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So ... this is about techniques to grow spam in fields? Come on guys, April Fool's Day was months ago, and nobody would believe something that stupid!

Also, a high water intake (just as long as you don't start killing off your kidneys) will help to detox you a bit, always nice in cubeville.

You what? What is a "high water intake"? I read that as "more than you need". And what in the name of Satan do you mean by 'detox'? If you mean removing excess salts and so on from your body then you should be fine just drinking when you're thirsty. Drinking to the point where your stomach is bloated to make yourself think you're full of food is not going to improve this. (And soft drinks will hydrate you just as well as water).

Snopes on the whole 'drink lots of water' thing.

idiot

Agh! Not another person who thinks the GPL is anything at all like an EULA! That's the third one today! We should get a page on snopes debunking this myth. Or you can just search for it.

I suppose I should also make some boilerplate to explain the difference. Here's the short version:

The GPL permits you, at your option, to violate the copyright on a piece of software, which is otherwise against the law.

An EULA (attempts to) forbid you, without your consent, from re-selling software to another person, which is completely within the law. (Different EULAs may forbid many other things)

You are NOT required to agree to the GPL before using a program. (That's why you've never seen it- because you didn't have to agree to it, unless you were actually going to look at the source). According to the software publishing houses, you ARE required to agree to an EULA before using their programs.

I feel that if such a case were pushed to the Supreme court, however, EULAs would be invalidated. When you sell someone a box of software (or a book, or a music CD), you are giving him permission to use it normally in private. Once he's got that permission, you can't interpret his normal use as consenting to some extra contract. "By closing this web browser window, you are consenting to mail me $500". That's not a valid license, because you're allowed to close the window without permission from me. Once you buy software and have walked out of the store with the box, you're also allowed to use it without further permission, but that's not what software publishers claim.

PS. I've answered this question so much today, I can actually quote GPL section 9 verbatim: "You are not required to abide by this license, as you have not signed it. However, nothing else gives you permission to redistribute the software, which is a violation of international copyright law..."

[This is my own story. In case kuro5hin is 404, for convenience I am reposting it in reply to your reference.]

Exposing the Happy Birthday story:
An editorial by J. Byron, May 2003, rev. June 2003

In this article, I attempt to answer three questions: 1 - What is that song Good Morning to All, and how does it relate to Happy Birthday to You? 2 - Is the melody to Happy Birthday to You public domain? 3 - Are the lyrics to Happy Birthday to You also public domain? There are many references to Happy Birthday on the Web. Most warn you of the copyright claim on it, and that the current owners rabidly defend it. Many of these "editorials" do not tell you about the song Good Morning to All - and the few that do, don't tell you about its undeniable legal status. Is this deliberate, or just ignorance of the facts? I don't know. Two such examples are an article at Attaché Magazine and the commonly cited article at snopes.com. In addition, some articles may unintentionally present inaccurate information. An article posted at lawyers.com incorrectly states that Good Morning to All was written in 1895 but unpublished. That assertion is untrue, and makes an important legal difference.

There is a 1935 copyright registration for Happy Birthday, but the melody Good Morning to All was formally published in 1893 as part of a collection, registered in October 1893, and is public domain by U. S. statute. (you just can't use the "Happy Birthday" lyrics in public without paying) However, one site listed in this editorial claims possession of some early publications that nullify the copyright to even the lyrics.

Good Morning to All [a.k.a. the birthday melody] included in:
Song Stories for the Kindergarten, pub. 1893
Song Stories for the Kindergarten, revised ed., pub. 1896
[and apparently other pre-1923 editions]
Words: Patty Hill (-1946) Music: Mildred Hill (-1916)

Good morning to you,
Good morning to you,
Good morning, dear children,
Good morning to all.

The song Good Morning to All - from which Happy Birthday was allegedly derived - is free to use (words and music) by U. S. federal statute. (Published before 1923, and furthermore published before 1909) Take a look at Lolly Gasaway's PD chart, or Cornell University's expanded chart. That version of the birthday melody may suffice for some people - instrumentalists in particular. Also note that titles cannot be protected by copyright, and no unique or proper names are involved. Naming an instrumental CD track Good Morning to All a.k.a. Happy Birthday to You should be legal. (The law of other countries might affect the song's status outside the U. S.)

