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Legend! http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/socialism.asp

Incidentally, this is not the first time this particular maker of this particular homeopathic drug has been a cause of this particular health concern.

...and backed up by Snopes, I notice this morning (at http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/zicam.asp; status still "undetermined" despite being "collected via email, October 2006").

other (funnier) examples of global clashing with local:

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html

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

The world's oldest urban legend? From Aristotle, no less: http://www.snopes.com/science/well.asp

Your post got me curious if this was true or not (whether looking from the botttom of a well would allow one to see stars) as its much more intuitive to have the lens be the primary mechanism for telescope than simply the tube. I don't think it is. Snopes actually has an article on whether this is true and under what conditions could one even hypothesize it is true:

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

No she wasn't charged $2000. She asked Maine's DEP how to clean up the mess and they said to contact a haz-mat cleanup contractor which they admit was overkill. She was given a quote of $2000 reportedly and she declined their services. Maine DEP stopped out twice, the first time there was only a detectable mercury level that would require any action within about a 8" radius of the initial spill. This is when the DEP mentioned a cleanup contractor. On a subsequent visit, there were no levels above 300ng/m^3, even over the spill site, the level where no additional cleanup is required.

From what I've heard, they are not only large, but also considerably better armed than you would expect!

Oh, and sorry for the double post, but I know that that acronym is not exactly real.

This idea already did the rounds in the form of an Internet rumor a couple of years back: http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/pinalert.asp

The Snopes page mentions why something like this hasn't been implemented:

No one in the banking industry seems to want the technology. The banks argue against its implementation, not only on the basis of cost but also because they doubt such an alert would help anyone being coerced into making an ATM withdrawal. Even if police could be summoned via the keying of a special "alert" or "panic" code, they say, law enforcement would likely arrive long after victim and captor had departed. They have also warned of the very real possibility that victims' fumbling around while trying to trigger silent alarms could cause their captors to realize something was up and take those realizations out on their captives. Finally, there is the problem of ATM customers' quickly conjuring up their accustomed PINs in reverse: Even in situations lacking added stress, mentally reconstructing one's PIN backwards is a difficult task for many people. Add to that difficulty the terror of being in the possession of a violent and armed person, and precious few victims might be able to come up with reversed PINs seamlessly enough to fool their captors into believing that everything was proceeding according to plan. As Chuck Stones of the Kansas Bankers Association said in 2004: "I'm not sure anyone here could remember their PIN numbers backward with a gun to their head."

This brings up a serious question. You need some cash in an unfamiliar state or country, and you come across an ATM. How do you know if you can trust it?

Given the number of people who've been scammed by everything from bolt-on ATM card skimmers to oldschool fake night deposit boxes, this is worth worrying about.

The standard security mantra is, "only use trusted hardware to authenticate yourself", but that can't happen here.

Anyone have any ideas for an ATM authentication system that will both prove to the bank that I am who I say I am, and prove to me that the ATM isn't stealing my authentication keys?

The only solution I can think of involves trusted hand-held devices like cell phones or keychain password tokens.

What intrigues me is how it's integral to the plot

The review and rewrite of the game's musical score would probably be so extensive that the game would need a complete round of play testing. Nintendo might not even still have the tools that were used to compose music for the SPC700 chip. And as the page pointed out, Nintendo doesn't want to defeat Michael Jackson in court as much as it wants to avoid getting sued in the first place. The return on investment for releasing a different Virtual Console title would appear greater.

At some point during campaigning there was a question as to whether Obama was born in America (Hawaii?) or Kenya. And whether he was a naturally born US citizen making him illegible to hold office.

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

Ok, dumbass, maybe you should learn to keep your stupidity to yourself.

Does this mean that everyone who warbles "Happy Birthday to You" to family members at birthday parties is engaging in copyright infringement if they fail to obtain permission from or pay royalties to the song's publisher? No. Royalties are due, of course, for commercial uses of the song, such as playing or singing it for profit, using it in movies, television programs, and stage shows, or incorporating it into musical products such as watches and greeting cards; as well, royalties are due for public performance, defined by copyright law as performances which occur "at a place open to the public, or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered." So, crooning "Happy Birthday to You" to family members and friends at home is fine, but performing a copyrighted work in a public setting such as a restaurant or a sports arena technically requires a license from ASCAP or the Harry Fox Agency (although such infringements are rarely prosecuted).

Now, please, shut the fuck up.

