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Don't santize it until I can sniff off all the cocaine!!!!

Please!?

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

The warrant doesn't need to be done ahead of time. They have 15 days to get the warrant after the surveillance starts.

How do they know what number is an Al Qaeda number? You don't really think that any actual terrorist would use the same cell phone number twice do you? There is no magic "only tap the terrorist phone lines" buttons that they can press. It's either a trickle, or open the flood gates. There is no middle ground here.

And they then listened in on the US number and any numbers that were called to or from that number. Even to and from other domestic numbers.

No, they could have easily gotten the warrants they needed, unless they were doing wholesale listening of every phone call into or out of the United States for years now.

The sad thing is that our intelligence agencies knew about 9/11 months ahead of time, everyone had a part of the info. Only because they never communicated with each other (or the white house actually stopped the communication) was the attack allowed to happen.

NOTHING is being done to fix the flaw that caused the intelligence failures that allowed 9/11 to occur. Not one single thing. In fact, because of the huge useless flood of info this massive illegal trolling for phone calls is causing we are less effective today than we were on 10 Sep 2001.

We are less safe now, with less freedoms than we were before 9/11. That is a fact.

We have more enemies and we have less friends in the world. We are turning friends to enemies fast. That is a fact.

If we look into the illegal spying against Americans I am certain that we will find that they tapped and listened to their political "enemies" more than they tried to stop terrorists. I had this same certainty about the lies they told about the mythical weapons of mass destruction that were supposedly stacked in Iran and all pointed at the United States. You know, those WMD's that Bush lied about.

We need to examine why we got attacked on 9/11 very very closely and learn a lesson about how to be a good christian country that people love and want to live in again. They hate us because we keep fucking with them and killing them. They hate us because we keep putting our asshat puppet dictators in charge of their countries, killing their elected leaders. Saddam, Noriaga, Bin Ladden, Pinochet, the Shah, the current puppets in Afganistan and Iraq, were or are the puppets of the people who run the government of the United States. We need to actually stand up and do what we say instead of talking out our asses and doing whatever we want that will make a few men richer at the expense of millions of people.

I hear that Bush is planning a dirty bomb attack in the midwest to help shore up his sagging popularity and allow us to attack Iran. You know, like he did last time when he let the planes hit the world trade towers and then used that as an excuse to invade Afganistan and Iraq.

And if the neocons think they are going to get away with a second attack against the American people, they are mistaken.

What goes around, comes around, and the longer it goes, the more it grows.

Snopes on Goering's observations about how to overthrow a democracy Goering should know, he did it. Bush and the neocons are stealing the facists playbook:

Later in the conversation, Gilbert recorded Goering's observations that the common people can always be manipulated into supporting and fighting wars by their political leaders:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want

Well actually...

Does this mean new donald duck episodes may include luxo?

No, but all future Luxo Jr. shorts will have subliminal messages in the background.

Here in the US, it's possible to get a credit card that has NO spending limit. It's not easy to do, you have to be super wealthy to qualify, but the cards do exist. One that I'm aware of is the "Black American Express Card." Check it out: http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/blackcard.asp
Reading Snopes sort of deflates the coolness and mystique of the card, but still, quite a ridiculous amount of credit there.

bullshit.

...yeah, but how does Walt Disney's cyrogenically frozen head feel about the merger?

~jeff

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/parental/babysign.ht m

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.h tm

Foo: Aren't those deadly, but only aren't because their fangs are too small to pierece the skin?

Bar: Nope just another urban legend

Thanks for the link. I live in Daddy Longlegs country and have played with them since I was a kid, but never heard anything like this until my teenage daughter's boyfriend "informed" me of the "fact" within the past year. Unfortunately, simply showing him the evidence probably won't do anything to sway his views. Remember, folks: Hire a teenager, while they still know everything!

Nope just another urban legend

I suppose the proof is in a briefcase, along with all of the UNIX code that IBM copied into Linux.

...they throw the seats in with the dishes!!!!!! http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/toilet.htm

I'm reminded of the (apocryphal, but instructive) story of the car that starts or fails to start depending on the flavor of ice cream the driver chooses.

