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You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright.

Good point. But what about the song "Happy Birthday to You"? It's a part of our culture and an expected song to sing at birthdays. Right now I can either not sing it, sing it and pay the copyright holder, or sing it and not pay (break the law).

Self-proclaimed? Nope.

It's perfectly reasonable for charity workers to be paid reasonable salaries. It's unreasonable for them to be paid unreasonable ones. The American Red Cross got a lot of flack a few years ago because of the high salary it paid Marsha Evans. Other charities were unfairly accused of doing the same thing but it turned out those claims were exaggerated.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/charities.asp
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_charities_salaries.htm

If you do donate to a charity, make sure it's an efficient one that serves the cause and not the office holders:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/23/charities-most-efficient-personal-finance-charity-09-efficiency_slide_2.html

My 2c on old PCs: Yes, I have lots, but really they are practically worthless. Recipients would do better with a cheap modern netbook than they would a hulking power-guzzling iron monster. Like a story I read about how people donating their old books to libraries: "People can't bare to throw out their old books, so they donate them to us (libraries), and we throw them out for them."

False. Indiana's General Assembly entertained something similar in the 19th century, but it's not quite what you're implying.

Just add glow sticks and you're there. Back in 2001 the snopesters didn't find any evidence that the quote is bona fide, though.

Looks like Snopes spoke too soon.

Although I understand your point, the story is apocryphal.

See Snopes for examples that attribute the same story to Tesla and Edison, as well as anonymous engineers, mechanics, and plumbers.

Also, pianos also have dampers (felt pads that lower onto the strings when the key is released) and petals, which control the action of the dampers. Furthermore, the vibration of strings on the piano can effect other string especially with the damper petal down. So a bit more complicated than you make out.

Some of my wife's relatives are of the "forward-to-all every-damn-thing-that-hits-my-mailbox" type. Naturally, every email address in the relative's address book is in the CC: line. So every desktop that sees those emails now has her email address, with predictable results.

I have a boilerplate response that I send (repeatedly) to friends, family, and various administrators, who do this. I really don't want to get mail with 800+ recipients' email addresses. Also of use is a template for bogus rumors linking to http://www.snopes.com/ .

It goes something like this:

        xxxxx,

        Sending email to lots of people who might not want their email addresses exchanged with random strangers, or others, is pretty rude. We get enough junk email without having all of your contacts' virus infested machines having a copy of my email address on them. I suspect that current privacy legislation prohibits this sort of behaviour. If you must send email messages out to lots of people, please use the Bcc header rather than "To:" or "Cc:"

        Here is a copy of a message I typically send out to people who send me huge lists of strangers addresses:

        I cannot recall if I have mentioned this to you recently, but I figure I will mention it again. Most of this is "boilerplate" that I send to everyone who makes the same mistake that you did, hopefully it is not too impersonal...

        The message you just sent included the email address of ALL (or at least A LOT) of the recipients in either the "To:" or the "Cc:" fields, so that all recipients could view the others' email addresses. I recognize that there are reasons why it might be nice to include all recipients in an easily viewed format, but in general I think it is a bad idea. What with the amount of junk email that we all get, and the increased incidence of email worms/viruses which spread by finding new addresses to send themselves to, exposing private email addresses of your corespondents to each other is a bad idea.

        In the recent past I have started receiving email viruses addressed to email addresses that are directly linked to people using them in legitimate "mass mailings" such as yours. If any one of the listed people's machines is or ever gets infected, all of your recipients could start getting junk and/or virus email from those infected machines. This is only one small reason for avoiding the practice. There are larger security and privacy issues to consider too.

        Much better is to use the "bcc" header whenever possible when sending to large numbers of recipients. It looks neater to each recipient not having to read through a huge list of addresses, and provides some privacy protections. Here is some information about "bcc" in email in case it might be of use to you:

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/bcc-for-privacy.html

        Thanks for your attention to this issue.

And some more copypasta for you AC.

A few of the Muslim percentages are just a touch misleading.
For starters, the Muslim population of China is largely concentrated in the far western autonomous region of Xinjiang (Sinkiang), an area which shares a long border with a number of the former Soviet Central Asian Republics (Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan), and the Muslims of Xinjiang are largely members of the Turkic Uygur ethnic group.
Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana have always had a large East Indian community. While the vast majority of these are Hindus, it would stand to reason that some of them were emigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh (most likely when the latter was still part of Pakistan) as these two countries are considered "East Indian".
As to India, amazingly there were actually SOME Muslims who didn't want to migrate back in 1947-48 to become part of the Muslim nation of Pakistan. Even more intriguing, the most recent religious tensions in India have been due to the majority Hindus, with Sikhs also being involved. Muslim tensions in India have been primarily confined to the Kashmir region.
Regarding Israel, it should be remembered that the Muslim population of ISRAEL are considered legally distinct from those of the Palestinian Territories. Israel's religious groups (including JEWS and Christians) are given a great deal of autonomy over their own people. There are purely religious courts which deal exclusively with Jews and exclusively with Christians on a number of social issues, such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. Each religious group is permitted to establish schools with minimal interference by the State--Jewish schools (yeshivas) run by Orthodox Jewish groups segregate students on the basis of gender just as Muslim schools (madrassas) do. Israel has historically had less trouble with its Muslim CITIZENS than the nation has had with Palestinians. (Muslims who hold citizenship in the State of Israel are exempt from the military service required of other Israelis; then again, so are any number of ultra-Orthodox Jewish citizens as long as those Jews are enrolled in a religious school.)
Ethiopia, it should be noted, has always had a very large percentage of Muslims. (That it's given as less than 33% suggests that figures may be very shaky. A figure I have from about 5 years ago indicates that between 40 and 50% of the country's population is Muslim.) In spite of its inclusion in this fear-mongering list, Ethiopia has been surprisingly calm in terms of inter-religious activity. The country's been incredibly troubled in the last 30 years, but little of that trouble has really been due to religious infighting WITHIN the country (there's been far more ethnically-based conflict as well as regional secessionist movements--Eritrea's led to the region's independence).
Bosnia is really out of place on this list. Apparently *someone* wasn't paying very close attention to the news during the 1990s. It was the Muslims of Bosnia who were largely targeted for ethnic cleansing by Bosnia's CHRISTIAN Serbs. Had the Serbian population of the country not been backed by Milosevic in his attempt to annex whole swaths of Bosnian (and Croatian) territory as part of "Greater Serbia" when Bosnia seceded from Yugoslavia, and had the Serbs accepted being part of a multi-ethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina, the country could have been as relatively peaceful as it had under Tito's rule. (Even following the death of Tito, Bosnia was relatively strife-free in spite of its multi-ethnic makeup. The Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia, largely homogenous regions, saw more strife in the post-Tito years.) In other words, Bosnia's troubles have had almost nothing to do with its Muslim population (and, it should be remembered that it was OTHER Muslim nations, not Bosnia, which urged Muslims go to Bosnia to fight).
Chad. Chad. What can one say about Chad except for the fact that its Muslim population (like Bosnia) has had little to do with its woes

Do you have an exact attribution or context for that quote? Googling for about 10 minutes yielded a bunch of right-wing sites citing the "Associated Press", one or two "ABC", and one individual claiming to have seen it that day on CSpan, but no newspaper citations. Given the nature of the statement, I find the lack of the latter renders it pretty suspect and am honestly curious to know the original source. FWIW, Snopes has declared another quote from the same time period (1994) to be bogus.

The funny thing is, even the analogy is bogus. Frogs do jump out of water if it becomes too hot, regardless of slowness of warming.
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp

I'm afraid the whole concept of opposing something that is reasonable, because something unreasonable might present itself later is ridiculous. It's like the frog choosing to sit in water that is colder than ideal, just in case someone chooses to warm it in the future. Regardless of the fact that it can jump out if that ever happens.

Why do developers seem to pick technologies based on that they ARE NOT what the other guy uses, rather than what benefits they provide? This seems to be the hallmark of the GTK-ish community.

The GTK community was created around that very notion. KDE pre-dated GTK, but used the Qt framework which at the time was published under the controversial QPL (it wasn't until 2000 that Qt was published under the GPL). GTK arose partly as a response to this, and since KDE used C++, using C mitigated the risk of the two projects competing for developers.

The more two competing open source projects use the same technologies, the less distinct their identities. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on how much diversity you prefer.

Snopes agrees with you.

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

Every day's a school day.

Not only is this a hoax, but a mutant one; a fake hoax!

The original tale was about Spanish speaking countries, where "no va" literally means "doesn't go". In Portuguese it would be "nao vai".

Easy to find, at the moment on youtube but I do notice that copies of it are starting to disappear.

An anonymous source who only talks to a discredit internet crank. It is hard to imagine weaker evidence.

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

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

The brown m&m story is actually a brilliant quality control hack: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

Short version: if there are brown m&ms backstage, then the technical aspects of the show are likely to be inadequate (electrical power, load-bearing specs), because no one read the tech specs which had the brown m&m bit buried among them.

Van Halen used to have a clause in their performance contracts that they must be provided with a bowl of MM's with the brown ones picked out. What does 'fairness' have to do with a legal civil contract?

They also demanded that venue owners not set the band on fire, cause the building to collapse, or kill hundreds of their fans in a stampede for the exits. The brown M&Ms thing was just a lot safer and easier to check up on.

As always, Van Snopes has the whole story.

As a wise man once pointed out, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Rupert Murdoch's news empire has made a fortune for him by following this dictum to the letter. Murdoch has figured out which people he can fool all the time -- angry white males who live in the US. And as another wise man once pointed out, a man will hear what he wants to hear, and disregard the rest. Murdoch isn't worried about his angry white male revenue stream abandoning him simply because somebody fact-checked his propaganda -- Murdoch knows that angry white males will ignore anything that disrupts their vision of the world, and embrace anything that endorses it.

And -- just to affirm the Rule of Three -- another wise man once pointed out that the truth is out there. We already have fantastic sites like snopes and factcheck that eviscerate Murdoch's untruth stream in near real-time. People who can't be fooled all of the time and who don't always disregard what they don't want to hear can take comfort in the fact that sites like these are out there and are accessible to them any time their common sense alerts on one of Murdoch's "facts."

http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/noplate.asp

Just to pick a nit with that Snopes article. The first paragraph says:

Allowing motorists to obtain personalized plates provides them with an opportunity to obtain something distinctively unique, something that commands far more attention than the usual humdrum string of letters and digits.

Every license plate is, by definition, "distinctively unique". Just sayin' ...

http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/noplate.asp

NO PLATE

NONE

NOTAG

MISSING

XXXXXXX

All are both funny and bad ideas.

I'd lke to get one that reads UFIA.

replace gun with knives. If you were paying attention to australia after they outlawed guns violent crime went up over 30% and home invasions even higher. Just because a criminal does not have a gun does not mean he is no longer a criminal. He is still going to kill you be it with a gun or a knife.

Actually, if you paid attention that didn't happen.

It's an old myth that has been disproven many, many times.

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

Crimes have actually decreased since 1997.

If you were paying attention to australia after they outlawed guns violent crime went up over 30% and home invasions even higher.

Not true.

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

We covered all this back in 2002.

I don't know. Let's ask Le-a.

RFID in credit cards is uncommon in the US, but much more prevalent in Europe. RFID in cell phones is more likely to be found in Android phones, but is spreading to other platforms. Actual cases of consumers being exploited by this "major security hole" are essentially nil - snopes.com as a good recap: http://www.snopes.com/fraud/identity/pickpocket.asp

"How can you compare the USA with a population of 350M to Switzerland of 8M, "
seriously? You really don't know how that's done? Or are you just making a knee jerk reaction to something you don't like?

" Also its very amusing the number one reason they cite is gun violence"
It's A reason, listed among others.

". Perhaps they should ban clubs and hammers, since more people die every year due them as one report recently found."
no it didn't. You really need to stop watching Fox News.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/baseballbats.asp
and, of course the source:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8

Facts bitch, suck it.

ALL Blunt objects(hammers, baseball bast, etc...) 2011 496
All Firearms: 8,583

And in every city with strict and enforce gun control, the murder rate trend down, without exception.

So when fascist dictatorships disarm the entire population, and then mass execute people, are you saying that guns would not have prevented that?

Yep. You're presenting a hypothetical that has actually been tested, and found to fail miserably. Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and pretty much every cvilian vs government conflict of the past 100 years hinged on air superiority. If you had air superiority, you did well. If you didn't, all the AK-47s and RPGs in the world didn't help you.

Would lack of gun ownership make any difference in these cases?

Possible, though hard to tell, as these are anecdotes, and not scientific experiments. It's impossible to tell how those events would have unfolded without guns at the ready. However, we have some actual statistics to work with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence,http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp, for just a few examples of large scale statistics. At a minimum, they indicate that gun ownership does not correlate with reduced crime, but that instead they are a common response to increased crime rates.

I have no shame in my own opinions, why do you have so much in yours?

Sometimes, shame is a good thing. Your knowledge of statistics would definitely benefit from it.

Look at the rise in food stamps

Recessions have a tendency to increase such needs...what caused the recession again? Oh yeah, GOP policies

healthy young people collecting social security

Sources plz

free cell phone program

You mean this? It was started by REAGAN, that bloody liberal.

That 'wireless' part of it?

"its first cellular provider service (SafeLink Wireless) was launched by TracFone in 2008, during the administration of George W. Bush"

That's same BS as saying the Occupy guys were hypocrites for using apple products - as if they should cripple themselves into ineffectiveness by not using any and all tools available to them. Following the law and simultaneously wanting to change the law for everybody including yourself is not a case of "do as I say, not as I do."

They are hypocrites. Should I cripple myself by allowing them to tax the business I work for knowing full well that would lead to a reduction in pay? If they're not willing to sacrifice their mobile Facebook, but want others to sacrifice literally billions in revenue, fuck them.

The jet plane which uses fuel that is priced above market to cover the carbon-offsets he thinks out to be made mandatory? How exactly is that hypocritical?

If you want to critize the guy, at least be intellectually honest about it - you only make the guy look better if the worst thing you can say about him is a misrepresentation of the truth. What's next? Accusing him of claiming to have invented the internet?

Carbon credits/offsets are the biggest load of bullshit of the past decade. I don't think anyone in their right mind thinks that just because gas costs more that makes it less dangerous to the environment. Most carbon offset companies have been show to be ineffective at best and often scams at worst. If he wanted to be green, he wouldn't go... or at least fly coach. The fact that he doesn't shows that his convenience outweighs the need for carbon reduction. Something most of the rest of us agree on.

Not that I wouldn't do the same... but it's more of Al Gores "Do as I say, not as I do" nonsense.

That's same BS as saying the Occupy guys were hypocrites for using apple products - as if they should cripple themselves into ineffectiveness by not using any and all tools available to them. Following the law and simultaneously wanting to change the law for everybody including yourself is not a case of "do as I say, not as I do."

I wonder if he was the sole passenger on a private jet that took him to sign the deal.

The jet plane which uses fuel that is priced above market to cover the carbon-offsets he thinks out to be made mandatory? How exactly is that hypocritical?

If you want to critize the guy, at least be intellectually honest about it - you only make the guy look better if the worst thing you can say about him is a misrepresentation of the truth. What's next? Accusing him of claiming to have invented the internet?

What a wonderful apologist you are for the hypocrites on the left! Really a phenomenal piece of twisted logic in your post.

'fraid not sir: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cnn.asp

Not that I wouldn't do the same... but it's more of Al Gores "Do as I say, not as I do" nonsense.

That's same BS as saying the Occupy guys were hypocrites for using apple products - as if they should cripple themselves into ineffectiveness by not using any and all tools available to them. Following the law and simultaneously wanting to change the law for everybody including yourself is not a case of "do as I say, not as I do."

I wonder if he was the sole passenger on a private jet that took him to sign the deal.

The jet plane which uses fuel that is priced above market to cover the carbon-offsets he thinks out to be made mandatory? How exactly is that hypocritical?

If you want to critize the guy, at least be intellectually honest about it - you only make the guy look better if the worst thing you can say about him is a misrepresentation of the truth. What's next? Accusing him of claiming to have invented the internet?

From :
However, it is not true such regulations (which apply only to Canadian broadcasters using Canadian airwaves) have kept the Fox News Channel from gaining entry into Canada, or that they were invoked to boot Fox News out of that country after the channel was established there. The CRTC approved an application to bring the Fox News Channel to Canadian digital television line-ups back in November 2004, and that channel is now carried by dozens of different digital providers throughout Canada.

From :
Fox News Channel is currently offered by Access Communications, Bell TV, Cogeco, Eastlink, Manitoba Telecom Services, Rogers, SaskTel, Shaw Cable, Shaw Direct and Telus TV. An exception is Vidéotron, Canada's third-largest cable company, which has not added Fox News Channel to its lineup.

Not just "disagrees", but has direct citations indicating that your post is repeating a straight up lie-- the same thing you accuse Fox of.

Hypocrisy much? Why would you even post something that is straight up false, and then post the source that explains how its false?

Oh, we were fed the same line when I was in the US Army. Snopes says 'no', and to be honest I think any suppression was due to exhaustion from four hours of sleep and twenty hour training days.

That's how I remember basic training/AIT. A big day in the Army started at 0330, and the drill instructors seemed to think you'd wasted 3 and a half hours already on something as trivial as sleep.

Oh, we were fed the same line when I was in the US Army. Snopes says 'no', and to be honest I think any suppression was due to exhaustion from four hours of sleep and twenty hour training days.

You never know, but the code reviewer could use whitespace and other coding convention rules as an easy way to check if you're a careful programmer.

As in the old bowl of no brown M&Ms required in the Van Halen contract. A quick and easy way to tell if the concert organizers were being careful to follow all requirements and safety conditions, the band hid a requirement for a bowl of no brown M&Ms deep in their contract.

If the bowl wasn't there or had a single brown M&M they'd know the stage and lights setup was potentially life threatening and immediately cancel the concert.

If you can't be bothered to follow naming conventions, brackets and whitespace requirements... how can they trust you to be a careful developer?

Apply the rules.

If you have better rules push for them.

If you just don't like what was chosen tough - comprimise. It's not your own project when you're working in a team.

I do pick these things up in code review. You know why? Because if you can't be bothered to do the small easy stuff that makes my job as a reviewer easier what kind of impression do you think I'm getting of how much effort you're putting into it? This is brown M&M territory: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

"The legendary "no brown M&Ms" contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen's contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read (and complied with)."

First the USAF copies Buzz Lightyear's badge for their new Space Badge and now NASA steals their spacesuit. http://www.snopes.com/disney/wdco/airforce.asp

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

Urban Legend

Let's see, just off the top of my head we have the norway shootings which were performed by illegal weapons, and many many many that go on every day in mexico despite everything being banned. "But Mexico got those guns in the US!" I hear you say? They did do that with the direct involvement of the ATF and Justice departments under operation "Fast and Furious." The gun dealers repeatedly called the ATF to cancel the sales, but were strong armed into cooperation with the threat of a lost license. I suspect that you are basing your Utopian dream of gun control on the UK and Australia. Neither country has shown a statistically significant decrease in the crime rates. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb0611/hosb0611?view=Binary http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp Any new legislation will not increase the safety of the average US person. It will cost more tax money to enforce these laws, in a society where law enforcement spending already eclipses most other budget items. Why don't we instead use our efforts and tax dollars to do something much more meaningful. Lets increase access to mental healthcare by rolling back the Reagan cuts. Adam might have been fine if he had been able to get help for his condition.

Less interesting when you factor in the truthfulness of that baseball bat statistic: http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/baseballbats.asp

Here is the actual link:

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

You don't have toddlers, do you. And the irony in your post, bashing people about how it's "not that hard", is that your advice is wrong. The mercury is not in liquid form, it is released as vapor. The correct thing to do is immediately open the doors and windows and leave the room for 15 minutes to allow the vapor can dissipate. I guess it wasn't as easy as you thought. http://epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup.html http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp So when your toddler pulls over a lamp and noone knowledgable happens to be watching (and you've just proven how easy it is to be ignorant), then he/she will lean in and look closely with curiosity breathing in big gulps of mercury vapors, just perfect for developing young brains.

Yeah, if the "depressed-hipster 'can't live with unity' meme" line didn't drill it in, Shuttleworth finished the job and made the big leagues there. What a jerk.

I've been saying for a while now that we should close the trade deficit by exporting American middle-managers to China.

Its a shame this story isn't true. Back when I was at the Lazy B, I had this article pinned up on my bulletin board. It got a lot of nervous looks (Boeing was just beginning to export work to China).

Tangential, but the story of how E.T. featured Reece's Pieces instead of M&Ms is a good yarn: http://www.snopes.com/business/market/mandms.asp

From another reply, that story about usa, Japan is an urban legend and shouldn't be repeated as fact. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/usa.asp

The fact that items made there were imported into the USA bearing the label is true.

FALSE.

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