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Urban legend - according to Snopes, anyway.

http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/cruise.asp

Here was a good read I found not oo long ago about the choice to add W.K. to the series.
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/chekov.asp

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

Um, You DO know that the "space pen" is a myth right? http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp So please, stop quoting every peice of spam that floats into your mailbox. Unless you really did know this and are really bad at math, I mean 400 pens at $2.95 each certainly isnt "Millions"

One thing I do remember from working on milspec projects many years ago was that our project failed an inspection because some pipe valves were black. The part number was identical to milspec, but they weren't painted milspec green.

Perhaps they were using such small points as a nit-picky "canary" check for standards elsewhere; in much the same manner that the No Brown M&Ms clause did for Van Halen.

It's a nice story, but it isn't actually true. Both the USA and USSR initially used pencils in their space programs. The company that developed the space pen did so on their own hook without any funding from NASA, and the pen they developed worked well enough that both the USA and USSR programs eventually used it. For more details see the writeup at Snopes.

It's a nice story, but it isn't actually true. Both the USA and USSR initially used pencils in their space programs. The company that developed the space pen did so on their own hook without any funding from NASA, and the pen they developed worked well enough that both the USA and USSR programs eventually used it. For more details see the writeup at Snopes.

The Snopes article about KFC's name change linked to by parent is a spoof! If you click on the more information link at the bottom of the page, it takes you to this page, which explains that everything in that section, including the KFC article, is a spoof, intended to warn people against relying on authority without checking things out themselves.

Al Gore did not say that he invented the Internet! Stop perpetuating this lie!

Yeah... I think people are making a lot of noice of this, at the end Red Hat could change its product name to just RHEL or Red Hat EL or whatever.

I remeber something similar happening to the KFC store which was once called "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and after the Kentucky sate (is it a state? I am not from US so sorry for my lack of geography knowledge) started enforcing the "trademark" of their name so they could get some $$ and then the fast food chain just changed its name to KFC because they found the move unfair.

The same thing happened to the Kentucky Derby and other Kentucky named products

So, it is just a name thing, and the people that is going to PAY for it are the 3 geeks under the basement who do not have a established name. Big companies like Novell, RedHat etc, will just change the name of their product (Like Lindows, Xandros, etc.), the small geeks will have to pay if they want to use the Linux buzz... or change the name to something else (like maybe Knoppix L) :)

http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/superbowl.a sp

wrong

Or James Taylor's "Fire and Rain", although it's not really about a literal plane crash

You do realize that Snopes just tells people what THEY want you to believe, don't you?

Bzzt! He was cremated and has a burial plot at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California.

The whole cryo thing is just an urban legend.

The case was dismissed - the woman who claims to have written them didn't prove her case, didn't supply the evidence she and her lawyers had to supply, and the case was thrown out because of this.

It never even went past the initial steps of discovery.

She's not getting any money out of that, apart from the money she'll score from the publicity for her crappy, crappy novel.

Please, just google her name in google news. It ain't hard. In fact, I'll take pity on you and provide a link to Snopes on just this matter.

No, of course not. There's certainly no such thing as unsubstantiated rumour floating around the internet.

Actually, not quite

"this film will suck because the Wachowskis are hacks, living it large off one good film"

And there's even been (as-yet unsubstantiated) claims that they stole someone else's treatment when creating that film. That could certainly explain why 2 and 3 seemed so lacking compared to the first movie. See http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/matrix.asp for a good overview of the claim's history.

Some of our theories are undoubtedly "mostly correct", to the point that no one is going to laugh at them. In fact, I'd bet that most of them are at least "mostly correct".

We don't laugh at the idea of "atoms", although a lot of the details were wrong. We understand some of the details of the human genome, and recognize that there is much more to know. A lot of things like string theory are looked on as predictive, but not necessarily descriptive, with the underlying mechanism still totally unknown.

A lot of things in mathematics, chemistry and physics have withstood the test of time quite well. No one laughs at Newton, even though in extreme cases things are more complicated than he figured. No one laughs at Galileo, Dirac, Hilbert, Turing, Church, Bell, Fermat, Einstein, Feynman, Laplace, Faraday, Maxwell, Hubble, Gödel, von Neumann, or even poor old Babbage. No one is laughing at the builders of Stonehenge. It seems unlikely that Stephen Hawking will be laughed at in the future (even if some things turn out to be wrong). It remains to be seen whether Stephen Wolfram will be seen as a visionary or misguided, but it is unlikely he will be laughed at either.

