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Hoax.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/scanner.asp

Actually, he said "creating the Internet". http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

Alas, likely untrue: http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/smithsonian.asp

Whoops.. link a site, see it get slashdotted..

Try this as an alternative link: http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/smithsonian.asp

normally i don't link to snopes but there is a good write up. better than all the random news that posted it

http://www.snopes.com/military/medal.asp

a retired General - Ex-Governor - War hero.. suspect because of his metal of honor..

really?? if there was any person who wouldn't try to blow up a plane - i think it would be this guy.. and if this guy DID feel the need to try to i think we all might want to listen to why he would.

as far as i'm concerned i'll Drive where i need to go unless it isn't really possible.

Ummm... no.

World series origin

For all you know, the name Kim Dong-cheol may be the American equivalent of John Smith.

Or Heywood Jablome.

...like the car ad with the rube goldberg machine made from pieces.

For those so interested, the ad you refer to, called "Cog", can be viewed in a variety of sites. Search for "Honda when things just work". The most interesting part is how the ad was made, for that I refer you to snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/advertisements/hondacog.asp

My favorite one being the poster's uncle's-brother's-cousin's-father somehow "stacking" carbs back in the '70s to improve fuel atomization, yet somehow the oil industry always buried the patents. Except that fuel injectors do a better job of atomization than any silly arrangement of carbs.

The origin of this apparently started around 1930. The patent would now be public domain. It was never used, not because the oil companies buried it, but because it does not, in fact, work:

http://www.snopes.com/autos/business/carburetor.asp

And Coke had a leg up, since it originally contained cocaine.

this one shows that as of 2003, 80% of fox news viewers fell for one of three lies the bush administration was pushing (weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, the world liked the US going into Iraq, and Iraq had been giving al-Qaeda support).

To be fair, though.. they may have been convinced by statements by Democratic leaders about Saddam Hussein's acquisition or possession of weapons of mass destruction, instead of Fox News.

FFS:
Snopes has it.
Factcheck.org has it.

Seriously, short of you personally examining the birth record yourself, or a time machine so you can be in attendence (in Honolulu, HI, USA) at the time of the birth, what would convince you?

Exactly right.

Which is why I want to be plastinated after I die. My family can keep me in a glass coffin and use me as a coffee table! Or just stand me up in the corner. If nothing else, I'll make a great hat and coat rack!

;)

(Huffington Post, Drudge Report, etc)

Then we're all doomed. Those "news" sites are just aggregation blogs which do about as much fact-checking as Google News's automatic robot. Just last week Huff Post actually reposted the kind of trash you get in your in-box from your grandmother - that first week she has email, when she's still tying in ALL CAPS. There are now TWO correction updates, and they STILL don't have the facts right. Would it have killed them to at least run a check on Snopes? Does anyone really think that they "soak" food in ammonia?

http://www.snopes.com/military/woodbomb.asp I'm sure that's not the final word, but the story seems too good to be true. Why forgo the value of having your enemy think you're fooled?

That is a myth: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

*There's also the boiling frog scenario - toss a frog into boiling water he'll try to jump out. Put a frog in cold water and slowly warm it to boiling he won't. Some research says this is legend, some says it's true as long as you're really, really gradual. Me? I wonder if it also depends on the frog. Anyways - there are probably people less likely to notice being slow cooked than flash burned.

The "boiling frog" meme is just an urban legend.

I agree with everything else you said, though.

I'm not sure what you think Michael Jackson owned, but read and understand this: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/jackson.asp

He owned particular _rights_ to the music, but was not "in control" of the Beatles music.

That's an urban legend. Please stop spreading it.

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

It may not work for real frogs, but it certainly is applicable to us frogs in IT.

That's an urban legend. Please stop spreading it.

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

The "painted cow" story also serves as the set-up for some popular jokes:

"So you painted C-O-W on all yer livestock. Did it help?"

"Ayup. Didn't lose nary a head..."

"Aye?"

"But I did get four bullet holes poked inter my John Deere tractor."


Just before hunting season opens, farmer Jones always paints COW on all of the bovines on his farm, including the bulls.
As he says, "No use confusing the city folk with details."

The PETA nuts are hypocrites too. Or hadn't you noticed that they're a lot more vocal about the evils of rich women wearing fur than that of burly bikers wearing leather?

I have a fear of falling (and the more likely to my brain falling is the more the fear kicks in), glass or transparent anything that I'd stand, sit, or other hope to hell is going to support me would give me a full blown panic attack...

Btw lots of people tell me it's just a fear of heights, except I'm fine on high things that seem solid and unlikely to fall... A cabin on the top of a 'mountain', won't bother me. A thin metal bar on the edge of a bridge 200 feet overlooking the ground (or water) makes me nervous. The transparent flooring on the upper level of a skyscrapper I once visited was another to have me curled up on the floor...