I would like to believe your post, in fact I would have believed it were it not for the fact that it was cut and pasted verbatum from a 2006 post on this page from someone called "GI Joe:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=37;t=001063;p=1

(do a find on " Brentwood VA in California" when you get to the page)

Same Exact Post

You astroturfed a meme.

According to this page at one point Coca Cola did indeed contain trace amounts but that is no longer the case and hasn't been the case since 1929

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp

Yes, and we all know snopes.com is correct about everything and the final say in all internet arguments.

According to this page at one point Coca Cola did indeed contain trace amounts but that is no longer the case and hasn't been the case since 1929

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp

The point is that this story is made up. It makes one leap after another, without any citations or evidence. Is there evidence NASA's engineers were limited by railroad specifications? Is there evidence that the English standards influenced the US railroad specs, when most US railroads were built when the country was independent, and no longer even a majority ethnically English nation? Is there evidence that English railroads are based on what the Romans built in Britannia? Is there evidence that the Roman roads were made to the specifications of a single chariot? Isn't it funny that these supposed "facts" all line up to one amazing coincidence? Isn't it a bit too neat and tidy that it all ends up with Ancient Rome, when there were other peoples who were influential in the history of England, and even in the history of Italy and the Roman empire? If you're gullible enough to believe all that, I've got an aqueduct to sell you.

Just googling around I saw this:

• Snopes - Claim: The United States standard railroad gauge derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
• ROMAN CHARIOTS, RAILROAD TRACKS, MILSPECS, AND URBAN LEGENDS

The size of the railroad gauge is not because of Roman wheel ruts, but because of the size of the horses. Not surprisingly this size, hasn't changed much during the millennia. This snopes article explains it all.

Snopes doesn't give that story much credit: http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp

False according to Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tooth.asp

Diet or sugar free sodas have artificial sweeteners that are cancer causing (among other things).

That's a myth. It's supported by the fact that most diet sodas used to contain saccharine, which is a sweetener that has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats if fed to them in sufficiently large quantities. As a result of these (possibly spurious) studies, most soft drink companies switched their artificial sweetener to aspartame ("Equal") many years ago (in the 1980s), which, as you can see by my link, has definitely not been shown by any studies to cause cancer (or lupus, or diabetes mellitus, or any other such nonsense). Virtually all of the evidence of aspartame causing ailments, including headaches, is entirely anecodotal and unsupported by scientific study.

I only have to worry about a shrinking penis.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/potables/mountaindew.asp

This is a working link:

http://www.thanhniennews.com/features/?catid=10&newsid=12673

And Snopes message board commentary:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/message/ultimatebb.php?/ubb/get_topic/f/43/t/001054/p/1.html

If you want to write code, you gotta snort a load; cocaine.
If you don't prototype, you better unit test twice; cocaine.
Write that line, write that line, write that line; cocaine.

If your routine is hung, and you have to debug; cocaine.
When your coding is done, but it still will not run; cocaine.
Write that line, write that line, write that line; cocaine.

If your SCC's gone, and you want to write on; cocaine.
Forget this fact - you can't get it back; cocaine.
Write that line, write that line, write that line; cocaine!

Worked for Disney (see http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/drugs.asp).
Apologies to Eric.

Try reading up on the Happy Birthday saga

A birthday party is *not* at public performance and not subject to royalties.

In my post I clearly stated that our current system can and has been abused. The copyright extensions are abysmally unfair to the public. 75 years is a crazy amount of time to lock up the rights.

The concept of copyright has been well understood and accepted for centuries. It gives incentives for people, while also rewarding the public in time through new and interesting creations. I'd argue that's a moral explanation.

Imagine your world without copyright. I create a song and sing it pretty well. But someone else can sing it better, all of a sudden my time and investment is taken away and someone else gets the rewards since the better performance will draw the consumers. What's fair about that?

http://www.snopes.com/business/money/cocaine.asp

Just because it really PISSES me off that Snopes disallows selecting text on their page, here's the full article:

A large percentage of U.S. currency bears traces of cocaine.

So often those "everybody knows" facts we naively place reliance upon turn out to be embarrassingly false. Such is not the case here, in that there is some truth to the "U.S. currency tainted by cocaine" claim, but the implications of this conversation-stopping fact are far more mundane than we might initially presume. To put it another way, it's less shocking a fact than we first perceive it to be because the underlying assumption — that every bill bearing traces of cocaine got that way through having been used to inhale lines of cocaine — is false.