Allegedly, after the publication of Good Morning to All in the Hill's songbook Song Stories for the Kindergarten, Robert Coleman, and others, published the "birthday" lyrics with the Good Morning to All melody. In the 1930's, the "Happy Birthday" lyrics combined with the Hill's published melody showed up on stage and in singing telegrams. The Hill family allegedly won a 1934 lawsuit for infringement. In 1935 the Hill family registered the "Happy Birthday" copyright mentioned endlessly on the Web. (Which does not affect today's public domain status of Good Morning to All.) Two sources for Good Morning to All sheet music are PD Info (a small studio, that also sells sheet music reprints) and

There aren't really any more whackos out there now (as a percentage of the total population at least) than there have ever been. Haloween became less fun with the news media realized that "scare" stores sell at lot better than regular stories. These stories were also helped along by right wing Christian conservatives who never liked the "pagan" holiday anyway and would rather it just go away.

Snopes has a long article on this very subject.

He did, after all, get a free pass from Vietnam because he had an ingrowing hair follicle. On his bottom.

"Let's all say happy birthday to Slackware."

Let's just be sure not to sing it, or we'll be on the hook for copyright fees.

Actually it's a criminal offense if it falls under NET, CTEA, or DMCA. It used to be a civil offense if there was no quid pro quo exchange, and each civil violation would have made a person liable for some actual loss, though it wasn't something that was enforced.

But after the MIT BBS case, which had to be dropped because there was no quid pro quo, the law was changed to account for one to many, but it was written in such a way as to criminalize equally one to many (new) and one to one violations (which were just civil, and probably unprocecutable). Thanks to this, if you tape a TV show for your mom (or a single song, or even sing her "happy birthday" in public) you have committed a federal crime which carries more significant penalties than manslaughter in most states.

There is such a tremendous disconnect between what people think is right and fair and what the law states, that it should serve as a red flag for constitutional review. (Lessig's outcome indicates that this may be futile without a major shift in perception.)

What one should watch for is an attempt by the copyright industry to create an obfuscatory sea change in the perception of copyright, steering it entirely free of it's constitutional mandate. They have been fairly successful in getting people to refer to guerilla antitrust as "theft," and have harped ad nauseum their view that copying a song is tantamount to walking into a record store and stealing it.

But saying so doesn't make it so. They are so painfully, obviously, hilariously wrong, that most people don't even try to think about it and soon it will require a child (or Thomas Jefferson) to point out the obvious: if I walk into a record store and take a CD, the CD is gone. If I copy the a song, the original is still there, "as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

A person may "own" a copyright, but that does not mean they "own" the information that is copyritten. You cannot own data, man. We, the People of the United States of America, to promote the progress of science and useful arts, grant for a limited time an "embarassing monopoly" to authors and inventors.

This is a critical distinction which has been carefully papered over by the entertainment industry and by their employees in congress: copyright is not and never was about protecting property or profit, it is a means to an end: the promotion of progress and science. It is constitutional only so much as it achieves that end. And it "may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody."

(Thomas Jefferson)

You laugh, but the usage of pellet guns is most certainly accepted practice when it comes to terminating hazardous balloon flights.

Just ask Lawn Chair Larry.

This reminds me of the great NY Blackout Baby Boom. Legend has it, on a Monday, 9 months after the big 1965 blackout, a nurse in a hospital noticed a larger-than average number of births. The NYT picked up on this, and reported it. By Wednesday, births had fallen off. It was later shown that there was no real statistical increase, and the numbers may have reflected normal weekly fluctuation (probably because people like to schedule planned births at the beginning of the week. see snopes for more detail.

One week fluctuations are pretty meaningless, especially when there is a huge confounding factor like the July 4 Holiday. But that doesn't mean the RIAA won't use it as evidence to coerce people.

And even that overlooks the fact that Algore was hyping this technology on the hill back when supercomputers were connected at a speed rivaling that of the mighty V.90 modem...

NASA decided that the astronauts needed a writing utensil to take notes during space missions. NASA spend a large amount of money to develop the zero G ballpoint pen.

This is an urban legend.

