Daily Pulse: Friday's Big $tar War$ Premiere, Tom Brady Can Go to Work, Where's My 2015 Raise?

May the For$e Be With You: It’s a little-known fact that Star Wars impresario George Lucas made his fortune not as a successful filmmaker, but as a savvy negotiator who retained the merchandise rights to what 20th Century Fox didn’t realize would be one of Hollywood's most successful film franchises.

Fast forward: Merch isn’t an afterthought anymore. It’s the prequel.

At midnight, LucasFilms — now owned by Disney — boldly goes where no one has gone before (wait — wrong franchise) by selling merchandise tied to the opening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Which OPENS IN DECEMBER.

This premier starts at 12:01. Disney stores are, of course taking part. So are certain Toys ‘R Us locations, and Amazon. Target seems to be “showing the most ‘devotion to that ancient Jedi religion,’” reports CNNMoney, by extending the promotion to what it’s calling “Share the Force Saturday.”  

If there are lines, I will cry. But I might try to snag a BB-8.

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Another Win for Tom Brady: A federal judge has tossed out the NFL’s four-game suspension of Tom Brady for “DeflateGate,” which means the Super Bowl-winning quarterback will be taking the field after all when the New England Patriots host the Pittsburgh Steelers on opening day next Thursday.

The NFL says it will appeal. But as Ian Crouch notes in The New Yorker, the passage of time has somehow weakened the league’s ability to claim the high ground in its pursuit of Brady personally in what it alleges was a conspiracy to break the rules by deflating footballs in the AFC Championship game.

Back when the scandal broke some advised Brady to suck it up, take the hit and move on, Martha Stewart style. But there’s been a turnover: Now some wags are advising NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to take the money (a $1 million fine against the team) and run. 

The longer it stayed in the news, the more ridiculous the entire scandal began to seem,” Crouch writes. “The more the evidence from the N.F.L.’s investigation was parsed in print and on talk radio, the more flimsy and bizarre it appeared. And the longer that the N.F.L.’s clumsy handling of the case was put on display, the more that people began to turn against the league and its commissioner. Even before Thursday’s ruling, the seemingly impossible had happened: people from places other than New England and San Mateo, California, had begun, begrudgingly, to root for Tom Brady.”

When you try to kill the king, you better kill the king (with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson).

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US Workers are Overdue for a Raise: This was meant to be the year Americans started to see real wage growth. But it isn't happening despite historically-low unemployment, labor shortages, big-name employers like WalMart and McDonald's announcing increases for low-wage workers and other macro-economic conditions that for some reason haven't altered a four-year trend, writes Neil Irwin in The New York Times.

Irwin's best guess: "shadow" workers who are slowly re-entering the workforce and aren't actively seeking work in the traditional sense. In other words, if you miscalculate the supply, you'll miscalculate the demand.

"Perhaps employers are having to expend more effort to find their new workers, and paying more for the lowest-paid, entry-level staff, even as they are keeping the lid on pay increases for those at middle levels and are ultimately finding the staff they need after more difficulty than usual," Irwin speculates.

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He Cleans Up Real Good: News hates a vacuum, so this picture Jack Dorsey shared on Twitter made for some lively chatter today on cable TV.

Why? The Twitter board met Wednesday, and they haven’t named a CEO to fill the vacancy left when Dick Costolo stepped down on July 1, and Dorsey is the interim CEO and his formerly hipster beard is more trim than ever.

Or, as he claims, Geno is the only guy Dorsey trusts with his hair, and he happened to be in town for some work-related meetings. No biggie.

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Nothing to Do? Spanish researchers working with telecommunications giant Telefónica say they've identified some signals from your smartphone behavior that reveals when you are bored.

If this idea is viable it could introduce a new criteria for the push alerts we love to hate — not based on the time of day, or your stated interests, but the moments when you, personally, are most open to suggestion.

The science reported by Laura Hazard Owen at NiemanLab may be sketchy but the idea is crystal clear: Learning how to get your attention without becoming a nuisance is is a Holy Grail for publishers and marketers.

We are in the infancy of understanding notification protocol. Smart phones made them a mobile fact of life, but smart watches have upped the ante and opportunity; some early users of Apple Watch were annoyed by the alerts which were now making their wrists vibrate like a cheap hotel bed. 

We all know that too many alerts are terrible. But what's not as well appreciated is that too few are worse: They are the definition of mini missed opportunities. Some readers of this article may not have learned of it were it not for a notification from the Pulse app.

Just as publishers try to target ads — so you won't be annoyed by what's irrelevant and block them altogether — it makes perfect sense to target opportunity. And if you are "bored" whatever they want to show you will likely get a better reception.

Distilling rules that define human boredom so a machine can step up is easier said than done. But it's a fantastically worthy engineering pursuit.

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• Missed the last update? Then check out Isabelle Roughol's 'SAT Scores Drop, A Cheaper Tesla on the Way, Chinese Soldiers Out of a Job'
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Cover Art: New England Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady arrives at federal court to appeal the National Football League's (NFL) decision to suspend him for four games of the 2015 season on August 12, 2015 in New York City. The NFL alleges that Brady knew footballs used in one of last season's games was deflated below league standards, making it easier to handle. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)