Contrary to our first thought upon encountering this interesting little fact, that trace amounts of cocaine turn up on approximately four of every five bills in circulation doesn't mean the now-contaminated currency was at one time used to snort coke or passed through the dope-laden paws of seedy characters. Rather, the drug is easily conveyed from one bill to another because cocaine in powdered form is extremely fine. (This point would have been much more difficult to explain prior to the anthrax mailings of 2001, but those deadly contaminations taught even the least drug-savvy among us how easily minute amounts of finely-milled substances can be transferred from one letter to another, even when the powder is contained within the envelope rather than lying on the surface.)

When a cocaine-contaminated bill is processed through a sorting or counting machine, traces of the drug are easily passed to other bills in the same batch. ATMs serve to spread tiny amounts of cocaine to nearly all the currency they distribute, as do the counting machines used in banks and casinos.

How widespread is the contamination? No one appears to have the definitive answer, as every study comes up with a different percentage. (For simplicity's sake, we'll say "four of five" throughout this article because that's the worst-case scenario, and the figure is representative of the results of some studies.)

In one 1985 study done by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on the money machines in a U.S. Federal Reserve district bank, random samples of $50 and $100 bills revealed that a third to a half of all the currency tested bore traces of cocaine. Moreover, the machines themselves were often found to test positive, meaning that subsequent batches of cash fed through them would also pick up cocaine residue. Expert evidence given before a federal appeals court in 1995 showed that three out of four bills randomly examined in the Los Angeles area bore traces of the drug. In a 1997 study conducted at the Argonne National Laboratory, nearly four out of five one-dollar bills in Chicago suburbs were found to bear discernable traces of cocaine. In another study, more than 135 bills from seven U.S. cities were tested, and all but four were contaminated with traces of cocaine. These bills had been collected from restaurants, stores, and banks in cities from Milwaukee to Dallas.

A single bill used to snort cocaine or otherwise mingled with the drug can contaminate an entire cash drawer. When counting and sorting machines (which fan the bills, and thus the cocaine) are factored in, it's no wonder that so much of the currency now in circulation wouldn't pass any purity tests.

The average person need not fear that the money in his wallet will inadvertently get him high, or that the act of paying for his burger and fries at McDonald's will cause him to fail a random drug test. Only those whose jobs call upon them to handle an extremely large number of bills every day need worry that enough cocaine is getting on their hands to be detectable. Bank tellers or those who work in the soft count rooms of casinos, for ins

http://www.snopes.com/business/money/cocaine.asp

It came from all the currency floating around.

hence it does actively make you thinner.

Your statement needs qualification. While technically, yes, eating a stalk of celery might produce a negative calorie effect, the effect is so small as to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. You'd have to eat several pounds of the stuff to have any meaningful effect.

When one considers that the vast majority of people eat celery with cram cheese or peanut butter, any small negative calorie effect is instantly negated.

For further information: Snopes and WikiAnswers

OK, dumbass, time to show what kind of ignorant, lying idiot you are.

1. "Have you ever sung happy birthday without payment? You're a pirate." No, one is not a pirate for singing happy birthday if it isn't a commercial performance, such as a movie, TV show, etc, per 17 U.S.C. 107.
2. "Ever recorded music from a friend or for your car or for an amateur production? You're a pirate." Recorded from a friend, one is probably a pirate. One making a recording solely for use in one's car, one is not a pirate per 17 U.S.C. 107.
3. "or an amateur production? You're a pirate."Per 17 U.S.C. 110, it depends on the nature of the "amateur production".
4. "Ever lent a TV recording to a friend? You're a pirate." Per 17 U.S.C. 109, as the TV recording is a lawfully made copy and it is being returned. one is not a pirate.
5. "Ever shown a DVD to a party?" Per 17 U.S.C. 107, 109, and 110, this would not make one a pirate because it is a non-commercial event.
6. "Ever saved web pages? You're a pirate." Per 17 U.S.C. 107, and 117 this would not make one a pirate.
7. "Ever photocopied a textbook? You're a pirate." Photocopying a whole textbook would make one a pirate. Photocopying a few pages would not, under 17 U.S.C. 107.

There you go, shithead. A point by point refutation of your claims showing exactly how you lied. Or would you prefer to claim ignorance instead of malice?

Donald Rumsfeld does have some connection with the company that produces Tamiflu.

There's a $0.25 limit on payment in small coins (e.g., pennies) and a $10 limit on payment in large coins

There is no such limit.