If that's the case, you should take a visit to the Grand Canyon Skywalk Snopes also describes it if the first source is too dubious.

Also: Kentucky Fried Chicken successfully pushed to be known as just "KFC" because of the stigma surrounding the word "fried."

Yeah, that's not true. They were being forced to change their name or pay up. People go to KFC to eat fried chicken and for those people (me included every other month or so) the wording likely doesn't make that big a difference. Then again, I'm an idiot....

To anyone not familiar with that section of snopes, it's called The Repository Of Lost Legends, or TRoLL (they say so themselves).
It's also where they "confirm" that Mississippi removed fractions from the curriculum, and that Mister Ed was a zebra.

i.e. These are fake pages.

A real page on KFC's name can be found at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/kfc.asp

Probably trolling about this kind of tactic http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pershing.asp , which I guess has been making its rounds among conservative chain mails.

An interesting common thread among terrorists and other suicide rampagers like the Columbine kids is having had suffered some kind of humiliation in the past. Just food for thought ;-)

I can't believe how many people don't know this one: KFC changed their name because the State of Kentucky trademarked the word "Kentucky" and KFC would have had to pay licensing to continue to use the word.

Snopes Link

Funny, but false.

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

http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/mexicoangry.asp

A little old, but... Mexican leaders are apparently mad at the US leaders for making Mexicans go back to Mexico.

But your mom has nothing on Canada's former Minister of Defense, who fell for the "don't flash your lights" urban legend and issued an official warning. What a moron.

Hmm? Obama's home country *IS* Kenya,

OK, birther. Sorry, but the facts do not support you.

And LEDs don't require you to use a hazmat suit to pick up pieces if you break one (since they contain Mercury).

Urban legend. Light fingered

"So a mass flu vaccine better be really safe, or the flu strain better be really dangerous."

or

(3) The people in charge of the scare-mongering (ie. government-sponsored TV images of Asians in face masks) better have a lot of shares in Tamiflu.

Geez, thanks for ruining a good meme with facts. Next thing you know we'll find out all those cats have been misquoted time and time again.

Or that Lemmings don't commit mass suicide, or that virtually all cartographers knew the world was round throughout the dark ages, or that glass isn't a liquid, yeah I've been noticing lots of this lately xD

I'm beginning to waft back to the old maxim: "It's not true unless it's boring"

He also seems to specifically target the US and only the US, as if no other country is currently doing dubious shit.

"RT @wikileaks Outcry in Belgium Over WikiLeaks publications of Dutroux dossier http://bit.ly/9RBPI2"

It seems, to you, that they are only picking on You, but does it seem to you that You are overrepresented in the World series of baseball? Maybe wikileaks isn't picking on the US more than it deserves, maybe you're paying less attention to the rest of the world than it deserves.

Over a century ago Edison was making sure Alternating Current was used in the Electric Chair, in order to make it seem more dangerous and associate it in people's minds with electrocution.

I don't know how old you are, but I currently have less freedom of speech and other rights than I did 30 years ago. And that's mostly on account of people born to William Lashua's generation and their misuse of the US military.

Ah, but you also forget that most of these people who have misused the military either "had other priorities" than serving their country and used their connections to get repeated deferments, claimed they had a boil on their asses that prevented them from serving, or got a cushy air force position and then went AWOL when even that was too hard.

Mr. Lashua's a hero and deserving of respect. Save your (justified, right, correct, and intelligent) scorn for the clowns screaming "Support Our Troops" while running the military into the ground.

Hey Haffner, misattributed quote in your signature: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/babbin.asp

OT:

"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf

I liked that quote so much, I had to look it up. According to Snopes, Jed Babbin said that.

Carry on.

There is no "unless".

If I say I'm Amish, who is the government to say otherwise?

You are mistaken. For this purpose, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is specific.

Here's one article including details of the bit of the law about how you'd get your exemption.

"Sit On My Face" and have a monument near the headstone. Perpetual recording playing only if the visitor sits in the right place (pressure plate activated).

That'd be even better than that famous Montreal inscription.

The alternate solution ceoyoyo is talking about requires a different kind of sensor. Imagine if you had two kinds of pixel sensors, one sensitive and the other insensitive. You'd alternate them on your sensor, perhaps in a checkerboard pattern, but basically pairing adjacent sensitive/insensitive pixels. Now, if your sensitive pixel registers too high a value, then it's probably blown out so use the value from the insensitive one (which is by definition not as bright). If the insensitive one registers too low a value, then it's probably too dark, so use the sensitive one (by definition not as dark).

So wouldn't that screw with high-contrast detail images, resulting in something like this?

- RG>

(This in contrast to the fast talking "green" showman whose mansion burned 20x the national average.)

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

And have to bring in a Klingon translator.