You seem to have focused on the phase of the circuit the same way the driver in the story focused on the flavor of the ice cream. Try to think of your problem more in terms of the facts, and less in terms of your hasty conclusions.

-Peter

Whenever I see that on a website, right there I think to myself, "This is an annoying, and/or low quality website with suspect information on it."

The essential and consistently-excellent Urban Legends Reference Pages site is the notable exception to this rule. (Okay, it has plenty of suspect information on it, but at least it's marked as such.) It's a shame they have those pop-ups; thankfully, FF1.5 now blocks the fastclick.net that always seemed to get past FF1.0.

First it was the future possibility of mythical bright green circles on cliff-sides from JATO-equiped flying green pigs, and now this. Today is a good day to myth!

Ahem.

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

I'll take the research of Snopes.com over any of those crackpot sites you linked to (which, for all I know, are paid astroturfers for Splenda), but thanks for playing.

There's an awful lot of "common sense" knowledge that turns out to be wrong. Some things are just counter-intuitive, some are easy to misinterpret.

Anyone looking at the apparent motion of the sun and moon over the course of a day would reasonably assume that both revolve around the Earth. The sun comes up, the sun goes down. Over time, people who took careful notes of the movements of the planets noticed that things didn't quite line up, and eventually they realized that it could easily be explained if Earth revolved around the sun and just rotated once a day. Since then we've sent out spacecraft based on this theory and they've gotten where they're supposed to, which suggests we're on the right track.

Until then, "common sense" said otherwise.

It's always worth double-checking common sense to confirm it. Sometimes you'll find out that, yes, people are groggy when they first wake up, and maybe you'll even find out why and be able to deal with it. Sometimes you'll find out that there isn't enough tryptophan in turkey to put people to sleep after a Thanksgiving dinner, and the reason they're drowsing off is just that they've eaten too much food.

I may have missed something, but I saw nothing whatsoever in the article that sends information or provides external access without the users knowledge.

Isn't that what a rootkit does - allow unauthorized access?

Of course, it's hiding a directory, but as mentioned by other posters, Symantec has never been very secretive about that, they just didn't come out and announce in big flashing red letters that they were creating a hidden directory. Not a lie at all, as was the case with Sony.

Now, apparently there are a few folks here that seem to consider Symantec only a couple notches away from M$ on the slimeball ladder, but the fact is they write software that attempts to protect computers (typically from the gifts M$ has bestowed on the world). Personally, I only use their antivirus SW, since Windows does just fine bogging the one machine I run it on without any unnecessary help. To date, I have had far fewer issues with Windows machines using Norton Antivirus than those without it. In fact, it seems to me Norton AV is as important for Windows machines as a network connection.

Not that this isn't something to be aware of, but at best this is a potential security hole, not a rootkit. While I don't want anyone "hiding" stuff on my system, I know very well there are users out there that can be easily convinced to delete important system files - or doesn't anyone remember the SULFNBK virus?

Sadly, it would appear that the burning-mouse story is just plain wrong.

I dunno...even Disney has its moments.

From http://snopes.com/disney/films/films.asp:

Letters spelling the word S-E-X are formed by a cloud of dust in The Lion King.http://snopes.com/disney/films/lionking.htm
Photographic images of a topless woman can be spotted in The Rescuers.http://snopes.com/disney/films/rescuers.h tm
Mischievous animators drew Jessica Rabbit naked.http://snopes.com/disney/films/jessica.htm

I dunno...even Disney has its moments.

From http://snopes.com/disney/films/films.asp:

Letters spelling the word S-E-X are formed by a cloud of dust in The Lion King.http://snopes.com/disney/films/lionking.htm
Photographic images of a topless woman can be spotted in The Rescuers.http://snopes.com/disney/films/rescuers.h tm
Mischievous animators drew Jessica Rabbit naked.http://snopes.com/disney/films/jessica.htm

I dunno...even Disney has its moments.

