Slashdot Mirror

on this (in)famous story about NASA's space pen.

Snopes has something else to say about this little urban legend: Clickity click

The Walt Disney Company may have already lost the copyright on Mickey Mouse due to a faulty copyright notice.

Snopes seems to think "Happy Birthday to You" is still copyrighted and owned by Time Warner. But it may not be different enough from an earlier song called "Good Morning to All", whose U.S. copyright has already expired, to be considered a distinct work worthy of a separate copyright.

So Walt Disney Corp can still sell Mickey exclusively and so that Time Warner can sue you for singing 'Happy Birthday' of course. What? You don't see the point in that??

consider the extreme case of inventing a pressurised fountain pen for use in zero-g vs. using a chinagraph pencil

Yeah.
Now consider that you've used a horribly flawed analogy and that the first-pass evaluation might miss a deeper issue.

Remember the story of how the US spent $5 million to develop a space pen, which would work in vacuum, under water, in massive heat, etc? ... the Russians brought a pencil.

Not entirely true.

This is an urban legend. The Fisher Space Pen was developed at private expense. Pencils were used for a time, but you run the risk of broken pencil points getting into the machinery. More discussion here.

Of course, the design challenge with pencils is what happens when they break. Broken lead tips and cedar shavings in zero-g can be troublesome.

wasn't the internet invented by a vice president, a few years ago?

No.

Cell phones tend to build up a static charge due to their emission of electromagnetic waves, which, in some cases, can cause a spark. [...] It's a legitimate concern.

Ummmmm.... bull.

Yes, this guy is a troll, and its bad to feed trolls, but he is not *just* a troll, he is also a propagandist and I think it is worthwhile to point out a couple of the more subtle lies in this propaganda piece.

(1) Religious name calling. Some people think that there are moral arguments for using free software. Enderle uses religious terminology to refer to these people: "priest" for the more reasonable; "zealot" for the less reasonable. He uses religious terminology because that allows him to pretend that these people support free software because an entirely irrational "faith", rather than because of some quite rational and well articulated moral argument. If Enderle ever dropped the name calling then he would have to actually address their arguments.

(2) Making sure that the trains run on time. Enderle is trying very hard to make sure that the question of freedom never comes up, so the only position that he acknowledges as reasonable is the position of the "pro" who only cares about whether the software "does the job". In doing so he is using a well worn tactic, familiar to anyone who has read pre-WWII defenses of Fascism and Communism. Like Enderle the defenders of totalitarianism did not want to address the question of freedom (they either claimed that there was no such thing, or that it didn't matter) and instead insisted that the only question was whether a given form of government could "get the job done" or as it used to be put "could keep the trains running on time".

Liberty is important. Like train schedules, the particular job done by any given piece of software is usually fairly trivial. People like Enderle don't want to touch the arguments about freedom because they know that if they lose those arguments then questions about which particular piece of software does a paricular job best will be irrelevant. If free software really does make a difference to how free people are then proprietary software is a bad buy at any price.

For what it's worth - here is a comprehensive article on the subject: snopes It seems like he did try to avoid it (but not evade it) - then again, that's perfectly legitimate.

There are worse than him out there, yet you don't see the US trying to topple them.

That sounds like a proposal to wage more wars like this one, not less.

No, it's pointing out that the war was built on a lie, one of the oldest in the book. Read this classic quote to see where I'm coming from.

You think the the 9/11 terrorists were Iragi and/or Afghani?

Mostly Soudi. I was one of first to get people on that.

And there you can see the reason for the war. The US wants to switch dependance on middle east oil away from Saudi to Iraq. The only way to do it was to topple Saddam. The rest was just lies and deliberate misdirection to get the public on side.

Thanks for falling for it. You must make Hermann Goering proud. His propaganda teachings have filtered through to new generations.

(of course, Godwin must be proud of my post as well)

The whole pen thing is an urban legend.

Sorry, but not quite true.

But also not quite false. The only part that Snopes really refutes is the width of the SRBs for the space shuttle being related to the width of the railroad tracks. I normally find Sonpes' analyses quite rational, but this one is a bit weak. They poke a little at a few of the raher weak links in the original story, but the fact that the Romans made their chariot wheel axles a particular width and that width has remained essentially a de facto standard for many similar conveyances up to the present time. Even they say so themselves in the very article you link:

" This is one of those items that -- although wrong in many of its details -- isn't exactly false in an overall sense and is perhaps more fairly labelled as "True, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons."

