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That impersonal, and rather boring, sentence was brought to you by the robot part of my brain.*  It’s the written equivalent of what most of us will be receiving a lot of on our phones this election season: rob calls. The Federal Trade Commission wants to crack down on those dinner-interrupters (the REAL BILL CLINTON always waits for dessert to make a call). Telecom and marketing companies are being summoned by the FTC to an October meeting on the practice. The summit is probably not going to stop the onslaught calls from robot Romney and Obama; instead it will focus on companies that continue to make illegal rob calls using fake caller ID numbers, usually resulting in some sort of scam for your hard-earned cash.

This type of en masse calling officially became illegal in 2009, and as the BBC writes, “The [FTC] said it had already imposed penalties totaling $41m since the change in the law.” But, just as the sun sets in the west, hucksters will huck, bilkers will bilk, and grifters will grift. The bad guys keep trying to outsmart the system. The FTC wants your input too. On July 17, that’s next Tuesday, you can tweet questions to @FTC or comment on the commission’s Facebook page.

*The implant was done as an outpatient procedure and didn’t hurt a bit! Scarring is minimal and I help calculate Pi while I sleep.