I would imagine that in many places, especially smaller ones, non-competes aren't something that anybody actually plans on enforcing.

Either someone who's afraid of getting blamed should something "bad" happens or some lawyer piles on the broadest and most restrictive terms they can come up with and everyone signs it and then promptly forgets about it.

Only when something actually bad happens do they go digging and remember "Oh hey, he signed this".

You mean personal responsibility might actually work versus assuming that the "system" will protect you or guarantee your safety?

I've always suspected that the telcos took a huge cut of third party billing. Which of course is why they make it possible, don't call attention to it in billing and play the ignoramus when it comes to the basically fraudulent nature of the whole situation.

The cell carriers are better about removing the charges and refunding multiple months of charges (well, at least 2-3) as well as being able to block them. Qwest was always terrible on our commercial accounts about refunding crammed charges and claimed they couldn't block them.

I'm glad to see the FTC do this and I think they should go so far as to actually ban the practice outright, at least as practiced. If they can do it the default should be "blocked" as a billing status on all accounts. Third party billers with a high degree of fraud complaints should be banned and their names forwarded to the FTC for criminal prosecution.

On the flip side, it seems so lucrative and low risk I wonder how I could get in on the action.

A better and more sweeping example would be working for a "closely-held business" run by Christian Scientists, who could contend that they should be excused from having to cover any care except from a practitioner.

This premise would also make killing all but one of every set of identical twins/triplets/etc. legal.

Talk about a headline from the No Screaming Shit Department, of course happier programmers are going to do a better job. There's no motivation to do your job well when you're miserable. That's why the team dynamics are more important than individual skill. I've seen one hot-shot programmer with great coding skills and horrendous personal skills totally undermine the team dynamic. No amount of skill makes up for being an arrogant ass.

I've done a couple of projects with engineering companies including one at a power plant. From what I've seen, the thing that tends to lead from air gapping to lack of airgapping is support.

The engineering companies don't have the IT infrastructure experience or skills in their engineering practice. They hired me to do basic stuff like SAN setup, switch configuration, VMware, etc.

The engineering company is required to provide support for their subsystem for a period of a couple of years and this includes everything IT related. Their office is hundreds of miles from the plant so problems with the IT environment require them to fly someone out. This is expensive, the guy who goes out has limited troubleshooting and they turn to me.

But they don't want to pay for my services on site, so ultimately they end up ungapping the environment so it can be supported with less cost. They have some security -- VPN only and possibly other restrictions which limit VPN connectivity, but they break the air gap.

They could maintain the air gap, but it would cost money -- support and travel costs, etc.

Ideally the engineering company would make IT systems part of their practice, but I think a lot of engineers have an "I'm an engineer" mentality which makes them they're good at everything, so they see this as unnecessary. They could negotiate with the plant to engage their IT resources, but that would cost them money.

One of the pictures seemed to show a poster with odds for some kind of gambling game. Maybe some kind of issue with licensing or maybe even some kind of organized crime problem?

Back when I processed computers to go to surplus I would DBAN the hard drives and install FreeDOS so that the guys at Surplus could show the customers that the computers would actually boot.

Lots of great ideas if you're building a new house.

Retrofitting is much harder. Since I'm not moving I think about the best option would be a central exhaust fan with ducts in every ceiling.

I'm still intrigued by the idea of some kind of heat pump in the walls tied to an earth-based heat sink for mitigating solar heating, but maybe just thicker walls and better insulation is saner overall.

I quit using Facebook six months ago, but for a couple of years was a regular user.

The "newsfeed" always struck me as enormously manipulated, with Facebook constantly altering the algorithm that determines what you're shown. Even nontechnical users would comment about this, wondering why they didn't see some posts from some people some times.

Some of this may have been benign, trying to figure out what order to display posts relative to relationships, posting frequency, sort of ordinary attempts to sort out "importance".

But I'm sure there was commercial manipulation -- ranking user comments with links to advertising-affiliated sites higher than non-affiliated sites, downranking links to sites likely to lead a person to shorten their Facebook session, etc.

All of this could be considered "manipulation" even though there might not be one single motivation behind it and not all the factors may be even focused on a specific outcome.

I sometimes wonder if there couldn't be some kind of way to cool the exterior of the house to somehow shed the solar-induced heating.

Our house, built in the mid-1950s and insulated in the attic crawlspace with blow-in insulation in the mid-70s, gets uncomfortably warm on sunny days even if the temperature doesn't get much above 80F. After sunset it seems to radiate heat, keeping the interior spaces above 80 well after midnight and downright uncomfortable until 2 AM.

If there was some way to absorb the heat and dump it into the ground it might keep the interior 5 degrees cooler.

I've also thought it would be nice to have some kind of whole-house forced air ventilation, like a central exhaust fan with ducts in every top level room to draw warm air out and allow cool air in through the windows.

The best earbuds I've ever owned. They stay in the ear, sound quality is excellent and the tangle/twist factor isn't bad considering the skinny round cable.

They were like $8 when I bought them from Amazon. I ended up buying six more pair of them they were so good. I have a set in the car, my laptop case, a pair by the door for walking the dog and a couple still in the sealed package.

I just looked them up, still $8.99 with Prime delivery. Maybe I should pick up a couple more just in case.

But there IS a free lunch -- wind generators already built that sit idle when the wind blows because there's no grid capacity for the power. Let them spin and create storable, transportable energy.

The alternative letting them sit idle, doing nothing.

Sure, pumped water is better, provided you have the geography and a reservoir handy. Most places don't.

Measures of energy efficiency are meaningless if you're using renewable energy when it would otherwise go unused. The only real question in terms of efficiency is the cost and operational complexity of the facilities, especially in light of the gas yields from fracking.

The Germans have a plant that makes 300 cubic meters of methane per day from 6.6MW of power. The Alta Wind Energy Center can generate 1.3MW -- a scaled version of the German plant could make 50,000 cubic feet of gas a day. That's maximum output, but even if you could only get access to 10% of the wind power you're still creating over a million cubic feet of natural gas a year with energy you could generate but otherwise could not input into the grid.