Basically, in the case of the axle width, the Romans chose a standard and there was nothing to gain and much to lose (compatibility) for anyone who might choose another. Just take a look at Brunnel's wide-gauge railroad lines in the 1850's. The 7-foot wide rails required different cars and engines, couldn't be linked up to the larger network of narrow-gauge lines-- causing chaos at the stations with passengers dragging luggage from one train to the other. Even though Brunnel's trains were arguably better due to greater stability (wider base), the standard was already set and Brunnel's lines wre eventually replaced with narrow gauge. Same thing with the x86. There's too much inertia behind it.

Do you know why railroad tracks are the width they are?

Sorry, but not quite true.

Well, if the RIAA is repeating what Edison did, eventually we'll start putting criminals to death by playing some recent CDs at them until they die.

(link)

We can certainly understand how people would respond with some shock to this apparent issue. We did too when it first came up nine years ago and we investigated it thoroughly in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League. The conclusion was that the sequence in the Wingdings character set is coincidental and that there was no malicious intent. In fact, it impacted several software companies at the time and continues to do so. Unfortunately, there was not an easy way to fix the problem. We understand that this requires explanation.

At the simplest level, wingdings and webdings are much like an alphabet of characters and provide thousands of potential combinations from which a person could choose. Changing the character set would create an impact of unknown scale on existing data and code using the affected font. Again, using the example of the alphabet, what would happen to existing documents and applications if we switched around a handful of letters? The likely result is that we would create significant issues for people, cause some unintended humorous moments and several offensive ones. For that reason Wingdings has been left unaltered since its inception.

This easter egg is a hoax...

Please let the rumor die...
Please let the rumor die...

Davak

I'm reminded of the probably apocryphal story

Everybody knows you need to trace the edges of the LCD with a green marker to get true "audiophile" sound quality. Sheesh.

annother ac already posted this, but here's the real deal on backwards spinnging. http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.htm

When poster Milo Fungus wrote, "As a happy and satisfied user, I say 'Happy Birthday' with vigor and gusto," he probably wasn't aware that Happy Birthday (the song) is NOT in the public domain. Yes, Milo, if you sang it in pulic, you owe the public performance rights!
This seems like the perfect urban legend, but it's not. Check out the Snopes explanation for the rest of the st.... Oops, don't want Paul Harvey suing me.

Scram, troll.

Oh, and, FYI, 'occupied by a foreign power bent on raping its natural resources' isn't the same thing as 'free'.

Yeah--some grandma who was holding up a steaming hot coffee with her KNEES. I'm sorry, but that's idiotic.

Internet Urban Legend strikes again... check the Snopes site here http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp.

Here is Snopes on the origin of the name "Donkey Kong".

The Americans spent more than $1 million developing a pen that would write in space. The Russians used a pencil.

SNOPES.COM

Now that we are talking about microwaves...

I heard from my dad that he read somewhere in the local newspaper that a woman was stupid enough to use the microwave to `dry' her dog.

The link states that it is a legend.

Thought for the day.

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.

Okay okay, this is an urban legend. But in every legend there is a grain of truth...

So, keep printing your old style counterfits. The public will begin to question their authenticity if they are in the minority. The public does that now with new redesigned bills when they are new.

... and the public does this now with $2 bills.

And to top that off, I have a bicentenial $2 bill that looks nothing like the other $2 bills out there.

Then there are those mysterious bills that say "sliver certificate". How the hell are we ever supposed to know what is money and what isn't?

That's an urban legend, dude.

please stop propagating myths

Subliminal advertising has never been shown to work. See here.

That is, splicing single frames of pornography into Disney films.

Who needs single frames? Many films distributed by The Walt Disney Company are rated R by the MPAA's ratings board because they contain whole scenes of nudity. Disney's Mumford and Disney's Full Frontal are far from being the only examples.

But I'm still not buying Mr. Eisner's crap, porn or no porn.

