Andymatic

Month: February 2011

  • The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

    Comment from Metafilter about this story about the theft of Half-Life 2’s codebase from Valve Software by a young hacker: I’ll cast the first stone. Fuck this guy. If he was a black kid in Chicago stealing stereos you’d have no problem putting him away, but a white kid doing computer crime and suddenly we […]

  • House Votes to Continue Spending Millions in Taxpayer Dollars on NASCAR

    House Votes to Continue Spending Millions in Taxpayer Dollars on NASCAR Taxpayer dollars on family planning is a waste- but spending on NASCAR? That's a keeper.

  • This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

    Got this at the Borders bankruptcy sale. 2 economists walk through 800 years of financial collapse and insolvency. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly Amazon.com: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (9780691142166): Carmen M. Reinhart- Kenneth Rogoff: Books

  • Struggling Musical To Bring On Co-Director

    Bedtime for Taymor. Things are so shitty they're bringing in someone else to clean up her mess. Struggling Musical To Bring On Co-Director In what could be viewed as a vote of no confidence in director/creator Julie Taymor's ability to fix Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark- the producers of the creatively flailing Broadway musical (which […]

  • The Science Behind Blue's Clues

    From The Onion’s AVClub: The show drew on decades of studies about the success of Sesame Street and other educational programming. For a long time, the conventional wisdom in academia toward educational television held that TV-watching itself was such a passive activity—and the medium so inherently distracting—that there was no way children could derive any […]

  • Fred Phelps from Westboro Church is a Con Man

    “Whether he believes his posters or not is irrelevant. He’s using this as a moneymaking scheme.”

  • CIA Relied on Con Man's Shitty Software

    Remember all that bullshit about how there were hidden messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts? Yeah. It was bullshit. But they won’t release details due to national security concerns – not because they might have made huge mistakes: The software he patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts […]

  • Inside Planned Parenthood

    Via Metafilter: I get feedback from our patients, and the common thread that people are surprised at the respect with which we treat them. Over and over, I hear how impressed people are that we’re friendly, we’re clean, we don’t make them feel like bad people for accessing (STI services, birth control, abortion services). I […]

  • How to Afford 300,000 Teachers

    $5 billion in takehome: Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains – at 15 percent – due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded. If the earnings of […]

  • Chicagoans Dish on Giordano's Pizza Bankruptcy Filing

    There was a always a wait to buy the most notable and expensive pizza in the city and they are filing for bankruptcy. Something else is going on here. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20110219/tr_ac/7897238_chicagoans_dish_on_giordanos_pizza_bankruptcy_filing Chicagoans Dish on Giordano's Pizza Bankruptcy Filing