    But I've never seen a business who accepts cash set a lower limit on what they will accept. Sure, I've seen "no bills larger than $20", but never "we don't accept pennies"

    So, if you are offering to pay with a legal tender of the nation you're in, you're in the right.

    There's a good writeup on this at snopes.

    Basically, they can refuse the pennies, but when they try to take action against you, your simple statement that you attempted to pay the debt with legal tender means they simply refused your payment.

    Back in the day, when you could pump gas and THEN go in and pay, I pumped a few dollars worth into my car, and then realized I had left my wallet at home. I dug through the car for enough change to pay what I owed. When I went inside, the clerk refused my payment. I told her I didn't have anything else to pay with, and she still refused. Finally, I asked, "So, if I just leave, what will happen?" She said she would call the police and file charges. I told her to call now. Being that she knew she was being stupid, (not taking legal tender for an owed debt), and the police would tell her so, she finally just took my loose change and we left without breaking the law.

    If I had left, and I had a witness and she had her security camera, that would both confirm that I had tried to pay but she refused to accept my legal tender, it would probably keep me out of jail. :)

    With the normal situation now being that you must pay before you get your item, they can refuse you service. It's not nice, and you probably won't shop there again. Usually for change under $1, people don't even count it.

    Now, back on topic.. The law firm will probably lose their merchant account, or have to change it, with too many fraudulent transactions. They may simply refuse any transaction under a particular threshold. I doubt they get too many transactions for $1 or less, so why accept them. This can all be worked out with the bank. It's not going to help PB at all. If they get $10 million in $1 transactions, it most likely won't satisfy the court order, as I'm sure it can be argued that the induced bank fees made that value nothing. They will probably end up in court again for civil charges, but I don't know the law at all there.

Anything with words in can be accused of having racist and/or sexist biases. Just for one extreme fictional example, imagine something like this: http://www.snopes.com/humor/question/mathtest.asp -- but it doesn't have to be ridiculous like that. It could just be the race and sex composition of the smiling faces on the cover.

Anything written by people can be tainted by other works by those people, or by private comments they have made. Anything published by a company can be tainted by other books they've published, how they treat their employees, where they get their supplies, etc.

So I can understand why you think math isn't polarizing, but in a poisoned political environment like California, anything can be politicized.

I could easily secure the border for *half* of that. Where is this "4,000 miles long" border of which you speak? Look!: I just halved the cost again, just by RTFSummary:"the 2,000-mile border with Mexico."To be fair, though, I agree with your point: technofences are a colossal waste of money. Now, let's get down to serious business: catskins for nothing!! http://www.snopes.com/critters/disposal/catrat.asp

The 'Crapper' story is well debunked.

And you would replace the fundie influence with a scientism that says humans are nothing but collections of atoms. That all religion is self-delusion and inarguably bad. That science is the only domain of knowledge.

I see your straw men got you modded insightful. I'm afraid mine will just get me set on fire.

Well, until someone can prove that one or more gods actually exist (and it's not like they haven't had LOTS of time to produce at least SOME proof), self-delusion seems to be a good contender for "best explanation", though others, such as fraud and greed, also work.

And yes, last I heard, people did believe that humans are collections of atoms, and science certainly has a better record of imparting knowledge than religion. We don't buy the "4 corners of the earth", Jacobs' "magic" for getting goats to breed favourably, or the "woman was created out of man's rib" stories, or that a murderer motivated by lust for another mans' wife (King David with the hots for Basheba) is "a man after god's heart" - because if god existed, that would be contemptible, criminal behaviour. So the bible fails at teaching both science and ethics. As a tool for keeping the masses in line wrt "droit de seigneur", slavery, kings as rulers, etc.

Speaking of slaves, the story that Jesus went into the temple to overturn the tables of the moneychangers shows religion is more concerned with the trade in money than with the trade in human lives, condemning one when it doesn't reap the rewards ("don't give your money to sacrifices, tithe it to the church"), but openly condoning the other ("Were you called while a slave? Do not worry about it; but if you are able also to become free, rather do that.") Freedom is optional.

Then again, religion IS enslavement.

Of course, use CFLs. The same CFLs that contain large amounts of mercury. The same CFLs that cost an environmental cleanup crew $2000 to clean up if you break one and follow proper procedure.

Bullshit. I'm getting tired of this anti-CFL FUD.

