It's difficult to tell from the graphs on that page, but to me it looks like the peak for wages in the 70's would have occurred in the first half of the 70's. perhaps at the end of Nixon's administration or the beginning of Ford's. Wages wavered a bit after that but never again seemed to match the rise in productivity that happened from the end of WWII and the beginning of the 70's.

It really did refer to machine. When Watson named the company International Business Machines it manufactured all sorts of machines. Actual, real machines. Punch card tabulators, clocks, scales and cheese slicers. During WWII they even made rifles. At one time, machines were the heart of IBM.

Revenue from power systems was down 32% compared to a year earlier. If they don't improve soon they'll get sold just like System X.

They've still got System Z mainframe line, and I can't see them selling that business unit off, but they ought to just drop the M and call themselves 'International Business'.

Students have changed majors since there have been majors. What's the evidence that schools are enrolling more engineering majors recently than they have in years gone by?

If I had mod points I'd give you one. Back in the '80s and '90s that was the official line. All the creative jobs would remain in the US while we shipped all the boring and dangerous jobs overseas. Companies like Apple are the exception that prove the rule. From what I've seen, engineering jobs eventually follow manufacturing overseas when a company decides to offshore manufacturing. Maybe not all the engineering jobs, but certainly a large part of them. The decline in engineering employment in the US is related to the decline in its manufacturing capacity.

What evidence do you have that more people are applying for entry to engineering programs? It seems to me that your premise is likely only true if universities could be shown to enrolling significantly more engineering students over the years. If the number of people getting engineering degrees is any indication, the information in this article would indicate that universities have not significantly increased their engineering school enrollments. If anything they may be enrolling fewer engineering students overall.

The Samsung Chromebook is $250. The Acer C7 Chromebook, with a 320G hard drive, is $190. I purchased the Samsung for my wife when her laptop died. She's been very satisfied with it. She likes the size and weight, that it boots rapidly, lack of a fan, relatively cool operation, and that for her usage patterns the battery lasts all day. Outside of work all that she does on a computer is email and consume content from the web, so the Chromebook fits her needs extremely well.

Would new drugs be required to wait for the FDA to complete testing before being released? The FDA has barely enough funding to review studies the pharmaceutical companies produce, where would the extra money come from for it to do testing? If pharmaceutical companies are freed from the need to test would they flood the marketplace with so many new products that the FDA couldn't keep up? If the FDA's testing program can't keep up with the number of new drugs being introduced by drug companies, who sets the priorities of what's to be tested?

What kind of people did Jobs tend to hire? Could two Steve Jobs work together productively?

Your normal calling pattern would still be there even with the background noise of random calls. It would take a bit more processing to tease that pattern out, but it could still be identified. Calling random numbers would be more of an inconvenience for you and the people receiving those calls than the software analyzing your call patterns.

My thought when I saw this is that Keep's revenue model will be to encourage more people to store more data on Google Drive, resulting in more people going over the limit where Drive is free. Google isn't pushing a note keeping service, it's selling storage. Google may also be looking at the data it can extract from a service that it can then sell to advertisers and marketing companies. If Keep sells enough storage and produces sufficient revenue from the quality and quantity of data it generates it will stick around, if not it's a goner.

Yep, if you've got stairs in the building where you work get up an walk up and down stairs every 90 minutes or so. Ten minutes of stair walking is a bit of exercise. Last time I worked in an office it was in a building with four floors, with two flights of stairs for each floor and two more to the door to the roof. Over a nine or ten hour work day I could do about 40 minutes of stair climbing. And doing it in small amounts spread through out the day is better for you than doing it in one big session.