>> How is that home entertainment hasn’t changed in what, like a decade? What was the last big innovation? Laser tag.

He lost me there. Have you ever heard of Nintendo's Wii? Or the billions of people who started gaming on smart phones? Or Netflix? Or...

Wait...I thought scientists had "given up"
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

>> Kathleen Rice says motorists who are caught texting while driving

And convicted. So, this rule will only apply to the lower and middle classes who can't afford the lawyers to beat the ticket down to some other charge, then?

>> great state of New York

Citation needed.

>> Those where (X) not (Y). Turn in your geek card

Syntax error in query expression.

Wessels.

Agree. I think this was the fad that finally allowed me to give up Facebook. Just looking forward to signing on one more time in mid-February and replying to all my friends' challenges with, "sorry, I've been offline for a while, but if you're still up for it I'd be happy to kick in a dollar."

Meanwhile in the Ukraine...or is it Russia now? (Anyone at NATO looking at that in between Swordfish showings?)

I tried the free/open source route on video editing and ended up falling back to a commercial tool (MAGIX Movie Edit Pro). I still use Camtasia at home. For me, the key things that saved me time ($$$) when looking at commercial tools were:
- ability to quickly integrate still shots and movies (without a separate save/load process like some editors - e.g., VSDC)
- ability to see the voice-over waveform (makes it very easy to close up dead spaces, do in-line retakes and edit out "ums" and stumbles)
- ability to control every audio track independently (without an explicit "split the original video" step)

I just took another look out there for a quick project at work and STILL ended up with a non-open-source (but free) editor in VSDC (and CamStudio 2.7 for screen recording), but I'd be embarrassed to put my name on the resulting videos if they weren't just for internal use.

Look at the graph in TFA. Only 35% are still working by 5pm. By contrast, 45% are working by 7:30am. So...why isn't the "standard workday" the 45%-to-45% mark of 7:30-4:30?

>> Obama will be breaking out his Red pen anytime now

I'd love to see the transcript of their next call.
Obama: "Putin, but why?"
Putin: "Because fuck you, that's why."

But I won't, so I'll have to comfort myself with some classic Clinton triangulation, probably coming out on Friday.
H.Clinton: "I knew Romney was right about Russia, but it wasn't my place to defy my President as Secretary of State."

>> ad development is more like a crap shoot than a science

Crap shoots (e.g., deterministic systems) can be science too. Think of particle physics. Or today's story about the "one in decades" chance to film moving stones.

The "science" in marketing (focus groups, crowdsourcing, testing, brand affinity, etc.) can be used to take a pile of ".00001% successful" ideas to (let's say) "2-3% successful" ideas...which can still be valuable if each idea takes $10K to try but could bring in millions if successful.

>> It could benefit marketers or anyone who wants to spread a message.

The multi-billion dollar marketing industry is WAY ahead of you. We are well aware of memes (as self-perpetuating brands or slogans) and have been successful launching quite a few of our own on behalf of our well-heeled customers for the past 80 or so years, e.g.,

"Bud" "Wise" "Er"
"So easy a caveman could do it."
"... Burma Shave"
"War on Women"

So...we're good over here. Why don't you just send that $1M back to the taxpayers?

#1: Scumblr: Ruby-based, web-configured application that allows searching the Internet for sites and content of interest. Includes libraries for sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
#2: Workflowable: Ruby gem that routes different kinds of detections from Scumblr to specific processes.
#3: Sketchy: takes screenshots of web finds for Scumblr.

(I might be a little off, but the Karma gods will surely reward me.)

>> area around Fermilab hasn't been rural for at least 20 years

I'd say "at least 40." 20 years ago I attended a high school program there - an hour away using mostly four-lane, stop-lighted streets.

The "rural" part's just part of a decades-long marketing campaign to avoid alarming the millions of semi-illiterate residents nearby. E.g., "if cows can live on top of a nuclear accelerator, then you can too."