CFLs contain tiny amounts of mercury -- in the best bulbs, about 1-1.5 mg, a fraction of the amount in the standard fluorescent lights we've all had in our offices and homes for decades. If your electricity comes from coal (as it does for most of the US), more mercury is kept out of the air by the electricity savings versus an incandescent bulb than is released if the CFL is trashed.

And of course they can and should be recycled. So during a normal lifecycle, no mercury is released from a CFL.

The $2000 figure for the cost of clean-up for a broken CFL is an urban legend based upon a comedy of errors between one ignorant consumer, one inept state bureaucrat, and one greedy contractor. Proper procedure if one is broken is basically to open a window, air out the room, and clean the glass up really well. If you want to go all-out, a mercury spill clean-up kit runs about $35.

You've got at least a dozen things in your house more dangerous than the mercury from a broken CFL.

That is an urban myth. CFL's do require special cleanup, but is is a pretty simple process. See Snopes for more information.

According to the EPA, the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere every year is 104 metric tons, mostly created by coal fired power plants. Since most of the mercury is bound to the CFL bulb as it is used, even if every CFL that was sold in 2007 (290 million bulbs) were sent to landfill, it would only release .16 metric tons of mercury, or raise the US yearly amount by 0.16 %.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp

Everyone involved agrees a $2000 cleanup crew is ridiculous and should never have been recommended. It was never in fact used, as the person who broke the bulb couldn't afford it. There are now published cleanup instructions from various environmental agencies along the lines of "ventilate the room well".

Per the WP article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Mercury_emissions
"CFLs, like all fluorescent lamps, contain small amounts of mercury as vapor inside the glass tubing, averaging 4.0 mg per bulb ...
In areas powered by coal, CFLs end up saving on mercury emissions versus incandescent bulbs, due to the offset power use (coal releases mercury as it is burned). ...
In the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were sent to landfill sites, that this would represent around 0.13 tons, or 0.1% of all U.S. emissions of mercury (around 104 tons) that year."

So, yeah, use CFLs.

Snopes. It also mentioned the space shuttle that another responder mentioned.

Some things have an even longer history reasons

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

I won't ruin it for those that have never heard of it before.

Snopes says undetermined on that one... http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp

Like the fich company that, for some reason, their salmon was white instead of pink, so they advertised it as "guaranteed not to turn pink in the can."

Apparently, it's just an urban legend that nobody can seem to backup.

You know, my initial reaction was "Translating Klingon?!? Yeah, right... that's a real marketable skill!" But as it turns out, it may actually become a marketable skill

Urban legend, eventually featured in both "Homicide" and later "The Wire".

It's an urban legend.

It's one of those once-in-a-lifetime events. I could be worried about an elevator car falling 20 stories and killing me in the fall, or being hit by lightning. Either of those are more likely than a repeat of 9/11.

I doubted this claim, so I had to check it. I don't think you're right. In the case of lightning, it's true that lightning strikes are much, much more frequent than terrorist attacks; but since one terrorist attack can cause many fatalities, you may still be more at risk from terrorists than you are from lightning. Reportedly lightning killed about 90 people in the US per year in the period 1959-1994. It'd take 30 years of lightning to make one 9/11.

As far as I can tell about falling lifts, there seems to be very very sparse evidence of people dying in falling lifts. In fact there seem to have been only two cases, ever. The first, as it happens, is precisely the case of 9/11. The other is a case from 1945 mentioned in the same link -- the article claims that that was the only fatality caused by a falling lift, prior to 9/11. There's also one case (near the bottom of the page) where a man in a hospital gurney was trapped when a lift slipped a couple of metres while his gurney was partway out the door, but that's not quite the same thing.

Most lift fatalities appear to be a result of people falling down an empty shaft, with a minority caused by people being trapped between moving parts (including a couple of famous decapitation cases) and electrocutions. And one case of a person drowning in a lift. But reports of lift fatalities seems to range between 16 and 30 per year within the US. I'd say you're definitely more at risk from terrorists than you are from lift accidents of any kind.

As much as this might be an attempt to trot out the tired and embarrassing net invention misquote, it may actually be fairly correct as phrased.

More accurately, sponsoring legislation in the early 90s to help commercialize the Internet probably contributed greatly to the specific timing of the boom. (Though there'd have been no way to know exactly when.)

Please, if anyone's ever inclined to say "Al Gore invented the Internet", learn to stop embarrassing yourself. You've bought into an intentional misphrasing. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp I think it might have been Rove who invented the smear.

Er, +5 funny, maybe. Not so informative on the trains or the vegetarianism....