We already are, and will continue to laugh at the State Board of Education in Kansas (and various other legislators and school boards, e.g. Dover, PA), along with legislators who try to dictate the value of pi (which didn't happen in Alabama, but almost did in Indiana).

This is an urban legend. http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/arbys.asp

meat dress

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

You'll love it -- it's a joke based on a myth, too.

interesting :)

"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." - John F. Kerry

Kerry never said it. It was actually GWB, according to Snopes:

"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." Though it is not a word-for-word match, it is close enough to a statement made by President George W. Bush in 2000 to be recognizable: "More and more of our imports come from overseas."

The Snopes page also shows that most of the other quotes are bogus.

No, that study was at Harvard and involved Coke bottles. Check out http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/sperm.asp for more details on the actual study.

The call to the legal team got pretty weird when they got direct approval from the US Supreme Court, when Clarence Thomas got wind of it and kept trying to submit his own Coke can for the study.

I think we all know the answer to that question: http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/gates.asp

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

People make mistakes. People that write encyclopedias are not gods; they also make mistakes.

Read this, which is about a mistake the editors made in a dictionary.

This explains what EB got wrong and what WP got right, ironically featured on WP's site.

Your sig is an urban legend.. Go on, perpetuate the lies that you have been told.

Sorry that this is off topic, but your sig is wrong.

See this link for details. NASA spent no money developing the space pen. Further, both countries started to use the pen once Fischer made it available.

Your sig is an urban legend. See snopes for details.

Great story. Too bad it's false.

Many people totally misunderstand LISP and its features. Its sad, but in any case the OP's case about the future of unix and managed code is wrong, anyhow. PS Did you know that lemmings don't mass suicide http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm

In that case, I'm going to sue Disney because the copy of the Rescuers I bought has nudity in it! and its rated G! I don't care if they recalled it when they found out, Rockstar recalled GTA:VC and they are getting sued!

Actually NASA spent $0 on the space pen. Fisher spent their own money and in return for producing the device recieved quite a bit of free publicity. You can get the details at snopes. Also I would think that a normal felt tip pen would work as capilary action still functions without gravity =)

Riiight.
"NASA never asked Paul C. Fisher to produce a pen. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge. Fisher sent the first samples to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200C. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. All research and developement costs were paid by Paul Fisher. No development costs have ever been charged to the government. "

She's actually the mother holding the baby, not the baby as some people have believed. http://www.snopes.com/risque/porn/chambers.htm

And as always, Snopes has some interesting info to add. I've gotta say, I've heard more unnerving sounds from my roommate's bedroom at night.

From the post: men who were accessing unsecured wireless hotspots...

There's the key term, "unsecured." By definition, if it's unsecured, it's PUBLIC. End of case.

Okay, well, it SHOULD be the end of the case, but we know it won't be.

Those calls for computer users to be licensed before connecting to the internet are starting to sound less and less off-the-wall.

"Yes, send it back. You're too stupid to own a computer..." http://www.snopes.com/humor/business/wordperf.htm

Stop spreading bullshit

Naming is important, but unfortunately that anecdote is untrue.

Two problems with that: Notable is an actual word in English, Nova isn't a word in Spanish. Also, the pronunciation doesn't change in Nova by adding a space: the syllables sound exactly the same, so when spoken, space or no space, a Spanish speaker will hear "no va". When you add the space to notable, you change the sound from notahble to no tayble.

All that aside, snopes has debunked this myth (this link has been posted so many times before on Slashdot, figured people would give this story a rest already...).

Ahh, bite the wax tadpole!

The Chevrolet Nova sold very well in South America. Consider that an equivalent situation in English would be a dining room set called "The Notable" not getting any sales because people think it contains no tables. http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp for further details.

Except of course where Beatles is Beethoven -- in particular Because is based on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (well, backwards anyway). And of course, we can't forget Roll Over Beethoven, although that was of course written by Chuck Berry :-)...

Back in the day? I still get forwards about the inhumanity of the site from the ladies in the office. And I still send them to Snopes. Doesn't help.

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