The observer bias regarding areas of education here on Slashdot is really something to behold. In general I've seen 'liberal arts' described as the study of comparative literature, shake spear, latin etc. Generally liberal arts are 'soft', do not lead to jobs, never invent anything or bring in university research. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter horseshit.

We shall for a moment accept the Slashdot definition of liberal arts as not including things like math and science (more accurately in academia it just means 'not vocational'), so if we just look at a 'school of arts' we have fields such as the study of all languages and linguistics (my areas), politics and international studies, criminology, design, economics, psychology, environmental and developmental studies, journalism, sociology just off the top of my head.

The amount of people studying the sorts of things which incense slashdotters so much, the Latin majors etc, is actually pretty low. Vitally, arts-type degree holders often go into jobs in the workforce which are not directly related to their degree. The idea that this made their degree useless is, well, quite depressing really. The fact is, these graduates didn't get a job in spite of their liberal arts degree, they very often get jobs because of it.

Yet there's also a very great deal of direct interest in a number of the arts fields. You may not believe it but every academic conference I go to, companies queue up to entice us to internships and employment. At a recent conference in my area, I was struck by the number of tech companies (I specifically recall Google and eBay) that had open ended invites for internships for anyone involved in the discipline, lamenting the fact there weren't more students in the field.

My field within 'arts' is extremely rich in research, practical applications, and yes, vocational opportunities. Yes, things you use on your web sites, on your phone, in your car. I was specifically drawn to it because it was apparent just how much further we had to go and how I might make a real difference. Believe it or not, modern technology doesn't just have 'science' bits under the hood, they have things that human beings control and that's where we come in.

It may bend your head to discover that a good number of people within 'liberal arts' also consider themselves scientists and very often work on issues imminently more practical than majors in mathematics. Yet despite that, you will generally not find people within the arts that are derisive about the studying the hard sciences.

Perhaps if more of you had a wider human-focused education then you would see that science does not live in a vacuum and university education does not have to be exclusively focused on the skills you need for your first job.

(The ex electronics engineer that went back to university to study 'liberal arts')

Quite so. This is in fact exactly how it's done in Australia. In fact the price I'm charged on my HECS student loan is different for each of the units I've taken, depending on the department that runs them.

There is another critical difference to US education, we have an extremely generous fully public student loan system which covers the entire cost of our university education and is only repayable when earning above a certain threshold of earnings, and it's interest free. While I would imagine such a thing would be called communist in the United States, it's a great way of insulating students from higher costs of studying sciences, medicine and what have you.

Arguably the higher costs of science is often not reflected by potential higher earnings. For reasons other than cost, just as in the US, science tends to be less popular. To encourage take up in some areas deemed to be in particular demand, the terms of cost of education is assisted with government funding. Making it cheaper still, but since we don't really care how much university costs (it's a fraction of what you pay in the US and we have those loans), the encouragement extends to outreach to high-schools, cost-of-living scholarships, lower entry requirements and so on.

I don't know what it's like in the US but in the UK and Australia, and presumably elsewhere too, there are a great many schemes that are aimed at encouraging take up of in-demand professions. Things like scholarships, grants, lower fees or even exempted fees for a portion of a course. Outreach programs to high school, ensuring that students with lower-than-expected results are aware of their opportunities to apply for the in-demand professions.

I worked for a major computer manufacturer within marketing and engaged in a number of co-marketing projects with Intel. I say co-marketing, they would essentially consist of us coming up with something and doing the leg work and just having the invoices for anything billable land with Intel. They needed to approve what you were doing but the process was very easy. The way it worked, and the way it still works to my knowledge, is like this:

You buy Intel product and a fraction of the cost of buying those products ends up in a war chest for marketing. You can spend these funds by doing things like co-marketing activities or putting a logo on an advert (they would pay x% of your advert cost then) and so on and so forth. This is more common than just Intel, Microsoft does just the same. That's why there's a Microsoft slogan on every print advert. By the time you do both, you end up paying less than half the actual cost of the advert.

Now this is on one hand a reasonable system. Just like manufacturers have chucked in cash to co-fund ads with distributors since the beginning of time... On the other hand, that war chest is only there if you're buying their products. This makes the business case of buying stuff from the other guy all the more difficult. It means really you're advertising Intel stuff because, honestly, AMD isn't going to write any cheques. The fact that Intel's business is larger than just the CPU itself means you get economies of scale here too.

Is this anti competetive. Well, I think some aspect of it is. However most of it is just a symptom of the fact that it becomes easier to work with the really big guy. It has always been more pleasant to work with them than AMD. You get samples of stuff when you ask, you get marketing help, they run cool events, they actively assign a dude to look after your account who is a genuinely helpful human being. You get precisely none of that with AMD. In fact AMD, as a point of order, probably has the worst marketing set up I have ever encountered in my career. It was amusing when they bought ATI because they were probably the 2nd worst...

What's the solution here? It feels like it's a business that is having trouble with scale. AMD isn't big enough to 'compete' just because they make a CPU. They aren't anything near big enough. They need to consolidate into solutions (buying ATI was part of that obviously) and be able to offer manufacturers the same sort of product range and attractive business proposition as Intel does. It's not anti competetive, it just makes doing business with you more attractive.

What all of this really boils down to, and why I wont shed a tear for a huge fine such as the EU fine, is that the reason Intel is in the position is because of distinctly anti-competetive behavior in the past. I never experienced that myself but if you've become the dominent player through dirty tricks then cleaning your act up in recent times isn't realy good enough is it? Unfortunately even a billion euros is kind of shutting the door after the horse is bolted.