Kindles, and Nooks, and iPhones, iPods, iPads, MacBooks, and MacBook Airs, Lenovo ThinkPads, etc., etc., etc.

The summer before college (1978) I worked for an audio electronics manufacturer. I'd guess that most of the assembly line workers made little more than minimum wage.

I suspect that today, even if they wanted to, most companies here in the U.S. couldn't find enough workers willing to do that work for minimum wage, and even if they could, Foxconn, at let's say $1 an hour, is 1/10th the cost.

Now Foxconn is going to automate, presumably to further reduce their labor costs. Which then begs the question: Why can't Apple and Amazon build those same automated factories here? Then at least the 100 jobs to run the automated factory would be here, rather than in Taiwan or Shanghai.

But the answer is probably that even with automation, the cost of salary and benefits, including health care for those 100 people here would still dwarf the costs of doing in offshore.

You mis-spelled FAUX News.

If it gets out of control, we just need the equivalent of either a laser pointer or catnip to bring it to its knees.

What occurs to me is that 15-20 years ago, when Sun iron dominated Wall Street, is that all the Sparcstations came IIRC with 10baseT on the motherboard, and I don't recall there being faster NICs available. And even if there were, in a lot of cases all the machines slots were populated with graphics cards.

Then three things all sort of happened around the same time: Linux (kernel and user land) reached a level of maturity and stability, inexpensive 100baseT and later 1000baseT NICs became available, and Intel closed the CISC/RISC performance gap. I don't know when Sun started shipping faster networking, but if the only way to get it was to buy a whole new machine, as opposed to plugging in a $30 NIC, it isn't hard to imagine which way the purchasing decision would go, even for money-is-no-object Wall Street.

No surprise then that Linux whupped Solaris' butt. Sun didn't help things by dawdling on fixing known Solaris performance problems. By the time Sun fixed them it was too late; Linux had already gained a foothold.

Thanks. I put plenty of gusto into my exercise rides. Daily.

You did read what I wrote, didn't you? Because, yeah, mountain bikes don't pedal themselves up hills.

irregardless of the outcome

From TFA: Parachute, followed by retro-rockets, then lowered by a tether.

Yes, it's new. How do they measure how risky it is?

Translation: Apple's won't be at the top forever, any more than Microsoft's was.

Everyone wants to know what happens when SJ leaves. I suspect a lot of people will be shorting AAPL big time when he does.

And I don't wish for it, but there's no denying that SJ's health issues are in the forefront of everyone's thoughts.

Is that SJ and Tillerson duking it out, mano a mano?

Are they launching missiles at each other's corporate HQs?

No, I didn't think so. They're just minding their businesses and the stock market is setting a price on their shares. Hardly what I'd call battling it out. Strange metaphor.

Oh sure, and in three years when I move to the next job then I can perhaps move back where I started. Or somewhere else.

In the mean time I will have torn my children out of their school and away from their friends, made my wife's commute to her job longer, and I'll have sunk thousands of dollars in commissions to the realtor who sells my house, hopefully not at a loss, all for what?

So I can have a reasonable length bike ride to work nine months out of the year?

If that's what the pundits are suggesting, then they're even bigger fools than I already thought they were.

Not all computers are laptops? Really? I'll alert the media.

My desktop at work is configured to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. It doesn't have a lid either.

Clearly you're still young and haven't reached the phase of life where your metabolism slows down.

If I don't get at least an hour of strenuous, i.e. aerobic, exercise every day I gain weight.

And it's not like I eat a lot, or eat junk. If you'd told me 25 years ago how little I'd be eating today, I'd have laughed in your face.

There are no buses, subways, or trains that go anywhere near my office. The most direct route is 17 miles on freeways and what I consider to be bike unfriendly roads. Getting there on a bike on friendlier roads is probably more like 20 miles, and is probably at least a two hour trip each way -- not really how I want to spend 25% of my waking hours each day. Not to mention the prospect of riding 20 miles in a blizzard leaves leaves me cold, even if that's only a potential problem two months out of the year.

But thanks for playing.

I never shut my laptop off. I close the lid and it goes to sleep for the duration of my commute to and from work. If I don't close the lid it'll go to sleep after 30 minutes.

I only reboot after an update or upgrade that requires it. And then I only do it when I don't mind the wait, usually because I'll go off and do something else.

Boot-up time? Not an issue.