What you're referring to by "re-recording rights" are known as publishing rights -- the ability to do new things with the words and music, such as license them to a cover band, or put the song in a movie (which also requires permission of the rightsholder of the recording itself).

This here page does an excellent job of explaining how the Beatles' publishing rights are owned. Said rights were not unfairly ripped from the hands of the Beatles by the evil RIAA; publishing rights can be bought and sold, and that's what happened here.

While it's possible for the record company to own the publishing rights to a song as well as the recording itself, it's not that common, at least among decent music (where the singer or performer writes their own stuff). At any rate, if you write a song or a piece of music, nobody can take ownership away from you against your will. If a songwriter or composer opts to sell the publishing rights to somebody else, or enter a work-for-hire relationship, that's entirely their choice.

See http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/popcorn.asp for more.

So why do searches that might fit US telephone conventions not trigger calculator?

What does the recently created verb "to google" mean? It typically implies to "grep the web", not "dc on the web" ;) (big up my unix geeks!)

So if you REALLY NEED to use google calc to do that, add 100 + 23 + 867 + 5309

Also, I mean, come on! You are asking for JEnny's phone number! (which, I got off the wall).

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

This is obviously a reference to the "americans spent lots of money researching a pen that would work in weightless environment, russians used pencils" urban legend. Guess whether it is true or not.

Good point. The top schools and big cities do help concentrate the top talent. A great artist is unlikely to stay in rural Alabama on the hopes that some art critic's car will break down while passing through their one-horse town. They're going to try to go to New York and hit it big there.

But then my question is whether this money truly has the indended effect? With their high visibility and the resources of prestigious, well-funded institutions behind them, aren't these people already given an advantage in the exercise of their genius? Might the funds be better spent in seeking out and encouraging more obscure genius in more obscure locations?

Given, this is a private foundation and they can do whatever they want with their money. They don't need my approval of their choices and I'm really just Monday-morning quarterbacking. I'm not walking a mile in the shoes of the nominating or judging committees, so I can't know what went into making these choices.

But there's a certain romance to the MacArthur Genius Grant: recognition from out of the blue of great minds laboring in obscurity that suddenly puts funds into their hands to enable them to pursue great works.

I always assumed their processes to be a bit more exhaustive, prying talent out of lesser-explored nooks and crannies, but perhaps the cream really does rise to the top and these are the areas that attract it.

As for the poster who jokingly suggested I compiled the stats as part of a campaign to get my own MacArthur grant... Unless accidentally starting an urban legend qualifies me as a MacArthur caliber genius, I doubt I'll ever generate a work or body of work worthy of such recognition.

- Greg

NASA spent a million dollars developing a pen that works in zero/micro gravity. The Russians just used a pencil......

False.

This is yet another urban myth, as explained by Snopes.

The lesson of this anecdote is a valid one, that we sometimes expend a great deal of time, effort, and money to create a "high-tech" solution to a problem, when a perfectly good, cheap, and simple solution is right before our eyes. The anecdote offered above isn't a real example of this syndrome, however. Fisher did ultimately develop a pressurized pen for use by NASA astronauts (now known as the famous "Fisher Space Pen"), but both American and Soviet space missions initially used pencils, NASA did not seek out Fisher and ask them to develop a "space pen," Fisher did not charge NASA for the cost of developing the pen, and the Fisher pen was eventually used by both American and Soviet astronauts.

Check Snopes for the lowdown...

Myth.

"Randomly milling seems" seems a pretty restrained characterization of what has been described as the "frenzied rush" of a lemming migration.

The sight of a few lemmings....being pushed over a cliff during the frenzied rush of migration, has become the basis of a widespread belief that lemmings commit suicide en masse when their numbers grow too large.

A stampede, of course, is a kind of "frenzied rush."

Not personally. Actually, my comments are based on the very references that you cite:

These deaths are not deliberate "suicide" attempts, however, but accidental deaths resulting from the lemmings' venturing into unfamiliar territories and being crowded and pushed over dangerous ledges.

Not personally. Actually, my comments are based on the very references that you cite:

These deaths are not deliberate "suicide" attempts, however, but accidental deaths resulting from the lemmings' venturing into unfamiliar territories and being crowded and pushed over dangerous ledges.