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Frogs do leap out of slowly warming water

Sorry to rain all over your simile.

Crazy libertarian conspiracy talk, Not real.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/ssabullets.asp

Please, not that Nova urban legend again. Geeze, when will it die?

In portuguese it means "new", btw.

That's because in Latin it means "new" and Portuguese, like Spanish, is a Romance language, descended from Latin.

However, the word "nova" is only a Spanish word in the sense that it's also an English word - both languages have adopted the astronomical term which was originally "stellum nova", meaning "new star". Which in turn was created to describe stars which suddenly appeared or became brighter.

"No va", however, is a perfectly good cynical term to apply to an automobile and I can think of plenty of English word and acronyms that are equally snarky (Fix Or Repair Daily, for example).

Please, not that Nova urban legend again. Geeze, when will it die?

In portuguese it means "new", btw.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

Guns are, however, what makes belligerent people dangerous. Hence the focus on extensive background checks.

No. Belligerent people are ALREADY dangerous. If they're going to be dangerous, they'll do it whether or not they have a gun, box cutter, knife, baseball bat, etc.

But the various mental defectives out there latch on to GUNS being the culprit and not belligerent assholes.

Yep, the numbers of belligerents going around with box cutters, knifes, baseball bats, and etceteras committing homicides proves that they would kill no matter what... Or wait, no it doesn't. Guess you better ask a mental defective to explain the difference to you.

It also doesn't disprove it either. According to Snopes the number of homicides committed by knives, etc. is considerably less than handguns. However the number of other objects used to commit murder is still a significant number. It also doesn't prove that the number of other weapons used would not increase if firearms were not available.

What I find particularly interesting is that the total number of homicides is considerably lower in all listed weapons except for "other". Even so, the total number of homicides for 2010 is slightly less (13,374) than the 1993 high for handguns alone (13,981). According to these numbers the total number of homicides in 1993 was 24,530. That's a decrease of 11,156. I wouldn't have thought the number had gone down and by such a significant amount. But the 24 hour news channels seem to keep us thinking that we're heading toward armageddon.

What would be interesting would be to see a publication similar to this one for more recent times. I wonder if the percentages are still the same.

Bullshit, pencil shavings get into equipment and short circuit things

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

Me holding up dripping keyboard: "Were you drinking coffee around this thing?"

Secretary: "No."

Were this an ideal world, her nose would have grown out about 2 inches.

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

1 pencils are a FIRE HAZARD in space
2 the pen in question was developed by Fisher and sold to NASA (and the russian counterpart)

Bullshit, pencil shavings get into equipment and short circuit things

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

They're where "Mobile homes" got their names from. http://www.snopes.com/lost/mobile.asp

Mod parent as flamebait, or maybe troll. Here's the truth; http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/baseballbats.asp

For those who won't bother to click, it's Firearms: 67.8%, Blunt Objects: 3.9%. As Snopes says, even if *every* blunt object homicide it by baseball bat, the parent's assertion is not just wrong, it's overwhelmingly wrong.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/russiansecurity.asp

I'd say that it is because most people could not care less and QWERTY is status quo. QWERTY will have to cause cancer before anyone cares enough to change it.

Good luck trying to change such a "standard" in a society that is still sizing its railroads to a Roman standard from 2000 years ago. ;-)

(It is interesting that Snopes doesn't actually debunk this myth. Instead, they explain why it's the reasonable outcome in a situation where there were weak reasons behind that width and no strong reasons to replace it with anything very different. So, while they explain why a lot of details you hear in the myth are dubious, the overall story is basically correct. QWERTY is just a more recent example of a similar phenomonon.)

For the same reason he tweeted about hitting people, showing off a gun and drugs, and generally cultivating his gangster/thug persona?

http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp

For the same reason he tweeted about hitting people, showing off a gun and drugs, and generally cultivating his gangster/thug persona?

http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp

For the same reason he tweeted about hitting people, showing off a gun and drugs, and generally cultivating his gangster/thug persona?

http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp

For the same reason he tweeted about hitting people, showing off a gun and drugs, and generally cultivating his gangster/thug persona?

http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/martin.asp

Explained here

If I could, I would try to convince the Romans of the past to stop building roads. The reason for this is that I've discovered that since the advent of roads, there has been such a phenomenon as road-side bandits, highway robberies, and even standing armies using this newly found infrastructure to lay siege to our vast empire.