Which is why you have to have a cutoff date on copyrights -- the origins of so much material is lost in the poorly documented past. What's new is that we've effectively fixed the cutoff date for all material late in the 19th century. So Hollywood gets to have it both ways: they can mine traditional literature for free material, but their own work (even their own interpretations of traditional literature!) are protected forever.

There are two particular instances that I find particularly bizarre. The first is the song "Happy Birthday" which is under copyright even though nobody knows who wrote the lyrics. (The music dates back to 1893.) So every time it's sung at a part... well, maybe that's "fair use". But it's a fact that you can't sing it on TV without paying royalties.

The other bizarre example is the Frank Capra classic, The Best Years of Our Lives. For various reasons, nobody bothered to renew the copyright on this one. That's why it got played to death every Christmas for so many years. Then all of sudden, Aaron Spelling informed everybody that you couldn't show the film without paying him royalties. How did he seize control of a film in the public domain? By buying the rights to the story it was based on, and also to a song played in the movie.

Perhaps if you really wanted to, you could challenge Spelling's right to collect royalties on Lives. But no one will: Spelling has deep pockets, and it'd be expensive to assert a moral principle here.

And the moral of the story, boys and girls, is that it's not about what's right and wrong. It's about who can afford justice!

Reminds me of that Newlywed Game legend...

> I read a story about a fellow who liked to eat his lunch in front of a microwave horn on an aerial somewhere

That is a hoax, although a very widely believed one.

At the University of Toronto. Link.

That's an olde urban legend

But to the main point: "the reviewer has greater incentive to give a good review". sure, but, whith an affiliate program, we're not dealing with professional reviewers....

If I (as an amateur) like a book, and give it a good review, and make a few cents from that, I don't see much harm.

All well and good so long as there was a pretty clear distinction between "amateur" and "professional".

A professional is someone who gets paid for his work, and an amateur is, literally, someone who does the work out of a love for it (Latin, amare, to love, being the root of "amateur"). Affiliate programs quite literally turn an amateur into a (low paid) professional; that's the point of these programs.

But this conversion to professional status doesn't come with the traditional professional "baggage": codes of conducts, oaths, test, certifications, guild membership, peer review. A lawyer's conflict of interest is (supposedly) checked by the Bar Association and by statute law; a journalist's by his editor and his profession's code of conduct and his peers' review.

No such check exists (or should, in any statute law sense!) for Joe Blogger or Jane Usenet Poster, or Jeff Amazon Reviewer.

You may accuse me of exploiting the etymology of the word "amateur" to create a problem that isn't real. But the problem is even deeper than that: the distinction betweem amateur and professional has begun to disappear.

In the "Blogosphere", it's not entirely clear who is an amateur and who's a professional. With MoveableType, anyone with the money to get a site hosted can put up a professional (that word again!) looking web site. Anyone can pontificate. And everyone has an opinion.

How can the causual reader tell who is knowledgable and honest, and who is looking to cash in on a favorable review? During the recent war in Iraq, I got much of my news of the war from www.theagonist.org, a blog with the most current breaking news -- aand the most current breaking unsubstantiated rumors. Is Andrew Sullivan a professional pundit, a professional journalist, or an amateur blogger? Can I trust Amazon.com user reviews? Can Snopes serve as a reference in a paper on Urban Legends?

What web site can I go to to tell me who is professional, who is amateur, who is honest, who is out to make a quick buck as an affiliate?

And can I trust the web site that purports to make those distictions?

So I fall back on the easy distinction: if you stand to make a buck as an affiliate, your review may be tainted -- whether you realize it or not -- by your self interest. You are perhaps no longer objective, as you're a (poorly compensated) contractor to the company you're affiliated with.

No, it comes from a town in France called Evian-les-Bains.

When in doubt, hit Snopes

(Many Highways were required by law to have a certain amount of space that could be used as a landing strip)

This is regrettably an urban myth:

US DOT document concerning this

Snopes document on it

Sorry mate, but I don't believe you. It's an ancient story. I first heard it best part of a decade ago, and in that version it was the Americans who were being idiots. Just goes to show, huh?

Heard it all before.

Partially correct. Check out this Snopes page regarding ownership of the Beatles. First of all, to say that Paul owns the rights to songs he did not write is untrue. John and Paul had an agreement and followed it--if either of them wrote a song for the Beatles, it would be credited to both of them. Whether or not Paul actually wrote the songs is just wrong, technically speaking, both John and Paul wrote those songs.

