The summary is misleading; the act will probably pass on Tuesday, and the provisions will be restored. It's depressing how completely dishonest this story is.

Yep, you've hit it on the head: the fashion world heavily depends on hyperspecific brands. A parent company may own an immense number of outlet identities that aim to cater to a specific submarket. Hot Topic is a good parent company for ThinkGeek because their model is already built around faddish, meme-driven trends (as you said), but the two target audiences have little enough overlap that this will be a substantial diversification to their marketing reach.

It's exhaustingly parodical—and entirely targeted at those who are sick of the book. Jasper Fforde has been hailed as a suitable compatriot to Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Judging by covers, etc.

Extending on this, there is at least one book where time travel is invented following the discovery of a recipe for unscrambling eggs.

...well, maybe they weren't happy with the specifics of the Nationalist-Socialist platform. (I bet it was the anti-smoking mindset.) It's not quite as if neo-Nazis have a monopoly on profound racism, or even a monopoly on holocaust denial. Sometimes it's just desirable for the sake of some local variety of nationalism to pretend the Jews weren't as abused during World War 2 as they actually were.

...But it's okay, because he actually died years ago; no one has bothered to check because he continues to emit information.

Vigorous!

Maybe unlimited storage of email text?

I believe at that point the poster child was OpenSSL/SSH, not a kernel.

Right, which is why I added the second sentence. My point is that it could've been phrased in a manner that avoids implying Moscow is a trap, e.g. "unable to return home." I'm sure there are schools of propaganda training that are more subtle and don't pooh-pooh that sort of structuring, but at the very least it implies some restraint on the parts of the authors away from being a proverbial anti-US slant.

I'd really love to see some examples—I've been watching demo competitions for years and I can't recall any efforts that really focused on authentic portrayal of humans.

Yes, I'm very aware that demoscene groups form (often very excellent) game companies, but I don't think any of those endeavours have resulted in products with anything like the quality shown in the video.

And! And: it says Snowden is "trapped" in Moscow, which is not very agitprop-friendly. Workable, but not exactly jingoism.

What does that really matter? Almost by definition, a demoscene prod involves clever choices in what to make and display on screen in order to achieve an effect. I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.) The achievement of this video isn't diminished by the achievements of the scene, nor vice-versa.

...I think you're the first person in history to call Windows 8.1 "good" and Windows 2000 "bad." What's your secret?