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"The colander lie detector story has been part of oral lore since at least the late 1960s." For more info, see http://www.snopes.com/legal/colander.htm
    -DaveR

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

(godwin, yadda yadda). see also surrounding circumstances

"this will cost them a bundle as they will have to junk all thoes discs, make new masters etc, and this will be them admiting wrong doing" HMMMM Where have we seen this before: http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp However I think Atari's games had better music.

That may or may not be true. It's a complex issue that can't really be boiled down to a simple statement of belief. Snopes has this to say about it.

Regardless of veracity, the parent is right in that there's zero humor involved.

The same kind of sensationalist journalism not to long ago likened mad cow disease to a new sort of plague with predictions of obscene death rates when in reality it was statistically low.

I won't argue that Mad Cow Disease was overhyped. However, you make it sound as though no media attention at all should have been given to it. Y2K was mostly a non-issue because the media hyped it, everybody got ready for it, and were ready when it came, so it passed quietly.

From what I've read, avian flu has killed millions, we don't necesarily have a vaccine against it, and known strains with a high mortality rate now exist. Having avian flu breakout is definite and real, such as the very real threat to the modern banana. It's real, and if we ignored it, bananas as we know them (the cavendish) would cease to exist.

But, those that need to be, are hypersensitive to the problem, and work feverishly to find a solution to the problem - usually found.

Hypersensitivy to potential threats is part of millions of years of evolution. We pay no attention to the trees unless there might be a snake in one. Then, we pay very close attention. This is no different. I'm not particularly worried about avian flu simply because of all the media hype and attention placed on it.

More power to 'em - they're protecting ME.

I think this is a variant of this story where every friday night, a cleaning lady would unplug the life support to a particular hospital bed to plug in a floor polisher, killing a patient every friday that the bed was occupied. The article mentions several variants, including one where a system goes down the same time each day for several minutes.

I remember this too. According to Snopes and this blog post, these warnings - boiled down to the simplest level - told law enforcement and other groups that going after them was a violation of non-existing 1995 Internet privacy law signed by former President Clinton.

It isn't true.

Anyone remember those MOTD's on pirate-software FTP sites giving us a pseudo-legal-brief about President Clinton signing some law, and then "FBI AGENTS YOU CANNOT ENTER THIS SITE"?

They never stopped, FTP simply lost importance. IRC fserves used to have them too. Websites, DC++ hubs, eMule hubs, WinMX shares as well. It's funny, I've had people present me that and then ask me if I'm a cop as well. Even after sending them this and this they still think it is for real. I guess it's some kind of mental self-defense, denial or whatever that makes them go LALALALALA I can't hear you.

Kjella

Anyone remember those MOTD's on pirate-software FTP sites giving us a pseudo-legal-brief about President Clinton signing some law, and then "FBI AGENTS YOU CANNOT ENTER THIS SITE"?

They never stopped, FTP simply lost importance. IRC fserves used to have them too. Websites, DC++ hubs, eMule hubs, WinMX shares as well. It's funny, I've had people present me that and then ask me if I'm a cop as well. Even after sending them this and this they still think it is for real. I guess it's some kind of mental self-defense, denial or whatever that makes them go LALALALALA I can't hear you.

Kjella

I'd recommend you check out this page. They do in fact still teach fractions in Mississippi.

Could be worse, you could live in Mississippi, where they don't teach fractions anymore.

Except that isn't the myth. The myth is that food is safe to eat after 5 seconds on the floor.

Seems very similar to this one:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/emergent/couch.htm

Ha ha aren't fat ppl funny :-/

Ahh ... the most successful reupublican talking point ever. A hilarious, utterly pervasive fabrication. Slashdot needs a Snopes filter to weed out these idiots.

Mountain Dew wont really shrink your nads, but we all know Dr. Thunder is the best.

Weird.

There have been far too many Bill Gates pays for email hoaxes sent out over the past 8 years... more info...

Nothing happens to the fork.

Now, HOW strong is the acid in your stomach compared to carbonic acid in coke? mmmK?

No, it wasn't.

I heard it with my own ears when he said it and a thousand times since. There wasn't enough time between "for" and "man" for there to have been an "a". Also the way his diction moves through "for man" differs than that if he had said "for a man" which would have come out more like "fora man". (Say it to yourself a few times)

did you ever see the pictures of the money people microwave? they have obvious burn marks where the chips supposedly are.

That's been debunked. See here and here.

There are no RFID tags in Andrew Jackson's eye.

>There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what
>he does not want merely because you think it does him good

E.g. the gov't mandates that all cars must have seatbelts installed for every seat. That makes the car circa 100 USD more expensive to build and buy and it hurts the consumer's pocket. Most consumers do not want seatbelts, it is a really annoying harness and does not look cool at all. It is thus very tyrannic to mandate seatbelts...

