It's good news if the US is moving in this direction, because it is an excellent system, but it would be a stretch to call it the bank account of the future when it has existed for years.

The thing is, in most places in the world, Canada included, there aren't that many banks, credit unions and other financial institutions. The number is small enough that they all can rapidly agree on new standards and proposals and all that. Heck, the vast majority of banking in Canada is done by the "big three" banks.

In the US, that doesn't hold - there are literally tens of thousands of banks and credit unions and other financial institutions. If you ever wondered why US cheques don't seem to be taken at a lot of places ("money orders" only or the sort of thing), well ,that's why - getting it all sorted out is a mess.

So a problem is just getting all of them to talk to one another and cooperate. And some of these are literally some old lady sitting around with a ledger whose only excitement is having to connect the computer to the phone line and downloading the day's transactions.

And given how independent-minded Americans are, there's probably a ton of those kind of banks who are basically run by 2-3 people.

Fundamentalists. They hate us for our chocolate.

I understand, once I tried Lindt chocolate, too.

Given the chemistry of chocolate, conching and termpering take place at VERY specific temperatures or you get poor results.

Notice how hot the middle east is? Well, it's so hot that chocolate just doesn't conch or temper at all without cooling, so if you keep chocolate outside, it gets nasty.

So yeah, they don't have good chocolate at all.

(While the actual temperatures are closely guarded, tempering is usually done around 31.5C, while conching times and temperatures are proprietary trade secrets for every company)

You ain't telling me nothing because I have a customer who has all the early Kiss albums on the very first CD releases and he came to me complaining that "These new CDs don't sound right, I think my PC is messed up" but when I threw an MP3 rip of Strutter from his first run CDs in Audacity? There was peaks, valleys, actual HEADROOM on the recording. Took the exact same song from the exact same album from his recent box set? it was just a fucking wall, literally it was just slammed to the max from the first note to the last and sounded like shit.

I have a compilation CD that was obviously from various masters. There was one track on there that was notable in Audacity - because while all the other tracks were squiggly with peaks, valleys and stuff, this one song was a solid blob on the timeline; And the CD was normalized, so the solid blob didn't touch more than 70% or so.

Was such an interesting sight - you had songs and then you had this solid blob in the middle of it.

why in the world is it still under patent?

You're not understanding how patents work.

For drugs, the drug (chemical) itself is not patentable. The process used to make the drug IS patentable. That's what's actually patented.

You see, part of the problem with making chemicals is the process you use. You want a process that uses little energy (energy costs money), has high yields (every chemical reaction has an equilibrium point and for some processes, it means your desired product is only 10% of the entire thing at the end), etc. etc. etc.

So when they tweak the process to produce slightly modified versions of the drug, that can generate a new patent because the patent describes exactly how to produce that drug - start with raw materials A, B, C, ... Z, then mix A and B and heat, ... etc.

In fact, it's possible for a generic drug manufacturer to come up with a different way of making the drug before the patents expire.

Android and Apple's own OSX are proof that this is not a death sentence to the company.

So, your example is to show that only Samsung is really making profits (HTC and the rest are struggling), and only by carpetbombing the market with hundreds of phones (seriously - Samsung has released 2 new smartphones per week in 2014, and 1 tablet per week).

And your other example is in a market that's declining (Mac sales are declining to stable, but far far less profitable than iOS).

Yeah, it may not be a death knell, but do we need to bring up the "Apple is dying" meme again? Your examples where companies are struggling to exist or product lines that have significantly diminished sales volume doesn't actually provide any backing to your statement. In fact, one could say that other than Samsung, Android isn't a moneymaker, and OS X shows a slow gradual fall.

GIven most of the data is what's reported by a browser, why don't browsers filter the data?

Especially if "Do Not Track" is set to on - why don't they limit the data to send back?

Fonts - Microsoft released 6 fonts for the web over a decade ago - just report those 6 across all platforms and maybe a few standard system ones (you can get this from the User-Agent anyways). Make it whitelist of fonts.

Sure, some data is gathered through plugins, but I thought many are now click-to-run so you can't get that data unless you specifically run those plugins.

Is there a reason why browsers like Firefox return everything?

As for CDs, they seem to be all over the place to me. Early on there were a lot of bad CDs because of bad engineering. Some were released with their vinyl oriented RIAA equalization intact, which is just plain dumb. People like to argue about technology, but I think recording engineering is an often overlooked factor in what comes out of your speakers. I have an MP3 album of the original cast recording of "Hair", and it sounds great over a good pair of earphones. It's not because of some kind of magical MP3 pixie dust, it's because the original recording was done so competently. If something is missing in the original master tapes, no amount of lossless encoding and copper-free speaker cables will conjure it back.

It's things like that which is probably where the "vinyl sounds better" craze got started - then it comes around again in the 90s because overcompressed (DRC) CDs sound noticably worse than the non-compressed vinyls.

As for tubes, it turns out people get very used to the "tube sound" (or rather, tube distortion) at normal levels, while overdriven tubes do sound harmonically better than clipping transistors (hence their use as guitar amp effects).