They are also the reason for not being able to deliver larger rocket boosters.

what's really funny is that Obama, by his own words in autobiography, used racist words and held racist beliefs couple decades ago, moreover went to a church that taught hate and racism from the pulpit. so should Obama lose his job?

This is not true.

More people are killed by clubs and bats than rifles, yet we are more scared of rifles

[citation needed]

Re. Bush at the grocery store:

According to snopes.com, "Moreover, Bush had good reason to express wonder: He wasn't being shown then-standard scanner technology, but a new type of scanner that could weigh groceries and read mangled and torn bar codes."

snopes.com then says that The New York Times and several other major news organizations reviewed a tape of Bush's conversation at the grocery store. Only The New York Times writers thought Bush was really impressed. The writers for Newsweek, Time and NCR thought Bush was just making polite conversation.

If you can believe anything that is said by our politicians, yes they did indeed believe Iraq had WMD's. Not just the Republicans either:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp

Blaming the whole thing on Bush is scapegoating. The fact is that he had large bipartisan support. If you're going to be upset about the fact that we took out a tyrannical genocidal dictator, then at least be upset at the right politicians (namely all of them). Better yet, don't.

Czars? really You understand there are no czars, it is just a term to refer to high-level presidential appointments. The same appointments that every president has made. It is not an actual title.

And regarding Executive orders, Obama has far fewer then any other president in recent history.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/executiveorders.asp

The biggest thing is to have lots of "helper" agents in the middle looking with eyeballs. The problem is that our airports were built like shopping malls, intended to be a destination to pickup/ drop off people and have dinner, etc. they have few "compartments" to their designs for the passenger spaces.

The main problem is that the people who build that security system rather had a administrative/military background instead of a system engineering / security background.

Anyone who ever designed a pice of software knows that backdors ALWAYS DECREASE the security. And that if you pile up enough unconvinient security measures (TSA) that need to rely on backdoors (signing up for TSA pre, "TSA approved" locks that are DESIGNED to be easily opend without the proper key) to be useable, you're doing something completly wrong.

Sometimes I really wonder who designed that stuff. They obviously didn't have the big picture in mind and obviously never thought of the impact and consequences. Like a really small example: Shoe scanning. For the sake of the argument I'll asume that it is in some way usefull. But no one ever thought of how you're supposed to put your shoes back on (or off before the scan) while holding your coat, cabin luggage, clear bag with toothpaste, and your laptop removed from your cabin luggage.

A bench or a footrest behind the x-ray machine would be a simple measure to ease most of the stress at that checkpoint. Or returning your stuff on a tray/table/conveyor belt compartment where you can re-pack it without holding up the line.

Or perhaps just not man the x-ray scanner with complete no-brainers!

Last time I flew out of PHL, the guy in front of me in the line was walking on crutches. I would have expected an approach along the lines of "would you please sit over here while we scan your crutches" or "May I assist you through the metal detector while we scan your crutches seperatly". What I heard was "Do you need these?" What answer did he expect? "No I just wear them to pick up girls. Here's your sign."

You got that right, A.C. If these "documentarians" had done a smidgin of research, they would have found that the cartridges were destroyed long ago. So this means they are either too lunkheaded to have spent a small amount of time to find the relevant information, or they do know the truth and just want to cash-in on the legend and rumors.

Quote from Snopes:

Atari, stuck with millions of games and consoles that were largely unsellable at any price, sent fourteen truckloads of merchandise from their plant in El Paso, Texas, to be dumped in a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico in late September 1983. In order to keep the site from being looted, steamrollers crushed and flattened the games, and a concrete slab was poured over the remains.

It's another idiot who gets their news from Facebook:

Here's the hoax that was floating around.

But as it stands Monsanto is imune from liability.

Except that's not actually what the legislation does, but hey... FUD is always good, right?

Really, section 735 just stops the judicial system from interfering with the regulatory process. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the courts can't stop farmers from planting questionable crops. On the other hand, the courts can't be abused by farm-sponsored activists to slow down approval for crops that are tested and shown to be perfectly safe. Unfortunately, both of these situations happen routinely.

The article you linked says that the provision "grossly protects biotech corporations such as the Missouri-based Monsanto Company from litigation". However, this statement is incredibly misleading. The provision protects Monsanto from the delays of litigation affecting their product's approval. They're still liable for anything they were last week, but now the court can't say "We don't know what's going on, so we're overruling the experts and banning the scary technology".

