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At the very least it shows that Jesus was a heartless callous vampire who wasn't satisfied with people unless he had sucked them dry.

Overall, it is a good thing that Mr. Gates is being charitable, even if he isn't giving every last cent he has to charity. I understand that some of his charities don't even require indoctrination to MS products anymore. I personally have a hard time giving to charity because a charity has to reputable (so I know it is not a scam). Also I cannot get over the fact that people running charities take home a much higher than a living wage for their services. It seems hypocritical to me.

Fake quote.

Errr, gonna have to try harder. Maybe some mods on /. will blindly accept the "quotes" you send at them, but some of us like to research things before we believe them.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/caesar.htm

"Yet as popular as the quote is, it's not real. These words are not anything Julius Caesar ever wrote or said. No biographies of Caesar or histories of Rome contain these lines, and scholars who have made it their business to know everything about the man draw a blank on this quote. Likewise, Shakespeare did not stuff this soliloquy into the mouth of the title character in his play Julius Caesar, nor did any of the Bard's other characters utter it. No record of this quote has been found prior to its appearance on the Internet in late 2001."

Damn you and your logic. Of course people wouldn't do anything irrational like that. I guess it was a silly idea.

Most people are generally intelligent. No way could they be easily duped.

Okay, so one of the points raised in the whole issue is the fact that if it is going to call itself an Encyclopedia then it must be as authoritative and trustworthy as a "real" one right?

If it were just called "Wiki Pile of Conjecture" there would be no issue... right?

This means people should be able to trust it as implicitly as they trust a real encyclopedia... But the problem is that people who are stupid enough to blindly trust what they read on the internet are exactly the ones who have absolutely no idea what "authoritative" even means and who posses no B.S. filters. I mean just look at how many people believe any utter nonsense that they hear... from anywhere.

The people who don't know how to use Wikipedia for what it is are just as likely to go off and leech info of some random geocities page. At least if it's on Wikipedia and it's rubbish it's possible to be weeded out. If you take the average user researching almost any topic they will pop onto google or msn, type a few keywords, and take the first result as being gospel.
There is simply no cure for these types, so why single out Wikipedia as being a special danger?

http://www.snopes.com/photos/skirts.asp

Use of this method will probably not hold up in a court as it is simple for individuals to pre-send envelopes which can then be used later by placing the actual IP materials inside. [source]

We've yet to locate a case of its use where an author's copyright was established and successfully defended in a court of law by this method. [source]

second half of parent message is a myth http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.as p

We see this in the popularity of x86 chips with higher clock speeds, despite the dubious improvement in actual performance. We see it in the use of league tables and newspaper rankings for deciding schools for our children. We even saw it in Microsoft's rush to 'implement' the POSIX standard in Windows. (I gather that the implementation is pretty unusable, that performance is dire and that no-one would actually use it. However, it's a tick in a box that makes Windows available to certain government departments.)

Sony in particular seem to base most of their electronics on this, designing their products simply to hit certain feature points. If people really took into account quality, durability, reliability, ease of use, etc., then I suspect Sony Electronics wouldn't be as powerful as it is today.

(However, if I may sidetrack for a moment, lemming suicide is fiction, originating in a faked 1958 Disney documentary.)

How is this new Coke ...

I think that they'd rather that you didn't call it New Coke .

I remember this horrible time for humanity. I personally felt as if aliens had kidnapped my best friend and replaced him with a tasteless plastic replica. It was a lesson on why you should never trust marketers (although the comeback was a hell of a coup).

p.s.: No matter what they say Real Coke ("Classic") still does not taste as good as it did in the late 70's! (Or in the late 80's for that matter, but that's another century and another story. )

And what did Craig Shergold ever do with all those darn postcards? The public has a right to know!

Remember the (not true, but still proves the point) anecdote about space pen that NASA supposedly invested millions in its development? Guess what was the miracle cure to write in space that Russians used? A pencil.

History repeats itself once again... you throw rubber camera balls at us and they all turn their focus the wrong way. We use a mirror and see where to run.

It reminds me of a minor space race battle, the battle to write in space. The US spent millions of dollars to make a pressurized nitrogen pen that could write in space. The Soviets used a $0.05 pencil. Go figure.

