After spending all their money on cell phones, kids cannot afford to buy products advertised to them on Facebook.

The fact that Facebook's customer base is morphng into older folks only helps its business model of selling ads.

In a similar vein, I knew a prof who researched "Methods of getting out of having to do research" (I used quotes but this is really a paraphrase.)

I don't find anything wrong with such researchers. They are playing a game and earning a living.

My question is: How does such seemingly-ridiculous research get approved for funding? Can we not spend that money on greater good?

Wine may be perfectly crumulent, but I don't want it running on my network.
I'll wait until Netflix supports HTML 5, which should be fairly soon!

I would sooner buy a $35 Chromecast than install Windows emulation software (whether or not Wine is an emulator).

Electrons are point particles - modelled as zero-volume and massless. They might have no physical form. I am not surprised that our measures of them indicate perfect symmetry.

Stephen Wise was interviewed on a Canadian radio program this morning:
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2013/12/12/granting-rights-and-personhood-to-animals/

He wants this case to go up the legal court ladders. This would get him more press coverage and more profits from sales of his book. The cost to society of his failed attempt would be judges' wasted time. The cost to society of a ruling somehow favouring Wise would be less effective drug testing, for the chimps he is trying to "free" are used in medical research. Either way, it is lose-lose for human society.

I wish my cellphone were ...

For every economist, there is an equal and opposite economist.

Runaway - 1984 movie
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1803551001/

I'm afraid it's pick any one.

If I were to order a drink from a robot, I'd follow its rules. This might be as simple as raising my glass in the air twice - whatever the new protocol is programmed to be.
When I order from a person, I want eye contact with the bartender. This won't work with a robotic bartender because it would be new and everybody would be staring at it.
Now put my name down as one of the coauthors and get on with some real science.

The (negative) effectiveness of tinfoil hats may surprise you
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/archives/gsb-msg00128.html

Dual booting could be a popular option so that people can keep their old programs and data files. They should simply use Ubuntu for their web surfing and cloud activities. Keeping a separate drive or partition for shared data between the two OS's takes a small amount of time up front and makes the data sharing much easier.

At university, we used to use two modems on two phone lines to double our connection speed on a single computer.

I made up the statistic of course, but I wonder how many people the feds are going after. If it is an absurdly high number such as one sixth of Google's userbase, then we should pester our politicians to get this thing changed. If Google is prevented from disclosing the information, then we might as well assume it is at least a number so high that it embarrasses the government du jour.