Also keep an eye on your kidney.

http://www.snopes.com/science/well.asp

Unfortunately not it seems.

- Toast

HJED wrote:
> our gun license system works very well)

ORLY?

http://www.worldpublicunion.org/2013-04-05-NEWS-australian-gun-ban-resulted-in-higher-crime-rates.html

a bit sensationalist, but snopes supports some of the underlying figures:

http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp

and here's an analysis which concludes there were no significant effects:

http://www.ssaa.org.au/capital-news/2008/2008-09-04_melbourne-uni-paper-Aust-gun-buyback.pdf

(interesting definition of ``success'')

and here's another study which notes a marked increase in assault, robbery and sexual assault (rape):

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/?Article_ID=17847

A bunch of anti-vax types on my FB page were posting articles about how schoolchildren showed that plants that were grown with microwave water didn't grow, with side-by-side illustrations.

Snopes debunked it by repeating the experiment.

Until I see confirmations of the experiment, I am highly skeptical.

Alas, it is you who are revisionist. Try checking the facts. Deal with it.

Myth!

Old coke didn't come back. They created a third product called "Coke Classic" that was not in any way the same thing as "old coke," since Coke Classic is sweetened with High-Fructose Corn Syrup, whereas "old code" was sweetened with natural cane sugar.

Bullshit.

The taste is close enough, but you couldn't switch it overnight without people noticing.

Then why did they switch to 100% HFCS 6 months prior to introducing New Coke?

The corn syrup thing is just a myth. They switched from sugar to corn syrup five years before the introduction of New Coke.

You fool, don't you know Mr Ed wasn't actually a horse?

  http://www.snopes.com/lost/mistered.asp

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/household/wd-40.asp

They reviewed the list with the company.. arithritis is not on the list as far as I can see.

With all the crying wolf lately it's a wonder we still see these articles. What happened to SARS, did all five victims of the "pandemic" die without passing it on? H1N1 caused some sniffles. Donald Rumsfeld made a killing with his quack medicine while GSK fleeced the Brits out of a healthy chunk of their health budget during the swine flu hoax. Every year there's a new fake pandemic.

Almost makes you hope the promised pandemic finally arrives to take out the idiots who keep pump-and-dumping their antiviral stocks.

Please, take a moment to think.

Shall we grant ownership of asteroids, planets and other celestial objects to the astronomer who discovers them?

If not, why should other natural objects be treated differently?

If you are talking about patentig a sequencing method or a method to change a natural gene, then, by all means, grant a patent. Otherwise, forget it.

And then we have to deal with unintended consequences... What if the changed gene has deadly side-effects?

The corporations want the government to assure them their profits, but they don't want to take the risk.

Maybe we should not grant genetic patents at all?

...it's like the old urban legend about how NASA spent a heap of money developing a pen that writes in space and the Russians simply used a pencil...

Grrr....
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

snopes had a very old thread on this, without much discussion and very little to no investigation

The one thing about it that really makes me suspicious though: "It's no coincidence that between 1938 and 1960, the level of polonium 210 in American tobacco tripled"

I can't find a single reference to any investigation of polonium in tobacco before the 1960s, in fact, according to wikipedia's Polonium article, it was discovered to be in tobacco leaves in the early 60s.

amusingly, the article you link lists yet another article as its source for that, which goes on to claim it has been tracked since 1950, but trippled since 1938.

Not saying the theory is bunk of course, in fact, the EPA has weighed in, without sourcing dubious online doctors: http://www.epa.gov/radiation/sources/tobacco.html

I'm intrigued, do you really believe that, or do you dislike the Clintons so much to spread FUD, or are you just fishing?

Snopes: The Clinton Body Count

Yet the government often tried to try (yes, prosecute = to try a case) people for being drug couriers/smugglers/kingpins because the money found on their person had drug residue on it. Unfortunately, the penetrance of drug residue on money is so high that there is not a reliable way to link the person's drug use with the drugs found on the money. See statistics 101 to figure that out.

It is because backups need to be done in advance of the annual Internet spring cleaning.

cat litter, which is already radioactive

Urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/critters/gnus/litter.asp

http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp

Oh this garbage again?

There are many comments on Al Gore on slashdot. I did not know what it was refering too. Apparently it comes from a quote in 1999.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp