Slashdot Mirror

"made the trains run on time" has actually become a special English phrase/term:
http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp

Godwin, subverted.

Actually, if snopes is to be trusted, they didn't emphasize the 'blueprint' part as much, but were willing to go along with when the media spun it as part of their rock star image, so they didn't correct people when they assumed that.

Here's the description with a little bit of accompanying history with attribution.

Just for good measure:

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

Brown Out

Claim: Van Halen's standard performance contract contained a provision calling for them to be provided with a bowl of M&Ms, but with all the brown candies removed.

Status: True.

Example: [Harrington, 1981]

Van Halen tends to make the news portion of radio more often than it gets airplay. There was the M&M riot in New Mexico where the band did thousands of dollars of damage to a hall when they were served brown M&Ms — their contract said the brown ones had to be removed.

Origins: Rock concerts have come a long ways since the days when the Beatles performed in boxing rings and hockey rinks, and made no greater demand of Van Halen promoters than they be provided with clean towels and a few bottles of soft drinks. As the audiences grew larger, promoters stood to make more and more money from staging concerts, which meant that not only could rock stars command higher prices for their performances, but they were able to demand other perks as well, such as luxurious accommodations, lavish backstage buffets, and chauffeured transportation. It was inevitable that some high-demand acts, all their financial and pampering whims satisfied, would exercise their power and start making frivolous demands of promoters, simply because they could.

By far the most notorious of these whimsical requests is the legend that Van Halen's standard concert contract called for them to be provided with a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with provision that all the brown candies must be removed. The presence of even a single brown M&M in that bowl, rumor had it, was sufficient legal cause for Van Halen to peremptorily cancel a scheduled appearance without advance notice (and usually an excuse for them to go on a destructive rampage as well).

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). As Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with
nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
Nonetheless, the media ran exaggerated and inaccurate accounts of Van Halen's using violations of the "no brown M&Ms" clause as justification for engaging in childish, destructive behavior (such as the newspaper article quoted at the top of this page). David Lee Roth's version of such events was decidedly different:
The folks in Pueblo, Colora

"made the trains run on time" has actually become a special English phrase/term:
http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp

Unfortunately, for example, there are also people that write letters like this: http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/smithsonian.asp

Can you point at someone who actually writes letters like that? I ask since the Snopes page that you linked to says that it's a hoax.

/me strokes evil white pussy.

And it's not quite true that 'he would have published if it was real'.
If you have sufficiently ridiculous claims, journals may not accept your paper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shechtman - as one example of work ridiculed at the time that went on to win a Nobel prize.

Unfortunately, for example, there are also people that write letters like this: http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/smithsonian.asp

If it is true, I would send the guy my heartfelt thanks, and not buy the expensive heatpump for this winter.

http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.asp

Yes, and when the politicians say that the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference is 5/4 to 4 (and they did)

No, they didn't.

http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp

Sure you're not confusing that story with this?

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/kkk.asp

1) Yes, Natalie Portman has done some David Bowie-ish pictures, and shaved her head for a movie. Is this supposed to be proof of something?

2) Marilyn Monroe was not fat. Fat girls like to say "Marilyn Monroe wore size 16" because it makes them believe that they have bodies like her, but sizes were different back then. She was a size 8.

3) Gross, and notice how the hourglass look goes away when waists/guts are so fat.

4) Gross and stupid. You know you are dealing with an idiot when finding fit adult women attractive gets you branded as a gay pedophile.

Now go be gross and stupid somewhere else.

I'm not sure I'd call 1.9 million gallons a tiny amount of toxic substances.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/anwr.asp (near the bottom)

Snopes doesn't disagree with calling the area a wasteland, scroll to the very bottom. http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/anwr.asp Tiny area by a fraction of ANWR.

Hey, that's great! You took an ancient, and debunked urban legend, and posted it on /. as fact! Thanks for helping shit up the internet!

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp

Ah, quite right, it appears. I had to ask again to make sure I got the story straight. The warnings they received were about speeding in the EZPass lane, not between the toll booths.

I went and looked it up... http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/ezpass.asp

And there is an image of the warning at http://www.nytrafficticket.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/17/speeding-in-the-ez-pass-lane/

Carry on.

Now I would want to see any studies done as to the actual effectiveness of any of these so-called safety positions [it doesn't actually matter for me, as being 6'5", being in that bent over position is impossible for me anywhere but in first-class]. Has it been shown that it actually has helped in real accidents, or it is just a way to try to get people to sit still and out of the way?

Having the head as close to (ideally, in contact with) the surface it is most likely to strike reduces the risk and severity of head trauma. Bending over (such that one's head is below the level of the seatbacks) also may provide some protection in the event that the overhead storage compartments collapse. Other aspects of the "brace" position are designed to prevent injury to oneself and others caused by flailing limbs and impact of feet and legs with the seats ahead. The recommended position is based on on-the-ground laboratory crash tests as well as the aftermath of real crashes (particularly the 1989 Kegworth air disaster).

See also Wikipedia and Snopes.

People were investigated for stock trades made pre-9/11. It was determined to be a coincidence. The excessive trading on America Airlines on Sept 6 was due to a weird strategy that had the same people buying a shitload of their stock on Sept 10, which was hardly a way to make money. The United stock trades were due to a newsletter the previous day.

As for the SEC, look up "plausible deniability". It's easier to ignore current criminal wrongdoing than past cases for which you have a mountain of evidence and victims at your door demanding action.

You do know that the SEC has recently been called out for destroying evidence from previous cases, right? Since 1992? Illegally destroying it, mind you. So all investigators had to start from scratch?

So that means, to destroy all these 'evidence' you think they had...all they had to do was close whatever investigation they were using it for, and, poof, they destroyed it as part of procedure. (According to the National Archives this is illegal, sure, but hardly as illegal as being accessories to mass murder. And considering they're done it thousands of times, I can't imagine they got cold feet just that once.)

Maybe they just wanted those records really destroyed.

http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/autos.asp

Back in WWII, when the medical treatment was much more primitive, elderly persons in England, who had vision partially restored by cataract surgery, were asked to watch for long wave UV covert signals, from off the coast vessels, as part of the war effort. This may be an urban legend -- it is unanswered on Snopes http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=25056, but I do recall reading about it as a child, I believe in a commentary written by Arthur C. Clarke. But the memory is vague, and who knows where Clarke might have learned of it. So as something vaguely remembered from a book half a century old, that may or may not exist, where the original author may or may not have had first hand knowledge, ... well, by Internet standards, that's your proof right there!

Michael Jackson did not buy the "copyright" on The Beatles Songs. He bought the *publishing rights* to most of the Beatles songs (as well as other songs).

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

    Yup. Well, not all that recently, it was back in 2005. http://www.snopes.com/photos/accident/gunsafety.asp. And of course, The Video.

    But a shot to the foot is far from winning a Darwin award.

CO2 will kill the biosphere eh? It's like someone saw the DHMO prank and thought, "Hey, let's just do this for real."

What a very imaginative claim you make.

At no point did I say no Spanish speakers made the same joke that many English speakers with cursory knowledge of Spanish made. What I said was that nobody saw the name "Nova", read it as "doesn't go", and refused to buy the car for that reason.

Now, when you're done criticizing me for you not knowing what the hell you're talking about, read the Snopes page about this urban legend as you could have assumed I would say after reading the post to which you haphazardly balked at trying to respond.

aka The Mythical Chevy Nova Effect

FTFY!

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

As a long time /. reader, I can imagine what a hell of a ride this has been for you, Rob. Thanks for all the effort you put into /. and for the great influence you and /. have had on the whole internet community. Good luck in your future endeavors and enjoy some time off.

I must admit to inadvertently attributing the internet legend of Taco Hell to you, think that's where CmdrTaco came from. Oops.

Yeah, I've heard this before too. Seems like a variation on this story.

Sounds like yet another (pretty poor) attempt to tell this old chestnut again:

Miracle Carburetor

BOGUS.

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

... And yet, they march like lemmings to the sea. ...

The lemmings were herded into the sea by short sighted management looking for a quick return.

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

If I'm the only one with the card?

In case you are not aware, there are groups out there that skim your card at the ATM or gas pump sort of like this.

Then the skimmers make a clone of the card's mag-strip (not the imprinted number) with a dummy card and with your PIN and the cloned card in hand, they go to an ATM, put in the cloned card, type in your PIN and withdraw some more money (or go to a gas station and make a "free" fill up or any other venue where there isn't anyone to scrutinize the clone card and relies on just the PIN for ID).

At least you're not biting the wax tadpole.

Everyone has something to hide.
It's called their identity.
Something that can be stolen.
Something that can be overwhelmed by the vastness that is the Internet.

Or have you not heard about people who let facts get away from them, where they run rampant around the Internet on an unstoppable circle of chain mail, and searchable archives.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/medical/shergold.asp

People and companies who have to change their phones, move, etc. ... and THOSE people don't make telemarketing war dialers for a living!

Google provides support?

Seriously, though, what happens when Google patches 700 salesmen's laptops at an inopportune time? According to the documentation,

Customers on the Scheduled Release track gain access to new features on a regular, weekly release schedule following the initial release of those features. This delay allows time for administrators to familiarize themselves with new features using a test domain, educate support staff, and communicate any changes to their users. New features will be released on the Scheduled Release track each Tuesday, with at least a one-week notice following the initial feature launch.

What? Google expects "customers with complex IT environments" to "familiarize themselves with new features using a test domain, educate support staff, and communicate any changes to their users" in a week?

Google clearly has a rather superficial sense of familiarization in mind. Moreover, what sort of users, other than "IT people with nothing more interesting to do," would want to rely on a perfectly satisfactory tool to change on a weekly basis? Is it conceivable that Google's idea of "customer satistfaction" is akin to "boiling a frog"?

Perhaps Google Apps' target market is people who want an excuse to avoid taking the time to learn how to use their tools and companies who want an excuse to avoid training?