From http://snopes.com/disney/films/films.asp:

Letters spelling the word S-E-X are formed by a cloud of dust in The Lion King.http://snopes.com/disney/films/lionking.htm
Photographic images of a topless woman can be spotted in The Rescuers.http://snopes.com/disney/films/rescuers.h tm
Mischievous animators drew Jessica Rabbit naked.http://snopes.com/disney/films/jessica.htm

I dunno...even Disney has its moments.

From http://snopes.com/disney/films/films.asp:

Letters spelling the word S-E-X are formed by a cloud of dust in The Lion King.http://snopes.com/disney/films/lionking.htm
Photographic images of a topless woman can be spotted in The Rescuers.http://snopes.com/disney/films/rescuers.h tm
Mischievous animators drew Jessica Rabbit naked.http://snopes.com/disney/films/jessica.htm

Round down and put the extra aside. Say, in your own account.

> The most returned game in history, so I'm told... ;)

Really? Did it actually beat this one? That'd be one for the history books.

Look at the number of chain letter emails in your spam folder that are filled with misinformation easily checked at Snopes. Otherwise intelligent people pass on this crap without realizing they're polluting the information stream with fiction passed off as facts.

In the United States we need an education system that is actually oriented around giving children the ability to analyze information and make rational decisions. If you know how to swim, an ocean of information isn't very scary.

I find it very disturbing that people far younger than I, who have grown up in the Internet Age, often have no idea that the information they are absorbing is not all equally reliable. One of the first things I learned in school was that you can't believe everything you read. Perhaps we've forgotten how to teach that lesson, even though it is more important now than ever before.

The push is on to privatize schools and abandon the government's role in education. Market forces being what they are, I wouldn't be surprised if education conglomerates began to take over K-12 education. While privatization of education might not be a bad thing in other respects, something tells me large for-profit entities wouldn't be interested in pushing a curriculum that fosters healthy scepticism of marketing, mainstream media, and corporations.

That's been Snopes'ed.

Well, it's actually a hoax:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a "home computer" might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn't, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype "home computer." The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo

When I was on Slashdot.Org I heard about this prank which supposedly happened a few years earlier, although its a marvelous urban legend. Believing something as true makes it a much better story, admittedly, but it's very interesting how the urge to believe leads us to retell rumors and stories as if they were true. Human nature fascinates me. Are the best pranks we can come up with ones where we have to invent and personalize the story?

[EDITORS: IMPROVED VERSION! CLICK THE LINKS! Possibly the most inspired post ever ...] There's a history of pranks and hacks in the year-end issue of the Economist, including MIT hacks, the Bonsai Kitten, and the Pentagon hack by my favorite, Abbie Hoffman. They end with an invitation: "... we invite readers to nominate their contender for the finest prank in history, explaining in 750 words why it deserves the title." Slashdot readers, can you hack the contest?

Interesting. For reference, here is the original text and links (from before the article "went live", as seen by subscribers):

Luther Blissett writes "There's a history of pranks and hacks in the year-end issue of the Economist, including MIT hacks, the Bonsai Kitten, and the Pentagon hack by my favorite, Abbie Hoffman." From the article: "At Harvard's neighbour, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 'hacks', as the MIT crowd calls them, are more serious. So serious, in fact, that in 2003 the institute's best hacks were assembled in a 178-page book, 'Nightwork'. The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across. Mr Peterson's book includes an 11-point code for pranksters: leave no damage, do not steal, do not drop things off a building without a ground crew, and so on. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least, student pranks have become an establishment activity."

Actually, not like lemmings at all.

Like lemmings we click on the bonsai kitten link to find out more. The snopes bonsai kitten link is here.

Does this mean that the guy from GM was a prophet?

http://www.snopes.com/toxins/water.htm

Heinlein fans among us will recall a passage in Stranger in a Strange Land describing a Tennessee statute setting the value of pi to be exactly 3. But Snopes tells us it was apparently the Indiana House of Representatives who unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi.

The Snopes article specically concerns Alabama, not Indiana, although it does make mention of the 1897 Indiana House decision, which fortunately died in the state's senate.

