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Claim: NASA spent millions of dollars developing an "astronaut pen" that would work in outer space; the Soviets solved the same problem by simply using pencils.

Status: False.

Source: Snopes.

Anyway, next time someone refers to the lemmings suicide thing, have a recursive chuckle at their lemming-like behavior :)

From snopes.com

the idea that one must specifically drink water because the diuretic effects of caffeinated drinks such as coffee, tea, and soda actually produce a net loss of fluid appears to be erroneous. The average person retains about half to two-thirds the amount of fluid taken in by consuming these types of beverages, and those who regularly consume caffeinated drinks retain even more

but how many of us have heard the stories of Coke dissolving a nail, t-bone steak, etc.? I've also heard highway patrols carry coke to clean the roads after a messy accident.

Snopes is your friend for dispelling myth and legend. Cokelore

Yes, from what I've heard of it, it's a diuretic liquid that makes you dehydrated and stay up all night, unlike water.

According to snopes.com, this is a myth. (scroll about halfway down to get to the relevant part.)

--paul

This would be funnier if it wasn't a known hoax.

I have never seen evidence that giving up privacy actually worked effectively against terrorism.

But terrorism FUD or other "we're under attack" FUD is an old strategy to make the people do what the leaders want, nicely sketched out in an interview by Hermann Goering in 1946.

like the great quote

The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. The Lord's prayer has only 67. The story of creation in the Bible uses only 200 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 271 words. On the other hand, a recent Federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.

Arg! Not this again. This is an urban legend.

Pretty funny. Kind of like the old story about how our train tracks are spaced the way they are because of the size of Roman chariot wheels.

Oh yeah.. like how this works? (Clue.. the red dot means it's false..)

The Alabama story (ranked #8) was an hoax originated by Mark Boslough, but there was legislation introduced regarding pi in 1897 in the state of Indiana. It never passed. Sources: urban legends and the straight dope.

Snopes wasn't linked properly in the parent post. Sorry, that'll learn me to not use preview.

This must be why Slashdot is so badly Slashdotted today. I had to try a dozen times before it would even serve up the page. But it was worth it!

They already have the pictures. I received these in email, so they must be true!

Imagine if we had to pay a royalty every time we sing "Happy Birthday to You."

They were words spoken privetly with Gustave Gilbert, during the Easter recess. As such, they are not a part of the trial transcripts. Gilbert put his notes, including this interview, in his book, called Nuremberg Diary

One last note on that quote. Some people think it is a fabrication, since there is a simliar, and fake, quote falsly attributed to Julius Caesar. It is not.

Well, if you're a member of an unpopular political party (like the Greens), you lose the ability to use the airport

I suspect this was probably discussed in Slashdot back in the day, but couldn't get the search engines to give me a good reference.

> That's not the point though. The point is that the initial act--no matter who actually did it--was used as an excuse to prosecute people who had nothing to do with it one way or another.

And looking back on that first act of that sad affair from the vantage point of the last act, we have the immortal words of Hermann Göring.

The US Postal Service is already PLANNING TO DO THIS. This must be stopped at all costs! Please forward to all your friends! URGENT!
</sarcasm>

This snopes article explains it pretty well. Basically he did work on some legislation that helped the internet have a big boom in the '90s, but saying "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" is still quite a stretch.

• A very relevant and insightful quote from Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials.
  

Well, in recent history, about 87 I.Q. points

Horsefeathers! That "study" is a hoax. See Snopes.

For a more honest accounting of presidential IQ's, see this article.

Just as an indicator of how accurate that "study" is, note that the recorded IQ of Kennedy was 119, and Nixon's was 143.

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

When you heard him make that exact statement, was that like the time you met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland?

this is another bogus claim manufactured by the right-wing? Much like the stories that a Senator Gore dismissed Oliver North's warnings that Bin Laden was a threat or that Clinton pushed to have Israel release 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta?

Then again, this is the same group that's been manufacturing "lies" for Gore to have "said" for years.

this is another bogus claim manufactured by the right-wing? Much like the stories that a Senator Gore dismissed Oliver North's warnings that Bin Laden was a threat or that Clinton pushed to have Israel release 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta?

Then again, this is the same group that's been manufacturing "lies" for Gore to have "said" for years.

he didn't say he'd invented the internet.

No he didn't. What he said was this:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

His wording could have been better, but he was not trying to take credit for actually creating the Internet, despite all the jokes that followed.

For more on this, see snopes.com's writeup.

This actually happened/happens. The scam that I heard about is the Slavery reparations tax refund, where descendents of slaves get a $5000 tax refund.