There's a half-truth to that:

http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/klingon.asp
   

Exactly - and some bogus claims just feel too true to be false. For example, there's that idea doing the rounds that the Superbowl leads to a spike in domestic violence. It's just not true - the Washingdon Post even managed to track down where the falsehood originated, and there's a very informative Snopes entry on the topic. Yet it lives on and on and on because it feels right somehow - the Superbowl is a very violent, aggressive, and above all male event. Some proponents even suggest that anyone challenging the myth must have dubious motivations.

(There are peaks in domestic violence at Christmas and Thanksgiving, but they get less attention, possibly because that'd involve trampling on everyone's celebrations and not just a mostly-male event. There's also a small but statistically significant link between a team winning a game and domestic violence by their supporters, but that gets even less attention because it can't be used to get people's attention in the same way.)

But the fact remains: To hide an invetion they used misinformation. And they did it so well, that it is still effective today.

http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/cowcheck.asp

From the same page:
"A product known as LEAR (for low erucic acid RAPESEED) derived from cross-breeding of multiple lines of Brassica juncea is also referred to as canola oil and is considered safe for consumption."
(allcaps highlighting by me)

Safe? Who considers this safe? I guess I'll just follow the Wikis reference to this statement. http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/gmf-agm/appro/low_erucic-faible_erucique-eng.php
            Wherein we find a "Novel Foods" report. This means "Hey,we tested this machine oil over here by the worldwide accepted standards of some bureau somewhere and it turns out you can eat it."
        Feel any safer? It goes on to say "This opinion is based upon the comprehensive review of information SUBMITTED BY THE PETITIONER according to the Guidelines for the Safety Assessment of Novel Foods." O.K., so you will say canola is ok because Monsanto tested their product and say it's O.K. Well, Whew, you can trust Monsanto, can't you? Well O.K. I know Canola has had a rough time in the past and had a lot of nasty rumors so let's go let Snopes debunk this and see what we can find out . http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/canola.asp
Here we find the concerns about Eurcric acid causing heart leisions. So Canola has been bred, not genetically altered to have 1-2% eucric acid rather than the 30 to 60% in the Bulldozer lubricant Canola. Well gosh, do we feel any safer? How about we just limit lead levels instead of excluding it? Just how much mercury should we tolerate in food? Have a swordfish, someone official says it's o.k.
      Hmmm, this Canadian health site http://www.alive.com/3963a2a2.php?subject_bread_cramb=635
Seems to be spilling the beans that it is now indeed genetically modified and there are health concerns and some amount of hiding the truth about some genetically altered plants.
        Well from personal experience as someone who gets horribly ill all through my gastrointestinal system everytime I eat something(accidentally)made with canola, I can assure you I will continue to avoid it like the plague. I originally fell prey to the bit that Snopes debunked when researching my appearant allergies to it( which the Novel Foods Report assures me doesn't exist and isn't a concern.)
With the tin foil hats making up crap on one side and the Bureaucrats and Monsanto making up crap on the other side, who will ever know the truth?
Certainly not the moron who modded my original post down.

Well maybe, but we're talking different orders of magnitude. A smelter, for instance, would dump a shitload more heat than even the largest data center - after all, the data center's goal in life is to perform useful computation, and heat is an unwanted side-effect; a smelter's goal in life is to make things hot, so heat is something they make and eventually have to get rid of. That's why when you hear about thermal pollution it's almost always coming from heavy industry, not things like data centers and apartment complexes.

I wouldn't be surprised if a data center's total heat output falls below regulated levels, which is how they managed to pull in investment.

Hell, even if they're not allowed to dump heat out into the ocean, there'd still be plenty of benefits - ocean temperatures are usually far more moderate than inland temperatures, so you have to spend significantly less money accounting for varying temperatures in your design. They're also apparently mooring in San Fransisco, and, well, I'll just leave you with this apocryphal Mark Twain quote:

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

Don't miss the obvious indicators of morale problems already widespread in-theater and among returning Gulf War II vets. The US military suicide rate is through the roof, and troops (overseas and after returning home) are getting an average of 2-3 opiod prescriptions from military doctors (3.8 million prescriptions in 2009), see http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-03-16-military-drugs_N.htm.

Those two facts pretty much say it all.

In Viet Nam, the troops turned to illegal drugs as morale decayed during the failed (and impossible) mission; by 1969-70 or so the US Army had more casualties from drug overdose, addiction, and drug-related illness than from combat. Historical parallels like this must not be ignored.

Get the troops out now, bring them home, shower them with love.

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

- testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971 by LTJG John Kerry, USN, Bronze Star, Silver Star, three Purple Hearts (and before you start: all decorations reviewed and re-authorized by the Pentagon Inspector General in 2004; Swiftboat liar Commander George Elliott USN was the officer who originally submitted Kerry for the Silver Star in 1969; http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp; decoration citation texts (if you want to know what leadership and bravery truly are) http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bronze_Star_Citation_-_John_Kerry; http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Silver_Star_Citation_-_John_Kerry)