This is off-topic even with respect to the off-topic parent post, but... there is a strict "mouse exclusion principle" enforced at each park: only one mouse character is allowed to be walking around the park at any given time. This avoids any possibility of children being traumatized by seeing two copies of the same character at the same time.... :^)

This has been debunked several times http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/clinton.htm/ Go put on your tinfoil hat and look for terrorists in the bushes out in your yard.

Snopes says this quote is bullshit.

It's Christmas Eve and there's only 37 houses listed? It would have made more sense to post this three weeks ago in order to get the word out.

But not to scrooge anyone's Christmas fun, Here's a display put together by an electrical engineer in Ohio that's worth checking out (link goes to a .wmv. Also a Snopes article with more details).

BZZZT.

From Snopes:
The Santa Claus figure, although not yet standardized, was ubiquitous by the late 19th century. Santa was portrayed as both large and small; he was usually round but sometimes of normal or slight build; and he dressed in furs (like Belsnickle) or cloth suits of red, blue, green, or purple. A Boston printer named Louis Prang introduced the English custom of Christmas cards to America, and in 1885 he issued a card featuring a red-suited Santa. The chubby Santa with a red suit (like an "overweight superhero") began to replace the fur-dressed Belsnickle image and the multicolored Santas.

The success of this advertising campaign has helped fuel the legend that Coca-Cola actually invented the image of the modern Santa Claus, decking him out in a red-and-white suit to promote the company colors -- or that at the very least, Coca-Cola chose to promote the red-and-white version of Santa Claus over a variety of competing Santa figures in order to establish it as the accepted image of Santa Claus. ...

At the beginning of the 1930s, the burgeoning Coca-Cola company was still looking for ways to increase sales of their product during winter, then a slow time of year for the soft drink market. They turned to a talented commercial illustrator named Haddon Sundblom, who created a series of memorable drawings that associated the figure of a larger than life, red-and-white garbed Santa Claus with Coca-Cola. Coke's annual advertisements -- featuring Sundblom-drawn Santas holding bottles of Coca-Cola, drinking Coca-Cola, receiving Coca-Cola as gifts, and especially enjoying Coca-Cola -- became a perennial Christmastime feature which helped spur Coca-Cola sales throughout the winter (and produced the bonus effect of appealing quite strongly to children, an important segment of the soft drink market). The success of this advertising campaign has helped fuel the legend that Coca-Cola actually invented the image of the modern Santa Claus, decking him out in a red-and-white suit to promote the company colors -- or that at the very least, Coca-Cola chose to promote the red-and-white version of Santa Claus over a variety of competing Santa figures in order to establish it as the accepted image of Santa Claus.

This legend is not true. Although some versions of the Santa Claus figure still had him attired in various colors of outfits past the beginning of the 20th century, the jolly, ruddy, sack-carrying Santa with a red suit and flowing white whiskers had become the standard image of Santa Claus by the 1920s, several years before Sundlom drew his first Santa illustration for Coca-Cola.

"he wears a red suit because Coka Cola sponsered his hat and so the rest of the suit was made red too."

This is false.
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/santa.asp

uhh...

http://www.snopes.com/glurge/twoquest.htm

They had a blog but they stopped updating it after a while so I can only assume they died.

(Actually I think they ended up going to a doctor, heard some bad news and gave up on their scurvy quest)

...and then we got off the spacecraft, jumped around the moon, planted a flag...blah blah blah.
Sd./ Edwin Aldrin.
Don't tell me you were expecting this ;-)

Why is it that someone who makes a drunken santa gets on the Slashdot front page, but this does not:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/xmaslights.asp

The quote is fake, as has been pointed out. if you want a proper quote, how about one from Hermann Goering?

"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."

That's incorrect. In the past they have awarded it to Khemlani when it was obvious he was a nutjob. They just lost their bottle in 2001 and chickened out. See http://www.snopes.com/rumors/manyear.htm

Actually, they were going to give it to Bin Laden, but they realize the title is confused as an award, and they wanted to avoid the controversy.

Every two-wit fuck knows Giuliani didn't alter world events the way Bin Laden did, and his selection was a way to acknowledge the attack and still have a positive American spin on the cover. Who's a better person, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.