So your plan is to violate copyright and misappropriate trade secrets, then enter the data as evidence in a legal action?

if your opposition has a lawyer who believes in scorched earth

Sir, I don't know who you are. You don't know who I am. Perhaps you should think of me as a wandering porcupine. Harmless until you attack. Like Tom, I do know the person I worked for, and he knows me. I don't need to puff up my chest and intimidate you, because I know that if you want to screw me, you're going to wonder where that dry, rusty corncob came from.

re flect o porn

The original Herald Sun article has been arcived. I would suggest checking out the snops.com article. At the bottom is a follow up from October where they think it's a fake.

First of all Michael Jackson only owns publishing rights, only jointly owns them, and does not own the entire catalog.

Sony (by far the biggest record label out there... more accurately a massive owner of several huge labels) has right of first refusal on the part of the Beatles catalog which Jackson jointly owns with ATV (one of the labels Sony owns), so if Apple Computer wanted to buy the Beatles music, they would have to negotiate with Sony to do it.

In other words: Fat chance.

For the strait dope on the subject: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/jackson.htm

The ad told the story of a guy who collected a $500,000 jury verdict after he was injured using a lawnmower as a hedge clipper. The agency later conceded that it had no factual basis for the story, but that didn't keep it from circulating widely in the media and in conservative political speeches.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/041 0.mencimer.html

(Think about that for a minute - even if you were to try to cut a hedge with a lawn mower, how could you hold it such that it would be your thumbs which were injured?) A quick Nexis search confirmed the story to have been a fabrication.
http://thestoppedclock.blogspot.com/2004_10_10_the stoppedclock_archive.html

Haven't heard about the lawnmower one, but the Winnebago one is an urban legend according to Snopes.

I don't know about US law, but under Australian law, manufacturers are not responsible for the inappropriate use of their products. All products carry with them an implied warranty of fitness for merchantability and a particular purpose. That is, if you knowingly sell a product that does not perform in the manner in which it is expected to perform*, you are in trouble.

*"the manner in which it is expected to perform" is a bit vague. It is generally understood that the purpose of most products is generally understood - if the company claims the use to which the customer put the product was not one in which it was expected to perform, then it is up to the courts to decide whether or not that is a reasonable claim.

Somehow I doubt that this would produce enough carbon monoxyde to keep the cycle going. You know, perpetuum mobiles and all (laws of physics apply to living creatures too!). Btw, it has already been tried with other critters.

Close, but no cigar:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp

The highways/interstates were never intended as landing strips. Besides, when's the last time you heard of traffic being shut down/diverted for the practice landings?

Main stream media outlets have been taking content off the web and calling it their own for some time.

From http://www.snopes.com/humor/mediagoofs/sixpence.as p:

The last few years have seen several television programs dedicated to the examination and "debunking" of urban legends and similar types of stories. One entry in this genre was a show entitled Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed, which aired on cable station The Learning Channel (TLC) in the U.S.

One of the features of this program was its use of quizzes as bridges across commercial breaks -- just before each commercial break it presented the audience with an urban legend-related tidbit and challenged viewers to guess whether it was true or not; after the commercial break the (supposedly) correct answer was revealed. We noted with some amusement that most of these quizzes dealt with fairly obscure items covered on our web site; we were even more amused when the 18 March 2003 episode posed the question of whether the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was used as a coded message for recruiting pirates. Of course, that was nothing compared to the hilarity which ensued in our house when "Mostly True Stories" revealed this item to be TRUE: "The notorious pirate Blackbeard used this code to recruit hands, whom he paid sixpence a day," they disclosed.

What's so funny? The notion that the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was used as a recuiting song for pirates was invented by us as an example of a story so incredibly silly that no one could possibly believe it to be true.

There are at least two accounts of people jumping into the hot springs in Yellowstone Park to rescue pet dogs. Snopes has an article about David Allan Kirwan, who jumped into a 200 degree C hot pool. ESPN has more details.

Although since a lava stream is anywhere between 800C and 1200C which is enough to melt most metals below manganese, you would probably just end up being a large carbon statue.

I'm waiting for the word "Dord" to be added.

I agree, and I'm sure Nigeria does too.

More info on the famous Christmas lights video.

Includes an interview with the guy by a local radio station.

