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Had to check, but i heard that many bills had traces of cocaine. Still want scratch and sniff?

(not enough to have any effects, but the myth is listed as true

...And that is when Snopes is going to out this for the hoax that it so obviously has to be.

From TFA: "The data would be gathered using various motion sensors and biometric technology..."

Riiiigght.... And the Bush Administration makes widespread use of electronic mind control, and is covering up evidence of a hidden intelligent civilization on Pluto.

I call "Bulls*it" until and unless I see hard evidence to the contrary.

So you've mentioned one instance where the original manufacturer hasn't done such a good job of making their batteries safe.

As I also mentioned, it is not the first such incident, see for example http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/networking/?cat= 201

Any examples of third party batteries being unsafe? FM transmitters can short out and melt their casings too, but I have no problem using a third party FM transmitter on my iPod.

Nokia claims that all cases of phones from their brand exploding or setting themselves on fire were caused by 3rd party batteries. While they have an obvious stake in making such a claim, it seems that all cases investigated by them did indeed turn out to involve 3rd party batteries. See for example http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/cellcharge.as p

From the relatively few incidents with li-ion batteries despite their inherent instability, is the result of proper management of the technology, and as long as you do that, they are quite safe and fine. This includes making very sure you are using the proper battery pack for your device. Whomever you trust for providing that is absolutely upto you.

I think this discussion is pretty much at it's end. You like AAs, that's fine. For a lot of things I like built in battery packs, that's fine too. Isn't it nice we can both get what we want?

Choice is fine, but devices with artificially limited lifetime cause enough problems (waste being one) to argue against using them, hence I disagree that internal battery packs are 'fine' in general. The ipod with its battery replacement programs and from what you say good 3rd party battery packs and such, is the exception, not the rule in this (but then, as some teens around me clearly demonstrate, for now Apple doesn't have to make current ipods unusable after a while in order to keep selling newer models to the same people)

Anyway.. guess you are right, no point in discussing this any further.

Because they know how to manipulate "the people." The recipe is hundreds of years old. Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring summed it up very nicely.

From Snopes, http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm

"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 Göring at the Nuremberg trials

Let's recap: 1) We're under attack by Terrorists. 2) America hating Cut-and-Run Democrats will harm the nation. It's the same chapter from the same playbook the Nazi's used.

Looks like it's generally considered Urban Legend:

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

http://www.snopes.com/humor/nonsense/kangaroo.htm Just about says it all. Nothing new under the sun.

For those of you who don't get the joke:

"During the space race back in the 1960's, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronaut needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space. NASA went to work. At a cost of $1.5 million they developed the "Astronaut Pen". Some of you may remember. It enjoyed minor success on the commercial market.

The Russians were faced with the same dilemma.

They used a pencil. "

Although it's apparently an urban legend - see http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

"Usa" is an urban legend.

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

You've never been to Japan have you?
I used to think it was a bit weird until I saw this

Man, I just got to point out that disaffected kids have been killing since before computer games were about- Check out this snopes article on the above mentioned Boomtown Rats song http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/mondays.asp It has some info on 'prior art'....

"Happy Birthday" doesn't enter the public domain until 2030

I always thought that the story of "Happy Birthday" being protected by copyright was an urban legend, up until 5 minutes ago, when I saw this article on Snopes. According to the article, the owner of the "Happy Birthday" copyright receives 2 million dollars annually in royalties. I'm definitely in the wrong business ...

The story about the space shuttle and the horse's ass you linked to? Urban legend.

Tried and not true, you mean.

http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/popcorn.asp

Subliminal advertising does not work. It may have a marginal effect that fades very rapidly, but it is much less effective than superliminal advertising, where people are actually aware of the message and will remember it. The only experiment in which it was reported to have Master of Puppets-like mind control effects was not only not reproduced by others who tried to replicate the results, the guy who did the study admitted later he made the whole thing up. (Technically he only admitted to making up the data, but that's more or less the same thing.)

Snoped You wife will believe anything.

Snopes says not quite. Though the lesson of the story is true and profound.

According to a different article, oddly enough also on snopes, KFC changed their name because the state of Kentucky (actually, the Commonwealth of Kentucky) requires companies to pay royalties for using the word Kentucky. So they decided to get rid of the word Kentucky to avoid paying royalties. I don't know which article is right, although the one I linked to tries to debunk the myth that says KFC changed their name to get rid of the fried part (which is the reason given in your article), while your article is debunking the myth of, it's not actually chicken, which I don't think anybody thought was true in the first place.

KFC has also now reintroduced the name "Kentucky Fried Chicken" into their marketing materials.