Second, Jackson only owns the publishing rights. He still splits royalties 50/50 with Paul and John's estate (presumably Yoko).

As long as the Beatles' original albums are still available in new formats (or at least in unprotected formats), and Paul is still alive, I'm ok with paying for those albums.

So I guess you want copyright terms to be only last the term of life of the author?

According to this, Gilette and Wal-Mart have been trying out RFID chips. Like it or not, these things are starting to take off.

Pretty story. Not true.

That's an old story. The problem with pencils is that they're made of graphite, which is a wonderful conductor of electricity, among other problems.

See http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.htm
for the full story

And don't even think about singing HAPPY BIRTHDAY at some party. That is a COPYRIGHTED song

Sure, Warner Bros. has a copyright certificate for "Happy Birthday to You", but is the copyright valid?

When in doubt, turn to snopes

Quite funny, and this made me google it. Snopes has a great history of the copyright ownership of "Happy Birthday", which is currently controlled by a division of AOL Time Warner until 2030. That is, until copyrights are extended. . .again.

According to this page the copyright is owned by a company that is now part of AOL Time Warner and it brings in two million dollars every year in royalties.

Tom.

Actually, I think this is the link you're looking for.

HTH.

It's not so much that it "just works" it's that they design things and, indeed do everything with a diffrent philosophy.

The old story about the pencil and the million dollar space pen may not be true, but it reflects the diffrence between the US and Russia perfectly.

Case in point contrasting the Russian Air Force with ours:

STACY KEACH: There are many striking contrasts between Russian and American airbases, not the least of which is overall appearance. In the United States, daily FOD sweeps -- for Foreign Object Damage -- clear the flight line of the smallest bits of litter that could wreck a jet engine. At Russian airfields, metal scrap is tossed in the open. The grass is allowed to grow tall, even on the runways. Birds, lethal to an engine if sucked inside, gather freely in the fields around the tarmac. To the Russians, there is an undeniable logic behind the mess. After all, the field of combat would hardly be cleaner.

JEFFREY ETHELL: Walking around a Russian airbase is quite a unique experience for an American, who is used to seeing everything picked up and nothing that can get in the airplane. And here, that isn't the case. It doesn't need to be.

STACY KEACH: Russian jets are designed to perform in less than ideal conditions. Retractable titanium grates protect the engine intakes on the SU-27, -30, and -35. The MIG-29 has doors that automatically shut on its intakes to keep them from inhaling debris. During take-off and landing, the MIG's engine breathes through slits at the top of the wings.

JEFFREY ETHELL: They build airplanes like tanks. The US Air Force and the West builds airplanes like fine watches.

STACY KEACH: The US builds sleek, sophisticated fighters that require teams of trained specialists to service them. Leading the pack are the Navy's big F-14 "Tomcat" and the F-18 "Hornet." Small and agile,the F-18 is good for both ground attacks and air combat. The heavier F-14 carries a larger weapons load and more fuel than the F-18. The primary jet of the US Air Force is the single-engine F-16 "Fighting Falcon." It provides excellent visibility, the fastest, tightest turn rate of anything in the air -- and pilot comfort. The lightweight plane fits around the pilot like a glove. He doesn't so much fly this jet as "wear" it.

LT. R. GORDON FOGG: The F-16 is the Porsche of airplanes. I mean, it handles great. It goes fast. It feels good. Your seats recline to help you with the G-forces. Everything's right out here like a big video game. And it's a sweet ride.

STACY KEACH: While the Russians admire American planes, they consider them almost too delicate for the rigors of war.

LT. COL. ALEXANDER GARNOV: Our military aircraft was designed for battle. It's built for war, not to just stand there and look pretty. Here behind me, you have an example of this. You can't break this plane. You could land it on its fuselage and they'd come out, pick it up, lower the landing gear, clear the engine, and you could take off again.

JEFFREY ETHELL: We go at it with a scalpel, trying to very, very carefully hone the capability, build the weapon. They go at it with a sledge hammer.

smyle wrote:

(Now, everyone who sang "happy birthday" as a class in school, please make your royalty check payable to...)