The population of Gander Newfoundland is about 10k people, on 9/11 there was about 10k people stranded there for a few days. Was that where your friend got stuck? Things were, naturally, a little messed up with trying to feed and shelter that many people. Sorry about that but do you really think some remote outpost in Alaska caould handle taking care of that many people much better? Next time feel free to have all those planes circle over the ocean until they run out of fuel. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/gander.htm

- An uglier, less-functional prefrences screen which hides more options at a time
- New, non-standard "flat" look for the menus (presumably trying to emulate MS-office in windows XP)
- Extension interface broken once again, so no 1.5 support for some extensions
- new "Hey look, we're pretending to be IE!"-style error pages (less-intrusive than error popups, I'm mixed on this one.)
- Some of the more-important functions of tabbrowser extensions seem to be included, but I'm not going to bother to disable tbe to find out if it's "good enough"
- http://www.yzzerdd.com/, http://www.snopes.com/ no longer seem to succeed at opening popups (Yes I'm against ad blocking, No I'm not against blocking browser-hijacking.)
- Still seems to have whatever bug makes it sometimes simply "stop responding to all links", but now seems to recover from it after a long delay, rather than requiring browser restart.
- No obvious improvements to the bookmarks panel
- The incredibly stupid favorite-icon bug is still there. I dont know what idiocy causes this, but it certainly /looks/ a lot like something being left uninitialized or simply an offbyone error. Seriously, what is wrong that you havent fixed this by now?

So, verdict for the moment: Less fun to look at, more good.

"Is the apocalypse nigh? I sure think so. The last one happened at the height of Atari's power, they were invincible, pumping out hit after hit. Pac-Man, ET, Asteroids, movie tie-ins, overflowing arcades and a rabid fan base."

The same Pac-Man that Atari was left with 5 million unsold cartridges for? The same E.T. that was so lamented that most of the copies of the cartridge came back and are now occupying landfill space in New Mexico? These aren't prime examples.

Hmmm, not sure why my URL showed up properly when I previewed but not when I posted. Let me try again. It was

http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/babtrain.htm

i.e. here

Hmmm, not sure why my URL showed up properly when I previewed but not when I posted. Let me try again. It was

http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/babtrain.htm

i.e. here

In addition, of course, most stores have huge sales on that Friday. It would be interesting to see the order that all this occured in, but I suspect that the sales just made a fairly popular shopping day into a very popular one.

Of course, even Black Friday is only the Fifth Largest Shopping Day of the year. Apparently weekends leading up to Christmas are bigger, and I suspect that peaks in online shopping will occur based on when things can be shipped to get to people in time for Christmas. This year, with Christmas on a Sunday, I suspect that Christmas Eve will be an astounding shopping day.

Sorry, this has been debunked. I was going to mod it down, but instead decided to just post the info:

http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/writing.asp

I've been actually quite surprised at the number of IT people that have been propagating this email. You'd think they'd be able to spot a fake a mile away.

Even frogs notice being boiled alive

"I can't come up with anything else in the entire marketing world where marketers knowingly introduce a flawed or inadequate product [and] it helps grow your user base."

I guess he wasn't around for new Coke.

That's an urban legend. Unemployment level is determined by survey.

Read for yourself: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm

I stand corrected as I count SNOPES as a fairly reliable information source.

It does raise another serious issue though - out of the full population only 60,000 homes are survey'd? I find this far too small a data sample for properly determining this data trend even if the surveys are done monthly. With data collection and sorting what it is they could certainly increase their sample size and still get timely results.

And yes I know this goes hand in hand with the arguments as to the TLAs and their ability to gather/sort data. I'm not saying we need a sample size that large but something larger than 60k homes is needed in my opinion.

Only because people dropped off unemployment completely and thus disappeared from the statistics. Had we been counting actual bodies and not just checks we'd still be in the hole right now.

It doesn't matter, because this story is fake. Notice it was put out by PRWeb, an open-access news publishing service that just happens their articles are also published on Yahoo -- you may have seen them in the news a year or two ago when a rumor about Andy Kaufman still being alive was taken seriously by many people, a rumor that was given credence just because Yahoo! had mirrored it.

What's sad is, I've only seen at most three or four other posts in this entire story pointing out the fakeness and past history of PRWeb, out of over 300 posts. No, no... what's sad is, Slashdot actually posting this story, as if the story had any credibility in the first place.

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

It's more important to have privacy, than it is to worry about flushing. But some hotels just don't understand that, as you can see in the link's photo.

The same PRWeb that carried the news of Andy Kaufman's triumphant return from the dead? How exciting!

According to this, it sounds like the Martian ambassador was annoyed that he couldn't get an audience with the president back in May, so I'd say an attack is imminent.

This was on snopes this morning:

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/turkey.asp

I don't care what they say though, I'm still blaming it on the turkey ;)

Yup. Cue the chain e-mails:
"Did you know that $organization is HEATHEN? They support this 'evolution' exhibition, which is like spitting in the face of God! BOYCOTT! And forward this to all your friends!"

It is sad. But, corporates don't want that kind of attention.