• A move to de-emphasize "chicken" because KFC planned to offer a varied menu that included other types of food. (The Boston Chicken corporation took the same approach for the same reason, changing their name of its retail food outlets to Boston Market.)
  
  
• A desire to eliminate the word "fried," which has negative connotations to the increasingly health-conscious consumer market.
  
  
• A recent trend towards the abbreviation of long commercial titles, as demonstrated by other companies' employing shortened forms of their names, such as The International House of Pancakes (IHOP) and Howard Johnson's (HoJo).

This was covered in plenty of detail yesterday morning on Language Log. See this post.
It's just like Snopes is for urban legends. If you see a funny language article, check Language Log first.

Where this falls down is the composers' guild trying to get money from things like Happy Birthday, which has clearly fallen into the public domain.

Interestingly enough, it's illegal to perform "the birthday song" publicly as it is copyrighted material. This is why all the restaurants sing their own home-made birthday songs when they embarrass you needlessly. So, while it may seem absurd, there is already precedent in the US for this type of thing.

No.

Unless it wasn't.

More fear mongering to get us to buy Tamiflu.....

http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/tamiflu.asp

Does anyone believe that if Al Gore were president 2000-2004 (and maybe still), that there would be any significant global anxiety about US governance of the Internet, compared with the terror Bush has spread since being installed in the office?

BTW, here's some poison for the trolls who will insist on repeating the Republican lie that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, when he simply took some credit for the work he did in government to ensure its inventors succeeded. Compare that to the guy who understands the Internet as well as he understands Camus.

Wrong.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/revocation.a sp

Besides, that's John Cleese.

Err... Not!

Whatever you do, don't select seat 29E on your fake boarding pass... http://www.snopes.com/travel/graphics/seat29e.pdf

You forgot Snopes!

"I am a Geek." Lets see, according to this source, the most important factor on determining whether a person is a geek or not should be if he claims to be a Geek. Congratulations, you truly are a Geek.

"Vint Cerf: I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."

But I thought shaving after you shower is bad because your skin has expanded from the moisture, so that after you have and it dries back, it'll recede a bit exposing the previously hidden base of the hairs.
Basically, the same concept behind how hair and fingernails seem to "grow" after death.

This reminds me of the old speech given (and verified)... back in 1973...

Every time I read/hear/run across this speech, it makes me think...

Nephilium

"Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place." -- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

Brilliant. Cogent. Concise.

My thanks.

Also:
http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.htm

Why does it need to be a written work?

The most widely known piece of music in the English speaking world is "Happy Birthday to You"...

http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp

To make the most out of a single large gift to humanity, it should be something that effects everyone. Thus other IP owners can be influenced. Maybe the credits of commercial works could be required to cite the public license and a statement to encourage other works to be released.

Doing the "The Happy Birthday Song" together with a broader set of serious works (textbooks etc..) will get the attention of the whole populace. Thus be more likely to kick off a chain reaction.


Ross

It had better be hearsay...

It is. From that article (fixed the link):

I've heard from two White House sources who claim they heard from others present in the meeting that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."

Hearsay starts at only one degree of separation, and this has two. For instance, "Alice told me she saw Bob steal the money" is inadmissable in court - the court (rightly) only cares what Alice has to say in the matter. This report, however, is equivalent to "Alice told me that Bob told her he saw Cindy steal the money." Hearsay isn't allowed in court because it very quickly turns into slanderous fantasy. For further reading, I will simply refer you here.

Also, it's good habit to always consider what sort of agenda the source might have. Snippets from today's front page:

The shortest distance to our salvation is a straight ticket - My wife [will] vote a straight ticket - a Democratic one. So will I.

Cops raid California candidate's office, home - For two days, a Republican congressional candidate ...

Top US general says God tells Rumsfeld what to do - The top US general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God.

Tough race, influence-peddling probe haunt Rep. Curt Weldon - Add this to Republican Curt Weldon's long list of re-election woes his very own October surprise.

Unknown gaining ground against GOP opponent - She's got zero political experience, unless you count a stint as president of her suburban community club.

Notice a pattern? Doesn't really seem all that to objective to me.

>Tapeworms are *very* common in some areas of the world.

Yeah, like the US. One of my best friends is a medtech in the Denver area, not known for its barrios or ghettos. The other day her lab received a stool sample from someone who was pretty ill, and the tech who was supposed to do the analysis on it promptly fainted when it moved. The patient had more than tapeworms, as it turned out, but it was a hatched egg that had moved.

by the way, apparently people sold diet pills including tapeworm eggs.

...post-graduate work?