Summy Birchard, Inc., a subsidary of AOL/Time Warner. Here's the history of its copyright. Assuming Congress doesn't extend copyright yet again, it is due to enter the public domain in 2030.

No, just because a principal has knowledge that something can happen and warns his agents to be aware of it doesn't mean he gives his agents implied authority to do the action (in this case make a binding contract for the company). Then the business would be better off not warning the agents in the first place, which would foster bad public policy.

Regardless, there is no new consideration for the new contract terms written on the check. Thus it's not binding, even if the agent did have authority to make such a contract. You're not giving anything that you didn't already owe to impose the new terms (or to get title to the brooklyn bridge, etc.). Even the infamous "if you write 'paid in full' on a check written for an amount less than you owe then the remainder of your debt is discharged if they cash it" thing is an urban legend. See UCC 3-311, or Snopes.

I was once told by a gas station attendant who had come back from a safety course (it was EXXON. Ride the Tiger baby!) the cell phone fire scenario is also due to static electricity. The claim is that static from the antenna might cause a problem. There is the additional possibility of the electronics inside the phone igniting gasoline fumes which permeate the case, but I would think this is something that could be tested for. Gasoline fumes are volatile but I have to wonder if they are really volatile enough to be ignited by the amount of current running through a cell phone.

good link here

Nokia couldn't make gas fumes explode with their phones...but they concede that, though extremely unlikely, it is *possible*. Of course, I tell people that it's *possible* I'll become the world's richest yet most beloved benevolent tyrant, but that doesn't mean it's *likely*.

It would be interesting if one of the mitigating factors how passangers on UAL 77 overpowered their hijackers was because of the cell phones used to call loved ones, hence interfering with the instrumentation and/or guidance controls, enough to distract the highjackers.

Hmmmmmm.....

Then perhaps the write up on Snopes should be updated.

Then again, perhaps Snopes should do something to their pages so that they finish loading in finite time. Those damned remote-sourced Javascripts in the body of the pages never load, and too much of the web now requires Javascript to work for me to disable it! Client-side CSS does nothing to prevent them from trying to load.

what, like this?

short answer is that there was no internet privacy act signed by anyone in 1995, and the whole warez kid disclaimer thing isn't worth the bits it's stored in.

Snopes has something to say about that.

apparently no.

I believe that they use dead birds.

Ideally, thawed dead birds.

What's really funny (and what provides an additional clue that this is an urban legend that's been around the block a few times) is that in most versions of the legend, it is a group of American engineers who have to clue in their foreign counterparts (their nationality varies too) that they have to thaw the birds first. If there's one universal in comedy, though, it's making fun of foreigners.

Thoretically, you are right, of course. A bird hitting a 747 wing will at most leave a dent in the leading edge.

About the engines: They're a bit more survivable than you would think. look towards the bottom

"And for software, because every PC is a software copying machine, since inception we have had a problem."

Yes, and every candlestick, pipe, rope, wrench, and knife is a killing machine. Reminds me of these urban legends.

You are mistaken. It's urban legend. Sort of. His then wife may or may not have said something like that to a German magazine.


Snopes knows.

'They can then host files that are authorized for distribution through this network and will receive "Peer Points" that can be redeemed for prizes every time someone uploads a file.'

One of those banned Shadowbane players already has 768,323,000,000 Peer Points, and plans to redeem them for a Harrier jet.

>>Like boiling lobsters, you just raise the temperature a tiny bit at a time and people don't realize they're being baked.>>

>That's frogs. A lobster couldn't get out of the slowly heating pot even if it did realize what was happening. A frog could jump out but doesn't. Anyway, lobsters are properly thrown into a rolling boil.>

Actually, neither is true. See here.

Disney movies are for kids

The Walt Disney Company owns Touchstone, Miramax, Caravan, and Dimension studios. Do you claim that Dimension's Scream series is for kids?

Farquaad =F***Wad

Is the nude scene in Disney's The Rescuers any better? What about the (accidental) penis-shaped tower on the cover of the first run of Disney's The Little Mermaid VHS and LaserDisc?

momma bear becoming a rug

Is Walt Disney's Bambi any better?

I am too poor to see the value of having something I have copyrighted becoming public domain

Would you want to have to pay a royalty to the descendants of the caveman who invented the wheel? What if Beowulf were unavailable to the public because we could not locate the author?