Mattalyst

just down right sick

feigenbaumsworld:

Oh, it was a banner fucking year at the old Bender family.

It's that time again: Steam's taken the wrap off of its annual winter sale, meaning tons of discounts on great games starting now through January 2nd. Unlike the "Exploration Sale" last month , this one's the real deal, complete with flash sales, community choice discounts, and more.

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gifsboom:

Video: MorpHex MKI

drilpencils:

(art by edward steed, words by dril)

"Someone killed 12 people and shot another 70 people at the opening night of Batman: The Dark Knight. They kept that movie in the theaters. You issue an anonymous cyber threat that you did not have the capability to carry out? We pulled a movie from 18,000 theaters," cybersecurity expert Peter W. Singer says of Sony's spineless response in an interview with Vice.

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Pulp Nintendo

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why-i-love-comics:

World’s Finest #51 - “The Amazing Talents of Lois Lane!” (1951)

Written by Alvin Schwartz
art by Al Plastino

justice4mikebrown:

#AskACop 

The most wonderful time of the year

Kevin Poulson has a good article up on Wired about how the FBI used a Metasploit variant to identify Tor users.

There are a lot of overwrought hawkish reactions to the news about Cuba, but Elliott Abrams’ response may be the most risible:

The American collapse with respect to Cuba will have repercussions in the Middle East and elsewhere—in Asia, for the nations facing a rising China, and in Europe, for those near Putin’s newly aggressive Russia. What are American guarantees and promises worth if a fifty-year-old policy followed by Democrats like Johnson, Carter, and Clinton can be discarded overnight?

To call this mindless would be generous. This takes a typical hawkish loathing of diplomatic engagement and mixes it together with absurd beliefs about “credibility” to create a completely irrational reaction. Restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba isn’t going to have negative “repercussions” around the world. For one thing, persisting in a useless policy towards Cuba doesn’t tell us anything about Washington’s willingness to back up its guarantees elsewhere in the world. It does hint that the U.S. is eventually capable of recognizing policy failure when it is staring it in the face, and that has to be modestly reassuring to our allies and regional neighbors.

If there are any repercussions from this decision, they are all likely to benefit America. Latin American governments will have less of a reason to fault U.S. policy towards Cuba. The U.S. will be able to demonstrate that it is still capable of resuming relations with states that it has previously treated as pariahs, and that might make U.S. diplomacy more effective in other places. Resuming relations with a close neighbor is the obvious thing for the U.S. to do. That is not going to make any U.S. guarantees anywhere in the world less meaningful. So the U.S. loses nothing by scrapping part of its failed Cuba policy. Acknowledging the failure of a policy that the rest of the world knows to be worthless doesn’t damage America’s standing with anyone. Normalizing relations with an old adversary doesn’t undermine guarantees to any other state. It does tell the rest of the world that the U.S. is getting closer to eliminating another worthless policy left over from the Cold War.

seriocopulo:

I’ll bite.

The US and Cuba announce moves to normalise relations in a major policy shift, following the release by Cuba of US contractor Alan Gross.

If you generally eat a heart-healthy diet, then you might have one fewer factor to worry about: the "glycemic index" of the carbs you eat, new research suggests.

"Limited edition" boxes of excrement are fetching $20-30 USD on eBay

Hello,

This next April, I will be getting married to the man of my dreams and we will be having the most wonderful storybook wedding that Allentown, PA has ever seen. The icing on the cake is sweet, but there's one thing that would be even sweeter than that. Traditionally, bridesmaids' hold bouquets; in our wedding, I want them to hold corgis.

Unfortunately, I do not have enough corgis for my bridesmaids. I require six more in order to make this dream come true. I'm looking to rent six corgis for roughly two and a half hours during the ceremony. Because this a my dream wedding, price is negotiable and I appreciate your understanding. Please reach out to me if you have six sociable corgis which you would be willing to rent out. These animals would be treated perfectly, and I would love to get us all together to familiarize ourselves with each other.

In addition to pay, I would be happy to also share some cake with you.