With this kind of reasoning the only award you will win is the Darwin Award, like Derek Kieper, that bachelor guy who wrote a lenghty tirade against seatbelt use in the university weekly and managed to eliminate himself from the human genome a few weeks later in an otherwise very minor car accident when he was thrown out the windshield. See: http://www.snopes.com/autos/accident/seatbelt.asp

I'd like to see an example of this actually having happened in court. If it has, please direct me to more information.

Snopes to the rescue

Short answer: no, it's never happened.

You might be interested in Snopes' take on the 'Al Gore invented the internet' thing - If you haven't heard it, or any of the other umpty-billion other people who pointed out that the whole thing was a giant con job.

I used to live across the street from Toys R Us in Sunnyvale, CA, and there was this local legendabout a ghost that haunted the store there.

of course

The allegory interpretion, while widely disseminated, is most likely untrue. The fount of all things urband legend (snopes) dismisses it, as does this more scholarly analysis.

ah.. sNope! Apparently, it's true http://www.snopes.com/science/mars.asp

I don't think the article meant it was "surprising". When I hear someone say "unusual" I don't think "exciting turn of events". Though I don't think the word "unusual" works well here either. WHO CARES!
As far as the actual article, who else thought this was Urban Legend Spam that had made it's way somehow to Slashdot?

A few things to consider:

Online "petitions" like this are meaningless - anyone could sit down and throw together a long list of names and no one would know whether they were accurate or not. Sending a list of names to someone you are trying to influence is irrelevant - any individual who makes policy based upon an online and un-verifiable list of names should not be in a decision-making role.

If you want to effect change, do the following:

1. Write the decision-maker, in ink, on paper. Inundate them with snail mail; it has a visual impact - email is easy to ignore.
2. Call the decision-maker on the phone; tie up his business line and he is likely to take notice.
3. Sign a petition, in ink. Online petitions are worthless for the reasons given above. If you want to initiate an online petition, form a lobby, accumulate a membership and write or speak on behalf of your members in lieu of an online petition.

Well, you'd like to think that, but there are morons out there that take what The Onion publishes, and treat it as gospel:

http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/potter.htm

Plus, there was a story of couple of years ago where China, North Korea, or Al-Jeezera (can't remember who) took an Onion story and reported it as fact.

This all comes down to lawyers protecting the trademark, anyway. This has nothing to do with parody.

THIS JUST IN!!!

Onion satire lost on more than two people:

one reference: In 1998, controversial minister Fred Phelps posted the Onion article '98 Homosexual-recruitment drive nearing goal on his God Hates Fags website as proof that homosexuals were indeed actively trying to get straight people to join their ranks.

two refererences: On June 7, 2002, Reuters reported that the Beijing Evening News republished, in the international news page of its June 3 edition, translated portions of a story from The Onion (they were apparently unaware of The Onion's satirical nature). The story discusses the U.S. Congress's threats to leave Washington for Memphis, Tennessee or Charlotte, North Carolina unless Washington, DC built them a new Capitol building with a retractable dome. The article is a parody of U.S. sports franchises' threats to leave their home city unless new stadiums are built for them. The Evening News is Beijing's most popular newspaper, claiming a circulation of 1.25 million.

three references: In late March 2004, Deborah Norville of MSNBC presented as genuine an Onion article claiming that 58 percent of all exercise done in the United States is done on television. [2] (http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/news/opin ion/8266998.htm?template=contentModules/printstory .jsp)

four references, AH! AH! AH! (cue thunder): Columnist Ellen Makkai and others who believe the Harry Potter books recruit children to Satanism have also been taken in by the Onion's satire, using quotes from an Onion article as evidence for their claims. [3] (http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/potter.htm) [4] (http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25 446)

Nah, everyone knows The Onion is a joke.

Not everyone.

That is a myth. The space program was responsible for a lot more than Tang and 'space pens'. Then again, there are things that you can't put a price on, such as the need for mankind to go to space.

That's amusing. Terrible pity it just isn't true, isn't it?
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

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

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

Now, don't you feel stupid?

I have a conspiracy theory:
The first man on mars will be British
The reason?
They're the only ones who will drink the bromine tea.



(sorry about the bad link...)

using binoculars are too low tech.
Some criminals are using card readers and hidden cameras.

http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/atmcamera.asp

http://bizpartner.com.my/article/23

In Malaysia, a gang even created a fake ATM machine that "collected" the users cards and pin numbers.

By the time the user get the new ATM card and the bank statement. Thousands of dollars would have disappear from their account.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

Nice flame ... http://www.snopes.com/risque/kinky/panties.htm

I never said it was common either.

WRT your final question. Yes, probably a small part though.

Splitting hairs about whether or not the US invented, or merely started the "first segments of the internet" in asinine.

Nutrasweet.
MSG
salts (For those that don't get it, ask a nurse about this old saw "The dose makes the poison". Anything, even the most basic element of life, is deadly in excessive quantities.)

"Preservatives" is a little generic. Even salt in its most basic form is a preservative. Sugar is as well. Liquid maple syrup preserves (get this) hardened maple syrup. So, yeah... hmmm... I'll let you all have at this one.