As a side note, various large US retailers greet their customers with 'Happy Holiday' instead of 'Merry Christmas', since a significant percentage of their customers don't celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Kwanza, Chanukkah (sp?) an so forth. This has altso caused chain e-mails from Christians.

Example from Snopes.

It's a little of both, I'm afraid:
According to this news article, it's some residents of the city that are suing. Admittedly I didn't find the source before posting. I basd the posting on my recollection of a conversation with a friend. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170468,00.html

HOWEVER, I believed it because of the ongoing assault on Christian's rights from the ACLU which I have seen again and again:
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/11/01/desert.cross .ap/
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/08/27/ten.commandments /
http://www.aclu.org//religion/tencomm/16298prs2000 1012.html
http://www.kotv.com/main/home/stories.asp?whichpag e=1&id=91429

The constitution says "congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion" When a county puts up ANY display, that's a county matter, not a federal one. Where are the rights of the states? GONE!

Why does the ACLU regularly file suit on issues like government properties allowing the display of Christian religious symbols AT CHRISTMAS when the VAST majority of people in this country celebrate that at LEAST as a secular holiday. Is it really oppressive? No way! This kind of thing makes me sick!

What does the Boy Scouts having their jamboree on federal property have to do with the establishment clause? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! The Boy Scouts having 'under God' in their oath is NOT the state establishing a national Christian religion.

Non-ACLU assaults
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/venrtura.htm
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/wtccross.a sp

Here's the point, these are NOT about getting the state to endorse my religion. What it IS about is that there are a majority of people (still) who agree with the vast majority of Christian belief and practices, and who are not negatively affected by the city, county, state or feds recognizing that these ideas are consistent with community standards and offer some value to the community at large. Also, the facts are that the 10 commandments have a unique relationship to the rule of law in our country and it's revisionist history to claim otherwise.

Let's be clear, persecution of Christians for their religious beliefs DOES occur. Predominantly this is at the hands of atheistic or Muslim governments. More than 150,000 Christians were killed last year for their Christian beliefs. (Source: Missionary to Indonesia speaking at my church - not available on the web. This number is consistent with other sources I have heard.) What's happening here is not persecution. What is happening here is that the culture is becoming more intolerant and hostile to my worldview. Others may disagree, but I have observed management in my company tell people that they cannot discuss religion at work. This is a violation of free speech rights regardless of religious views, but there's a fear and perception that recognition of religious belief at work is unacceptable. It's only going to get worse and worse.

Do you believe that when the school system rents a church facility to have graduation (because school facilities are not big enough to handle the event) that this is the state sponsoring religion? What if the "church" is a synagague, mosque or temple? Frankly I would absolutely NOT care if the school system rented and atheist-owned hall for graduation. If my kids' worldview was going to be damaged by one incident in one location one time, my world view would be pretty indefe

right, the original poster saud

>There's also been a lot less Scottie, though. Maybe they just don't have as much stuff that needs serious welding any more?

to which the reply was "she's not on the show anymore", which appears to be the case*

seemed to me they were talking about Scottie all along? Where did Kari come in except to ask for more Myths with Kari in a bikini (that *was* pretty hot) - they painted her with aluminum paste to test the tinman myth**

*also notice that Kari, Grant and Torry get equal billing with Jamie and Adam now?

**which was otherwise a screw-up because it really happened and Buddy Ebsen claimed he was sickened by the aluminum dust they used for makeup.

http://www.snopes.com/movies/films/ozebsen.htm

The aluminum dust used in Ebsen's makeup had caused an allergic reaction or infection in his lungs that left him scarcely able to breathe, and he ended up spending two weeks in the hospital and another month recuperating in San Diego. ...

The aluminum makeup was modified as well, changing from a powder that was brushed on to a paste that was painted on.

The guy that replaced him was made up with aluminum paste which was not irritating at all. Smearing Kari with aluminum paste makeup was entirely pointless, well except that it was hot.

Do you ever use the information at snopes.com? (My personal favorite for busting day to day myths.)

Or not.

Actually it is Mussolini who is credited with making the trains run on time, not Hitler, and it's not true in any case.
http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.htm

Subliminal messages don't work anyway

Here's a good example of content that should be in the public domain. It's really too bad that just about anything newer than the 1920s is still under copyright - Happy Birthday is owned by a division of AOL Time Warner and won't fall into the public domain for another 25 years (unless Congress extends it again).

It's okay, some of us get the reference :)

PS: everyone else, Snopes has the scoop.