Non-compete clauses create a bind, be them enforceable or not.

See California, largest state in the union, setting the precedent. Colorado followed. Blue states.

And again, these were legislative acts.

Absolutely not. Every single employer I've had anything to do with since the early 2000's has required some kind of non-compete, including very small shops. I suspect it's the same for every "knowledge" worker.

I predict this will die a violent death in US courts. Every AG in every red state will be in one or more big zoom meetings by the end of the week preparing to kill this with fire. Don't expect this to be real for years, if ever. They're lining up the judges and injunctions right now. This is fucking with signed contracts and that isn't something that happens in the US without a public law voted on by a legislature, war powers or similar caliber maneuver.

Many of the great names in computing, both hardware and software, were started by motivated refugees from larger outfits, striking out on their own to pursue some market their employer failed to see. If there is an underestimate in any of this it's the positive impact it would have on opportunities for individuals. Just don't bank on it happening: if you make any actual decisions that put you at odds with some document you signed, understand that 10 years from now some corporate lawyer won't hesitate to wreck your world if this is all just an election year legal fiction.

Yes, no hate on Gnome. It's not my cup of tea, but I'm happy if others prefer it. The thing that inspires me, however, is how KDE has prospered, despite huge problems in its past. QT licensing issues back in the day are part of the reason Gnome exists. There was the 4.x debacle. Also, the dominant Linux distros "standardized" on Gnome, or Gnome derivatives.

By all rights KDE should have died long ago. All those issues have since been solved and KDE loyalists have hung in there for years. Now KDE is thriving, the major distros are all supporting it. It's a pretty cool story.

Didn't want that company anyways.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

Network equipment often runs some version of Linux, including big iron stuff like Cisco Nexus. And they are running a watchdog, which works similar to a dead-man's-switch in a train engine: If it does not get activated in regular intervals, it restarts vital services or even the whole system.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

I need to get my bank to include some Ts and Cs of my own on each automatic payment.

Maybe "by accepting this payment you agree not to be a douche..."

KDE has to be a thing for Fedora because there are a lot of KDE loyalists and distros really can't just forgo supporting them. KDE really is very good and its followers aren't going to tolerate Gnome. Canonical tried to kill Kubuntu in 2012, pulling funding and official support. Kubuntu not only survived it's thriving and is the best choice for Ubuntu based desktops today. Then there is SUSE, which has been tier 1 KDE since forever.

If that argument holds, the court will decide. But as with every contract, they can be ligitated if one side feels wronged.

A car is a tool to move people and stuff from A to B, and without fuel, it ceases to fulfill its promise, on which it was sold.

If we don't manage to use electricity to merge neutron stars, it's probably not feasible. Until then it's like making gold from lead by nuclear processes: doable, but the price per atom is not market compatible.