Yeah.. That's complete bullshit.

Nope, deserts as in punishments.

I didn't incorrectly mod it off-topic, I correctly modded it troll.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp

What I don't get is why they're adopting something modeled on one of the key weaknesses of traditional relational database management systems. "Familiarity," perhaps, but this seems likely to be superficial, and the stated goal of "creat[ing] some form of commonality among non-SQL databases" strikes me as similar to the goal of finding "some form of commonality among non-elephant mammals."

That there exist applications for data storage where a relational database isn't the appropriate tool is trivial, and well-understood by the relational database community, as is the fact that integrity guarantees are not, in general, available "for free." This has nothing at all to do with one's choice of query language, incidentally.

The whole "NoSQL" thing strikes me as an attempt to use straw man arguments to drum up publicity, which, as I pointed out in response to another article, can be quite brilliant if done artfully. Unfortunately, the NoSQL community is hardly Groucho Marx, and the relational database "establishment," taken as a whole, is hardly comparable to a bunch of money-grubbing, back-stabbing studio executives.

The result, predictably, seems to be even more misinformed skepticism in a field already full of it, sort of like Twain's line about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" being mistakenly invoked as a general indictment of mathematical modeling (and, by extension, most of empirical science).

...about using Casablanca in the title of their film. Sadly, Snopes says Groucho ws being a bit disingenuous, but still an awesome read.

I only wonder why I never got a payout from Al Gore for my participation....

Maybe it's because a lot of his "Carbon Credit" profits went into his house?

You remember, of course, the email circulating around about the house that Gore, the "environmentalist" lives in and the house the Bush lived in?
Guess which house is environmentally friendly, despite Snopes liberal slant on Gore's house, he was shamed into making 10% improvements on electrical use.

I only wonder why I never got a payout from Al Gore for my participation....

Maybe it's because a lot of his "Carbon Credit" profits went into his house?

You remember, of course, the email circulating around about the house that Gore, the "environmentalist" lives in and the house the Bush lived in?
Guess which house is environmentally friendly, despite Snopes liberal slant on Gore's house, he was shamed into making 10% improvements on electrical use.

Sounds like another variation on this: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

(loses something in translation from the original Latin)

It's always a good idea to check Snopes.com before making any potentially racist statements, pal...

According to Snopes, the 9/11 commission DID investigate the unusual bump in puts-to-calls ratio for American and United in the days prior to 9/11/01. And found nothing suspicious. Of course, this will do nothing to change a conspiracy theorist's mind, but it is a useful tidbit for those poor sad souls that try to throw a little sanity onto the Internet.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/putcall.asp

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -Thomas Jefferson It doesn't get anymore prophetic than that.

I often see this quote (or something close to it) bandied about so I fired up the Interweb to research it. Snopes.com offers a different view of that purported Jefferson quote http://www.snopes.com/quotes/jefferson/banks.asp

Among the highlights ...

In addition to the lack of documentation, an entry in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations labels this quotation as "obviously spurious" for contextual reasons, noting that the Oxford English Dictionary's (OED) earliest citation for the word "deflation" (as related to currency) dates only to 1920. (The OED's earliest citation for the word "inflation" used in a financial sense dates to 1838, which means that usage might have been known during Jefferson's lifetime.)

Al Gore invented it,

But of course I shouldn't expect to reason you out of a position you never reasoned yourself into in the first place.

while DARPA misused an old packet switching protocol from POTS

Saying that shows that you fundamentally misunderstand the difference between POTS, by which you presumably mean circuit switching, and packet switching. It wasn't even derivative, much less "misuse" of circuit switching.

The earliest work on packet switching was done by Paul Baran at the RAND Corp, a US defense contractor.

How much innovation is stifled by government intervention into the economy, by mis-allocation of resources, and what would we have today if there was no government intervention and mis-allocation?

You write that as if the same can't be said of private corps. The world is far less black and white than you desire it to be.

No, I don't consider my original comment ironic at all, I consider yours misguided.

Ok, not ironic, just militantly ignorant.

If network speeds had increased as fast as processor speeds, the i7 would today at least have a 10Gbps network interface, and perhaps a 100Gbps one.

This sounds similar the the "If cars improved like computers" joke.

I call bullshit.

A brief search of the Snopes website via Google turns up information that swats the majority of your disinformation: Light Fingered. It includes step-by-step EPA guidelines for cleaning up a broken CFL on either a hard or carpeted surface. At no point in the guidelines does the EPA recommend getting rid of the carpet or even the clothes you were wearing when you were "exposed" to the bulb.

Your son is more at risk from the fish he eats -- and the fish your wife ate while pregnant -- than he is from that incidental exposure.

It's not nearly as bad as you seem to think. Please read this.

It's only vapor for a fraction of a second if the bulb is turned on when it breaks. Even then it quickly converts back to a solid once it's in the open air. It doesn't fill the room or propagate or anything. He almost certainly inhaled none of it. Replacing the carpet was certainly unnecessary and a bit of an extreme paranoid reaction (first time parent?).