First off, your sentence is broken because you inserted "obtained" recklessly. Secondly, your position disagrees with Snopes.

Thirdly, your use of the thermic effect of food is a bit wonky. 10% is, first off, an average estimate. Protein can cost you as much as 30%. Fat costs you very little. Secondly, TEF describes how many calories you will spend consuming the food in question. Conversely, it can be used to calculate how many calories of a given type of food one would need to recover from expenditure. What a bomb calorimeter gets from food is clearly not the same as what a human body gets from it. There are plenty of things that humans can eat that cannot sustain them calorically. Just ask Metamucil...

Fourthly (never had to go that far before), just think about it:

Even drinking cold water causes you to burn calories. Your body ends up doing the work to bring the water up to body temperature. How would digesting a highly fibrous water-stalk not take effort?

Yes, celery has a few digestible kcals per stalk, but you more than outstrip that in digestion. Will those extra burned calories make a marked difference? God no, but you're still on the wrong side of the argument. Whipping out your PhD just shows how much trouble you are having defending your position. I certainly hope I never need any of your work. To be considered right in an argument, it helps to actually be right. I don't have a PhD, but if the point of getting one is to have something to wave around when you're clearly wrong, I think I'll pass.

[S]ome nutritionists insist that half the country is walking around dehydrated. We drink too much coffee, tea and sodas containing caffeine, which prompts the body to lose water, they say; and when we are dehydrated, we don't know enough to drink.

Can it be so? Should healthy adults really be stalking the water cooler to protect themselves from creeping dehydration?

Not at all, doctors say. "The notion that there is widespread dehydration has no basis in medical fact," says Dr. Robert Alpern, dean of the medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Doctors from a wide range of specialties agree: By all evidence, we are a well-hydrated nation. Furthermore, they say, the current infatuation with water as an all-purpose health potion -- tonic for the skin, key to weight loss -- is a blend of fashion and fiction and very little science.

...

Regular coffee and tea drinkers become accustomed to caffeine and lose little, if any, fluid. In a study published in the October issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, researchers at the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha measured how different combinations of water, coffee and caffeinated sodas affected the hydration status of 18 healthy adults who drink caffeinated beverages routinely.

"We found no significant differences at all," says nutritionist Ann Grandjean, the study's lead author. "The purpose of the study was to find out if caffeine is dehydrating in healthy people who are drinking normal amounts of it. It is not."

The same goes for tea, juice, milk and caffeinated sodas: One glass provides about the same amount of hydrating fluid as a glass of water. The only common drinks that produce a net loss of fluids are those containing alcohol -- and usually it takes more than one of those to cause noticeable dehydration, doctors say.

I hate to contradict you blatantly, but this is a myth.

http://www.snopes.com/science/microwave/plants.asp

Documented, scientifically disproven.

>This all reminds me of the old story of the NASA which invested millions to develop a ballpen that can write in zero-gravity... well the russians solved the issue by using a pencil.

Urban Legend

Got proof of that? There was a wire-service article making this claim that got a lot of ink back in 2001, but it turned out to be a hoax.

Bush's SAT scores would put him in the top 16% of prospective college students, with an IQ around 115, statistically indistinguishable from the 119 of John F. Kennedy.

Moreover, Bush did very well on his military aptitude tests, so well that it is at least arguable that his IQ is in the 125-130 range and well above that of John Kerry.

Morons don't fly fighter jets without killing themselves, or get degrees from Harvard and Yale. George Bush's daddy may have got him into Yale, but he didn't get him out.

Too many people mistake a lack of glib speaking skills for a low IQ, especially when it confirms their own political prejudices. They are not the same thing at all.

Finally, genius-level IQ is not correlated very well with successful Presidencies, as Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter may testify.

-ccm

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

...is that people buy it:

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

rj

I knew there was something behind all those "dumb American" jokes.
Please reply with your best ones!

Yeah, real funny story there. Except it not true. NASA didn't develop the pen, some guy named Paul C. Fisher did. And the russians likes the pens just as much as NASA does, cause broken pieces of lead can be a hazard in zero gravity.

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

People should get used to the fact that lots of info one gets from the web is fake. So what?

And who cares about MySpace anyhow? A high-school assistant principal doesn't seem to be in the right circle of social relations to be harmed by that page.

If I were in the jury, I would propose a verdict "guilty but harmless, throw away".

Lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs. I wish I had time for a longer response/discussion, but I'm dead sleepy =P. Sorry.

Liar. http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/zero.asp

Aha, fnorgby, so this is where you've been hiding.

Which one of these people are you claiming to be?