As far as olestra goes, the results of eating too much (dose makes the poison again) are clearly labelled on the packaging, and apart from being messy, aren't any more dangerous than eating several bowls of all bran.

Did you know that MSG is in breast milk? Yup, in fact, the purpose of MSG is to make food "moreish". This way babies are more inclined to keep drinking mother's milk. I don't see babies suffering from migraines.

It never hurt when Disney did it

OR maybe that's why there're so many slutty girls out there these days ^_^

That's nothing. They have used underwear vending machines in Japan.

... it will interpolate the data to give an effective 44khz (or less, depending on how many active voices) sample. This means that an 8khz sample will sound better on the GUS than most other cards, since the GUS will play it at 44khz!

First:
I find it amusing that the Right Wingers out there have latched on to this mantra of "Democrats believe the Bush caused Katrina, what idiots".. I couldn't figure it out at first and then I realized that this was an unclever ploy to make Liberals look stupid somehow.. except that I couldn't find any Liberals actually ever even IMPLYING Bush was responsible for "causing" Katrina..

What Liberals were saying (right or wrong) is that it wasn't handled appropriately and Bush even agreed and took responsibility for this.

So please do yourself a favor and stop regurgitating whatever Fox News feeds you. (the origins that Democrats were even suggesting that came from Ben Stein http://www.snopes.com/katrina/soapbox/benstein.asp )

Let's see you like to talk a lot of officially approved Right Wing propaganda, but who had the highest death toll from Katrina? .. Which State? I'll help you out.. Starts with an L and ends with an A.
Here's a little link for your narrow mind.. Please click on it, it will help to educate you:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/33 87284

Let's see Louisiana had 1003 dead, Missisippi which you claim was hit the hardest only had 221 people dead.. Let's see I guess math escapes you, that's almost 5 times as many dead in Lousiana.

Maybe you should get your facts straight and do a little bit of research from alternative news sources before you go off spouting the misinformed Fox News spinning of the facts.

I can't imagine that a human flying a plane at 300mph (400 feet per second) would be able to see a flock of birds far enough away to be able to effectively dodge, either. I think planes just fly through birds, and the airplane's components are tested by hurling frozen turkeys at or into the various parts (like windscreens and engines).

From Snopes:

The chicken gun (also known as the chicken cannon, turkey gun, or rooster booster) has been around since 1972. It's used for the "chicken ingestion test," one of a series of stress tests required by the Federal Aviation Administration before a new jet engine design can be certified. The tests take place in a concrete building large enough to enclose an entire jet engine. With the engine operating at full speed, the cannon uses compressed air to shoot chicken carcasses into the turbine at 180 mph. (The Air Force is known to launch its poultry projectiles at 400 mph into F-16 canopies.)

>Expecting anything from someone who gave you free/free software isn't reasonable.

Tell that to the Indians who got free blankets contaminated with smallpox. Tell that to the people who got niftly little free tools infested with spyware. Tell that to the people who got candy laced with various sharp objects.

If there's going to be liability for software defects caused by willful negligence, no lawmaker in his/her right mind is going to buy the notion that free software is exempt. You put it out there, you're responsible for it not harming anyone whether you get paid or not.

Actually I'm not worried about the FBI but rather the kind of people who put fake card reader slots in front of the slots on atm machines. And then, so they can get your PIN, put a little camera in a pamphlet box next to the machine (http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/atmcamera.as p).

Surely someone who can do this to an ATM can do what I suggest to an in-room hotel computer, no?

http://www.snopes.com/photos/bugs/camelspider.asp

Look at the pic again. It's just an ordinary domestic cat hanging close to the camera. It also explains why it has no head. An ordinary cat's head comes off a lot easier (by maybe a larger predator? dog?) than the head of a puma!

This may be off topic but I have been looking for an excuse to ask this question and since ASCAP and BMI came up, here it is.

There seems to be a fundamental difference between the way performance organizations (ASCAP, BMI) handle things and the way recording organizations (RIAA) handle things. Here is an example (in the US.)

I have been to hundreds of birthdays in my life so far. At darn near every one of them we sing "Happy Birthday." People get offended if you don't sing it. "Re-light the candles! we forgot to sing the birthday song!!" However, at restaurants, they will celebrate a birthday by having many of the employees come by with a cake and they all sing... A different song!

The reason for this difference, IIRC, is that there is a copyright on the melody of the song "Happy Birthday". http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp I assume that restaurants would have to pay a fee/royalty if they "perform" the copyrighted Happy Birthday song. However, I have never in my 100's of birthday parties had a team of ASCAP/ABI lawyers threaten me or the other copyright violators at the party with litigation. I conclude there must be a difference between the restaurant, who is generating revenue from performing the song (and entertaining customers) and the party-goers who are not. (except for the one who gets the presents, but that is another issue)

So, let's extend that same situation to the recording world. iToons can make a copy of a song and sell it. They are generating revenue from that sale so they must pay the RIAA for the privilege. If I do the same thing without making any money in any way I get sued.

Can someone more qualified than me please explain the difference?