The officers took with them his picture and some intelligence: he's missing part of two fingers on his left hand. He doesn't go anywhere without his girlfriend, who's four or five months pregnant. They also thought Flesher might be with his one-armed brother, but neither man could be found. They crept up driveways and surrounded the homes, guns at the ready, to no avail. He wasn't anywhere they expected.

Here's the treatment for a new country music song.

U.S. Marshals nab hundreds in warrant operation or Another Country Music HIT!

There were people who wanted to make sure this event didn't go off as planned, and I'm very proud it was able to go off despite the change of venue," said Drew Johnson, president of Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a libertarian think tank that partnered in the launch. "There have been a lot of attempts to quiet us in our findings about global warming alarmism so it's not surprising it would happen to this event.''

yes, global warming alarmism. must be the same science that's used to float that balloon!

I cannot wait to see this skewered on the Colbert Report.

Global warming skeptics launch air attack on Gore

NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the "dark triad" persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

File under "bunk".

Bad guys really do get the most girls

The Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series (NEETS) was developed for use by personnel in many electrical and electronic related Navy ratings. Written by, and with the advice of, senior technicians in these ratings, this series provides beginners with fundamental electrical and electronic concepts through self-study. The presentation of this series is not oriented to any specific rating structure, but is divided into modules containing related information organized into traditional paths of instruction.

Complete electronics curriculum.

Davidson College Instrumentation Specialist - NEETS

Cyan Banister's Zivity seemed a natural choice to participate at the second Bay Area Girl Geek dinner, a networking event celebrating women in tech.

Nerdfight: Zivity sparks Girl Geek porn panic

"I had spent a lot of my time living a bachelor life. It was a lot of fun but I never seemed to meet the right woman. In my thirties, I dated a woman for four years but she didn't want a family. When we split up, it struck me that I was already 36 and that I couldn't spend my whole life partying.

"I do think that men have some form of biological clock. It's not the same as a woman's, obviously, but it really did feel that I'd reached that time of life when it was right to have a kid.

"But it took a traumatic experience to bring this home."

yep.

Father's Day: Single, male, broody?

Google's cupcake princess, Marissa Mayer, and Kevin Rose, the playboy of the Webhead world, would make an awfully cute couple. Not romantically — the two are dating other people at the moment. But we hear Mayer is pushing hard for an acquisition of Rose's Digg, for a price below $200 million.

Or Memestreams for let's say $2M.

Rumormonger: Is Google about to swallow up Digg?

Um, I would venture to guess that 90% of the articles on Memestreams are generated by this user. If this is indeed a human, I'd like to know what they do for a living, other than read articles online and post them on Memestreams. I check the site almost daily and there's absolutely no way I could ever read the amount of material generated by this user. Much less absorb it, comment on it, and pontificate about it. What's up?

Is possibly noteworthy possibly a bot?

The album, which became available for download just after 3 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, appears to represent the first time a superstar act has distributed an entire album without any opportunity for people to pay for it. Its release comes two months after the band issued the instrumental album “Ghosts I-IV” and allowed fans to obtain a portion of it for free or the entire recording for $5. Before that, the British rock act Radiohead broke with convention by offering its 2007 album, “In Rainbows,” online under a tip-jar-style setup in which people could name their own price — including zero.

Mr. Reznor’s new offer could serve as another test of how the easy availability of free music online affects subsequent CD sales and other money-making opportunities. “The Slip” will not be sold on CD or vinyl until at least July, according to representatives for the band. But the free digital version could stoke interest for Nine Inch Nails’ recently announced concert tour. Already, radio stations have shown interest in “Discipline,” a song from “The Slip” that was released about two weeks ago.

This is still very much an experiment and I reckon one that is ultimately going to fail. While NIN has probably net profited from the release of Ghosts, probably why releasing The Slip for free was done, it still remains to be seen if it maintains or grows his revenue stream from the subsequent tour and follow on releases. The thing that's been missing from this whole shebang is what record companies do best: promotion.

Most of the promotion that's been gotten for this album has been its novel approach. But what happens when it's the 60th album to be released this year in this fashion? NIN won't even make a blip on the newsfeeds, especially because it's not a MoR pop act. One thing that I noticed during With Teeth and even Year Zero was that I heard singles and saw promotion. Survivalism was in constant rotation on Sirius, Music Choice, MTV, and all over iTunes. Same for the other singles from With Teeth. I also saw billboards at HMV and Virgin in a few major markets (NYC, Chicago, and Detroit). But I haven't seen jack shit for Ghosts and haven't heard Discipline on any outlet. I don't expect to hear material from Ghosts on radio outlets because it is decidedly non-radio friendly.

That's not to say that gimmicks like the promotion for Year Zero aren't effective. But it's a very crowded marketplace and not every artist can pull something like that together for every release. The point being that the system that's currently used by the labels, for all its trappings (ahem... payola), WORKS. It gets product to the table and pushes sales and that's ultimately what an artist needs to break through the noise (no pun intended). If you go independent, and you're not investing a good chunk of your proceeds into marketing and promotion (just like a label that's fully supportive of your release will be doing), then you are playing a zero sum game. Probably a negative sum game, because ultimately only your fans will buy the product, and that's a shrinking market for every artist unless you are delivering LCD hits time after time. Also, this can only be possible for an established artist. I do not see a way that a new artist can break in this fashion. They simply won't get enough exposure in a mass space long enough to build a fan base.

I'm no fan of the patron model used by the record labels. BUT, if this is really going to work, NIN and Coldplay and others need to make sure that they are working the promotion angle enough to ensure success. The economics of which I can't see working for an artist on a case by case basis. How are you going to compete with the economies of scale that the label offers for these services? It's like building my own little data center in a wiring closet compared to IBM.

Nine Inch Nails Album Is Free Online

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Best. Quote. Ever.

Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital