Slashdot Mirror

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

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

I know, godwin. Whatever.

    That would be the same district that redefined pi as 3?

    I know, I know. urban legend. It's still funny though. :)

I assume you mean a citation for the Spielburg anecdote. Unfortunately, it is exaggerated. Read more here: http://www.snopes.com/movies/other/spielberg.asp

http://www.snopes.com/business/secret/jagermeister.asp

The Elk Blood is a myth. Jagermeister is a really nice drink, certainly one to try , it has a cult following round here.

Yup, "elk blood in Jägermeister" is a stupid myth, especially because there are no elks here in Germany :-)

http://www.snopes.com/business/secret/jagermeister.asp

The Elk Blood is a myth. Jagermeister is a really nice drink, certainly one to try , it has a cult following round here.

That story is apocryphal.

False.

http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.asp

(short story: The article was satire, but got passed off as true.)

http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/patdown.aspBe sure to double check your outrageous stories first.

Could it be you are mis-informed?

a) NASA didn't expend the $$$ developing the pen

b) It was needed because of fears that a broken pencil lead could cause damage to sensitive and life-depending machinery.

c) Americans used pencils too, at first. Then when the pen was developed the Russians used it as well...

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

Snopes is your friend on this one: http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/hilliker.asp

Similarly, the relationship between USB peripherals could be described as "master/slave," but these terms could also be considered offensive. (The "Microsoft Manual of Style" says such language is prohibited in "at least one U.S. municipality.")

Dear Neil McAllister,

That terminology originally comes from disk drive buses, and the municipality is Los Angeles. Are you really a tech writer?

Sincerely,

Suspicious

Man Claiming He Invented the Internet Sues

Al Gore is gonna be sooo mad...

Why, exactly? cf., Internet of Lies

Quite a lot of people used them to donate to the Haiti Earthquake relief effort.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/HaitiEarthquake/haiti-earthquake-donations-haiti-relief-efforts-text-message/story?id=9551199#.TzAdM8XQInE

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/charity/haiti.asp

I can't find any references to this before January 2012, although maybe the recent news flare-up has drowned the older stuff out. Here's a Snopes thread on it, nobody's calling it a hoax and these guys know their hoaxes:

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=78597

Actually, blonde hair went extinct over a hundred years ago. Didn't you hear? It was in all the newspapers.

Lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs (on their own). Really.

Anyways, you only need one Blocker and you're good to go. At least until you hit the nuke button - "Oh No!"

Maybe... but the Statue of Liberty was also originally sculpted to look like an African woman. It was changed after arrival because a large and politically powerful portion of the population strongly objected to the idea of an African breaking free from the chains that bind them in a display of ultimate literal liberty.

[Citation needed] Best I found on the subject is contrary to your assertion. (That said, snopes is not 100%, but they're pretty darned close)

I think the only appropriate response would be to drop a FAKE bomb on them.

Sounds to me suspiciously like: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/crushedbug.asp

Where can I send a card?

Just address it "c/o Craig Shergold". The postal service knows where to deliver it.

Mostly false. When you take into account the actual facts and circumstances.

Gore pays a higher premium because he requires the energy come from renewable/clean sources. So his energy use is doing far less environmental damage than regular users who are getting their electricity from coal/gas. So he's putting his money where his mouth is.

Further more he invested heavily into making it a more efficient system. As evidence of this, when a record heat wave hit Nashville, his energy use was down 11% from the previous year while most Nashville houses reported 20-30% *more* energy used.

If you generate your *own* electricity from solar/wind/etc as Gore's house does.. how much you use doesn't matter nearly as much .

Likewise trolls like you bitched when Gore bought an 'ocean front' house in CA. Obviously a hypocrite since he was saying sea levels were going to rise! Except his house is on a *cliff* 60 feet up. Well beyond any rise that will happen in his lifetime.

But Al Gore lives in a big house and lies about inventing the Internet, so he's a big weenee and we don't have to listen to him lalalalalalalalalala

You left out his wife's backing of censorship:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center

and, about the house, he feels real bad about that, and has bought all sorts of green credits to make up for it:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/gorehome.asp

Meanwhile, anyone who doesn't see why transforming the Arctic from ice (white and highly reflective) to liquid (darker in color and absorbs solar energy in the top 10 meters), might want to think about how many white cows would have to be replaced with black cows to have the same net effect. (Answer: even in post-McDonalds America, there aren't enough cows to equal the surface area of the Arctic ice cap)

Personally, I'm not opposed to the providing for your children through inheritance. I do find it funny, though, that most people say you can improve your condition if you work hard, that those that have currently earned it all for themselves. That dismisses the notion of inheritance, about the benefits that brings, and about how much better off a child is when their parents are better off. An argument for a different day.

The problem with inheritance comes when you talk about ideas and culture. The content we experience, the world in which we live, shapes our culture and our lives. I learn how to sing Happy Birthday as a child, I'm going to carry tradition forward and teach my children how. Only problem is that.. oh ya, that oh so famous Happy Birthday song, so much a part of our culture, is copyrighted, and will be for quite some time (ref: http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp). With the rate the copyright extensions are going, 2030 is being optimistic for something of that nature to come to the public domain. That's just one example, a really obvious one, but it applies to most creative works.

The whole idea of copyright is a construct that we people made up. We wanted to give incentive for people to create works for us to enjoy, so we said 'you can have exclusive control over that work for a limited time'. That exclusive control includes the right to control when, how, and why it is copied. The one question that I have yet to have answered is this; How exactly do you provide incentive for a dead man to create more works for you to enjoy? Adding to that, what incentive is there to their children to create works if they've been given a money train they never had to work for?

If there is incentive for the children to continue their parent's legacy, it wouldn't stop just because their parent's work was in the public domain. They would have the same incentive as any other creator. They just wouldn't have a flow of money from something they didn't make. The only reason we have copyright extensions as far into the future as we do is thanks to corporations attempting to retain control of works long past. They have no care for providing into the public domain, only extracting works from it, told in new ways, that they can then copyright and profit from for a long time.

All these highly trained minds that continue their mindless group-think like so many lemmings going to the sea cliff.

Talking this way seriously undermines your point -- all the more so since lemmings don't actually throw themselves off cliffs.

(But at least you didn't throw in "sheeple", a word that's inevitably shorthand for "I think I'm smarter than X group of people whom I consider mindless follower types, but I'm actually dumber than most of them AND a damn sight more pompous.")

BTW, grad school was pretty goddamned good at getting me and my peers to "think, for ourselves, beyond the confines of chosen orthodoxies". I had some fantastic professors whose critical thinking skills went beyond anything I've seen before or since, and whose minds were matched by generous spirits. The best of them did everything they could to help their students find viable careers and happy, fulfilling lives. I don't appreciate your slandering them as participants in some sort of deeply cynical Ponzi scheme.

http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/catbag.asp
"Although numerous etymology books tout this explanation as the phrase's origin, common sense should serve to dismiss it. For the duped livestock purchaser theory to be right, the seller's deception would come to light only when the cat was let out of the bag. Yet, bag or not, it's nigh on impossible to mistake a cat for a pig."

Um. Snopes dismisses it appealing to "common sense"

But a piglet would actually be about the size of a cat. Heck. You wouldn't be hauling an adult pig around in a poke - you'd be using a leash. So that would call into question "don't buy a pig in a poke"

Snopes also claims that the cat would be yowling and spitting. Well, I can think of a number of cruel ways to keep a cat from making as much noise, and in fact, while it might struggle, many cats can be pretty quiet after the first few minutes of an unpleasant experience. Struggling yes, but quietly.

Snopes does a better job when they appeal to facts rather than "common sense"

I'll just drop this little gem here. It is quite clear that either most everyone in the government was lying, or it was really believed that he could be a major threat. Al Gore even said in 2002 that he knew Saddam had stores of chemical and biological weapons. Now, whether certain parts of the government deceived other parts is an open question I won't get into, but Saddam himself was doing everything in his power to make it look like he was a threat. Every reasonable examination points to the government as a whole honestly believing he was a major threat in a region that possesses massive amounts of economic resources and in some cases nuclear weapons which could lead to catastrophic disaster should he ever choose to act.

In hindsight, of course, we know better (hence all the "Bush lied and just wanted the oil"... the oil we never actually got, of course: Iraq's production has gone down since the invasion). At the time? No one did. Whether the actions were justified even given what we thought we knew at the time: well, again, I won't get into that, as it is pretty messy. I will just say that retrospect offers amazingly clear vision.

I'm afraid not. There is no conclusive link between aspartame and MS within the scientific community. Such claims are often repeated by doctors-turned-authors, scam artists, and conspiracy theorists, though.

Moving on, I do wish this madness with stem cells would end. They have their own soul as much as my feces (mostly dead blood cells and bacteria) do.

Debunked:
http://www.snopes.com/glurge/fleming.asp

Your story, while cute, has no basis in fact.

Most electricity in the US is produced from coal. You don't have any control over the source of your electric power. In some states you can choose your electricity retailer, and select a plan that is "100% renewable", but that doesn't actually control the source of your power. Once it's in the grid, it's all electricity and you have zero control over the source.

Your claims about mercury content are seriously flawed. Do some research and stop spouting disproven lies.

Disney won't likely release Song of the South in its entirety any time soon as executives are concerned about backlash. The NAACP described the movie as giving "an idyllic impression of the master-slave relationship."
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/sots.asp

It's a shame, because the stories on which the Song of the South movie is based (Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris) do give some (but likely very limited) insight into the amazing culture and folklore that US slaves were able to create in spite of their situation. Unfortunately, much of that culture is probably forever lost to history.

Note: I'm aware that the Uncle Remus stories were compiled after the Civil War, but I think it's safe to say that they were stories passed down from the era of slavery.

At least try to come up with a true example. That space pen one is bullshit.

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

Oops, forgot to include this link as well in my previous post.

This would be funnier if Al Gore had actually claimed that he invented the Internet, and the whole story hadn't been invented to make him look silly.

...just like for these political leaders there is no denying of their leadership expertise!

The FDA allows a particular percentage that is greater then 0% of bugs dead bugs to be found and processed in food.

More to this point, for example, "The food colorants cochineal and carmine are made from ground bugs." - True.
For more: Google food dye bug|beetle

It charged because the Army told it to. C'mon, a 5-digit Slashdotter should know about Snopes.

You do realize that you can't actually boil a frog that way, right? I mean its been shown that they jump out. http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp

on average we have a sexual thought about every 20 seconds or so. That's the way we're made.

Wrong. http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/thinksex.asp

It makes me wonder where this piece of memorabilia ended up.

Sometimes snopes disappoints me... http://www.snopes.com/critters/farce/cowtao.asp I apologise to all who, like me, had their high hopes that this story could be true, broken.

the electromagnetic field between the phone and antenna tower would provide a path for the lightening

To make the lightning actually hit the poor sod on the phone, you would need to ensure that the bridge generated by the field between the phone and tower was the path of leaast resistance for the lightning to follow. While it may create a path of (microscopically lower than the air) lower resistance, it would still need to become the optimal path - which is where it would fall down.

You would have more luck trying to get the guy to play golf swinging metal sticks around, or better yet stand on top of a sand dune in the desert during a storm. In fact it would be much easier to try to rig the house of the person and call their landline (as long as it isn't a wireless phone, but one of the old fashioned curly cord types) and get the lightning to to id that way. There are many more documented cases where lightning has travelled along phone cables. This is because the resistance differential offered by a metal cable is in the order of many many magnitudes higher then the resistance differential offered by an EM field.

It's like trying to divert a huge river with two options, one is a path in the sand drawn with your finger (That's the EM field) and the other option to divert is with a Panama sized canal (that's the metal phone cable). The lightning will try to pick the path of least resistance from the clouds to the ground, but the likelihood that the path just happens to be the EM field caused by the phone signal is so miniscule that it is almost not plausible. A wet tree, a telegraph pole, an overhead wire, a nearby hill or even a lightning rod would almost always provide a path of lower resistance.

Not saying it isn't theoretically possible, but to be able to "set it up" to happen just at the right moment when a call is made to "kill" the person isn't realistically plausible.

I don't think this is as big a deal as people always fear. The person operating a machine normally takes responsibility for what it does under their direction. Nobody says, "that backhoe just dug a cellar," they say, "I dug a cellar" (even though 99.99% of the caloric expenditure was by the backhoe). Nobody says, "Excel just computed our monthly budget," they say, "I just worked out our monthly budget" (even if Excel did 99.99% of the calculations). Only when we're thinking into a future we don't yet understand does it seem like the machines will be making all these "intelligent" decisions. Once the machine is in hand and understood, we feel like we are making the decisions (even though the machine is actually making thousands every second, as with an airplane autopilot). Our perception of intelligence on the part of the machine disappears. Once we know what to expect from them we simply laugh at those who don't and assume they are idiots (pertinent example). People even feel this way when working through human subordinates. "George Washington crossed the Delaware River." It doesn't mean he rowed the boat.

Of course not. The point, though, is that Jesus' birthday is not meant to coincide with pagan holiday.

The linked Snopes article seems to claim otherwise when it says "The idea of celebrating the Nativity on December 25 was first suggested early in the fourth century CE, a clever move on the part of Church fathers who wished to eclipse the December 25 festivities of a rival pagan religion..."

http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/jesus.asp

When did Snopes start obfuscating so that it was difficult to copy text from their pages or is something screwy with my system?

It is unlikely that Jesus, if he existed, were born in the winter. See e.g. http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/jesus.asp .

Ever notice that major restaurant chains don't sing the traditional "Happy Birthday to You!"?

AOL Time Warner currently collects about $2M per year in royalties on "Happy Birthday to You", originally popularized more than 80 years ago.

and, won't the world be such a better place when these rights are more vigorously protected? cough, gag

I remember being taught this as a sophomore in highschool. In 2003 there seems to have been a chain e-mail and Slashdot article that talked about it as well, . I'm not sure who could possibly think we subvocalize every word, that's obviously not what happens unless you're very inexperienced with a language.

I aslo thugoht it was ovibuos

According to a raseerch at Caibrmdge Unviersity, it deosn't mettar in waht oedrr the letetrs in a wrod are. The olny imaortpnt thnig is taht the fisrt and lsat letetr be in the rgiht plcae.

The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wiohtut peoblrm. Tihs is bucaese the hmuan mnid deos not raed erevy letter by itslef, but the wrod as a whloe.

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp

No, Bush claimed that Iraq was trying to get yellow cake uranium from Africa. Interestingly enough, after the invasion it was discovered that Iraq had a small supply of yellow cake uranium.

False.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/yellowcake.asp

Had the exact same thought.. False Positives would be common:
http://www.snopes.com/business/money/cocaine.asp