This was, of course, false, but a lot of people signed up for it.

It turns out that the IRS has a page on Tax Fraud Alerts.

I'm actually surprised there aren't more of these.

http://www.snopes.com/business/deals/banana.htm

Might be true about buying a stereo, but probably not about buying a new car.

...this urban legend? First, a lot of the questions on the exam were stupid; many of them involved listing rules rather than actually being able to use capital letters etc. in practice. It was probably also a teacher's exam, which would explain some of the strange questions.

that is until you start talking subliminal messaging, which is a whole other issue.

Which issue are you referring to?

The issue that subliminal messaging is evil, will make you kill your cat, buy more popcorn, and do just about anything the evil advertisers care to tell you to do?

Or the isse that the subliminal effect has never been proven an is actaully an urban myth.

• Some publications are embarassing, and would damage their corporate image. For example, Disney doesn't want Song of the South to be seen again. They've also censored the original versions of Alladin and other films.
  
• A richer public domain will reduce the public's need to buy new entertainment products. If 50-year old books and TV shows were available for free, there would be slightly less need to pay money for new ones. (The TV-Land channel, at least, would see it's operating costs decrease)
  

Snopes also weighs in on the Bush/Clinton binocular lens cap issue.

The direct link would be to http://www.snopes.com/rumors/putcall.htm.

It's been amply demonstrated that terrorist funding is not just from illegal trade.

Snopes had an interesting article on this. Can't link directly to it, but it's in the Rumors of War subsection, do a search for "shorted".

I'll cut and paste a small section:

On 10 September, another uneventful news day, American Airlines' option volume was 4,516 puts and 748 calls, a ratio of 6:1 on yet another day when by rights these options should have been trading even. No other airline stocks were affected -- only United and American were shorted in this fashion. Accelerated investments speculating a downturn in the value of Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch (two New York investment firms severely damaged by the World Trade Center attack) were also observed. The Chicago Board Options Exchange is investigating each of these trades and at this time is declining to offer comment on its progress. The volume traded and the one-sidedness of the trades, however, make it clear that those who had knowledge of the details of the attacks (which airlines would be involved and that the World Trade Center was a target) were behind them and stood to profit mightily from them.

qualye quotes (like gore quotes and bush2 quotes) are more often false. snopes does attribute this one to him though.

I'd heard the analogy before, and whether or not it is actually true or has been scientifically proven is irrelevant. It still has some merit as an analogy.

Searching google (exact terms: "boil a frog" temperature slowly) turns up many, many uses of the analogy, applied to just about any topic. I must be bored today, but I looked at all of the results, and not a single one cited any scientific study or anything.

Fine. I'll start the water... :p

Damn. I tried one last place, and found this. Guess it's not true...

Dr. Pepper DOES NOT contain prune juice!!

Snopes; Dr. Pepper

This urban legend deserves to be mentioned on its own in reference to the Ask Slashdot question... =)

I almost believed you until someone else told the same story, but not in first person. Then I found the urban legend on snopes...

There are no prunes in Dr Pepper.
http://www.snopes.com/business/secret/drpepper.htm

A funny story, but only a joke.

Book-a-chow

Unless there was a MOTD that stated who can and can not access what and where. I'm pretty sure there has been legislation passed stating that. But I am not a lawyer, I've just seen mnay, many servers citing it in the past.

Oh, you mean like the Internet Privacy Act and similar legislation that 'protects' pirates from law enforcement and copyright holders? Yeah, sure.

Public, anonymous FTP sites can and will be crawled by a plethora of spiders, and the "requirement" to provide a valid e-mail address is an optional tracking system, essentially honour-system based, not a legal requirement. Want precedent? Tell me the e-mail addresses passed by Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Squid, etc. in connecting to FTP sites.

I do believe that any remotely technically adept judge with any ounce of common sense or grasp of the law would tell you that if you don't want people to access your files, don't make them available to the world. Moreover, if you're making illegal content available to the public at large, expect repercussions and be prepared to deal with them.

slashdot.org
newsforge.com
theregister.co.uk
my university's daily newspaper (no link!)
fark.com
the smirking chimp
dr. fun
the daily vault (although i review there once in a while)
google news
daily rotten
lwn.net
crackmonkey archives
the dot
kde-look.org
corona's coming attractions
snopes' update page
doc's weblog

And I think that's about it for a daily basis.

human beings use less than 10% of their brain's potential computing factor

As mentioned here several times in the past, this is actually an urban legend. This is even convincingly explained by this neuroscience for kids article.

No, the secret of Life, the Universe, and Everything cannot be found in one tenth of a joint. The secret lies in the question.