An anonymous reader writes: We keep hearing about the revolutionary properties of graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon whose physical characteristics hold a great deal of promise — if we can figure out good ways to produce it and use it. The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of graphene and its discoverer, Andre Geim, as well as one of the physicists leading a big chunk of the bleeding-edge graphene research, James Tour. Quoting: "[S]cientists are still trying to devise a cost-effective way to produce graphene at scale. Companies like Samsung use a method pioneered at the University of Texas, in which they heat copper foil to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in a low vacuum, and introduce methane gas, which causes graphene to "grow" as an atom-thick sheet on both sides of the copper—much as frost crystals "grow" on a windowpane. They then use acids to etch away the copper. The resulting graphene is invisible to the naked eye and too fragile to touch with anything but instruments designed for microelectronics. The process is slow, exacting, and too expensive for all but the largest companies to afford. ... Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Monday morning, The Smoking Gun released a damning exposé on Sandra McElroy, the woman previously known only as Witness 40 in the Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s grand jury hearing. Her testimony–which conflicted with other witness accounts of Michael Brown having held his hands up in the air at the time of the shooting–perfectly corroborated Wilson’s account of the incident, and had been held up by Fox News personality Sean Hannity as evidence of Wilson’s innocence. In fact, it is very likely that her testimony was a major factor in Wilson not being indicted.

There had already been some questions as to McElroy’s reliability during the trial, due to some extremely racist statements on social media, in her journal and elsewhere, the fact that she was not on medication for her bipolar disorder, and the fact that she admitted to having had a serious head injury in a car accident which made her memory a little fuzzy.

McElroy testified that she saw, with her own eyes, Michael Brown charging into Darren Wilson. Which, let’s just say it, is an absurd thing that no one would do. She was also notable for her weird journal entry about how she was learning to not refer to black people as “n****ers” but as “people.”

However, it turns out she was almost definitely lying. In fact, there is almost no chance that she witnessed the encounter at all.

McElroy, despite having been a vocal supporter of Wilson on social media in weeks following the incident, did not report having been a witness to police until four weeks after the shooting occurred.

The Smoking Gun reports:

In the weeks after Brown’s shooting–but before she contacted police–McElroy used her Facebook account to comment on the case. On August 15, she “liked’ a Facebook comment reporting that Johnson had admitted that he and Brown stole cigars before the confrontation with Wilson. On August 17, a Facebook commenter wrote that Johnson and others should be arrested for inciting riots and giving false statements to police in connection with their claims that Brown had his hands up when shot by Wilson. “The report and autopsy are in so YES they were false,” McElroy wrote of the “hands-up” claims. This appears to be an odd comment from someone who claims to have been present during the shooting. In response to the posting of a news report about a rally in support of Wilson, McElroy wrote on August 17, “Prayers, support God Bless Officer Wilson.”

So there’s that.

There’s also the fact that McElroy had originally told officers that she was in Ferguson–30 miles from her home–because she was visiting and old friend, but had the wrong address and her cell phone wasn’t working, and had witnessed the incident when she got out of her car to smoke a cigarette. She later said that the reason she was there was because she was going on weekend sojourns to black neighborhoods in hopes of learning to think of black people as being people. Which is a rather odd thing to do for anyone, but especially McElroy, given that even after she reported having witnessed the incident to the police, McElroy was posting shit on social media like “But haven’t you heard the news, There great great great grandpa may or may not have been owned by one of our great great great grandpas 200 yrs ago. (Sarcasm) [sic].”

McElroy is also a felon, having had a bit of trouble with passing bad checks in her past. Which she claims to have done by accidentally using the wrong checkbook.

For me, however, the evidence I found most damning was the fact that this is far from the first time McElroy has attempted to insert herself into a national news story.

In 2007, Shawn Hornbeck was rescued from kidnapper Michael Devlin (Memory refresher, this is the case in which “psychic” Sylvia Browne told Hornbeck’s parents on the Montel Williams show that their son was dead and then it turned out he wasn’t). Following his rescue, McElroy went to the media claiming that she had seen Hornbeck with Devlin, reported this to the police and was ignored. Unsurprisingly, police determined this never happened. She also claimed that Devlin had given her photos of other boys, including Charles Arlin Henderson who had gone missing in 1991. Police concluded that this was a complete fabrication as well.

After reading this entire exposé, which I highly recommend doing, there is no doubt in my mind that McElroy was fabricating her entire testimony. I can’t even see how it would be possible.

It’s also not possible to know if omitting McElroy’s testimony would have resulted in an indictment of Officer Wilson, although that’s probably a distinct possibility.

[Source: TSG]

Read the full article on theworstthingsforsale.com.

memeguy-com:

Some signs exist because theyre practical Others have a hell of a story behind them

This past November was the ninth warmest globally in a record extending back to 1880, according to data released today by NASA. | Update 12/15/14: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came out with its own, independent report today. It ranks November 2014 as the 7th warmest on record. Their data suggest that 2014 is still on track to be the warmest year globally on record. | This represents a bit of a cool-down from October, which was the warmest globally. What happened?