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So what happens once satellite photos are the same quality as photos taken from a few metres away?

Some people think Google can already do this and more. I showed my Mom Google Earth, and she told a friend about it. My Mom called me a few weeks after that with a question that was so insane I was almost embarrassed to answer. Her friend had something stolen from her backyard a few weeks ago, and she wanted to know if I could find out who it was with Google Earth!

It is sometimes surprising how much people think technology can do. To see this for yourself, show a technophobe this card trick at snopes: http://www.snopes2.com/humor/info/card1.htm

I've had people actually believing the computer was reading their minds. And if that's not it, they'll come up with an even stranger explanation like, "It must be using a complex algorithm to decide which card you picked based on how you move the mouse." Or maybe find a way to "trick" the computer by pointing (with their finger) at one card, but choosing another. Hilarious.

Wow, I sound like a jerk.

ZOMG TEH GOVNEMRNET IS EVIL!!!!1111

Or maybe not: http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/pentagon.htm

Seriously, what is the possible justification for lying about this? If there wasn't a plane crash, why not just tell a lie about an attack that fits the pictures? If the government is so incompetent that it can't even come up with a convincing lie, how come it's so successful at stopping insiders revealing the truth?

Occam's razor suggests that the more plausible theory is that you just don't know what the aftermath of a plane crashing into the Pentagon should look like.

Interestingly I have a recording of Shostakovich' 7th symphony by the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra under Gennady Rozhdestvensky (a very strong performance by the way), and it's exactly 75 minutes long.

I think a better factor was that the disc diameter had to be able to fit within 5 1/4 inch disc drive bays, and then that manufacturing technology at the time only permitted a certain spiral density.

Still having a musical heuristic to validate its use as a musical storage format is a good idea.

There's that rumor that he's in cryogenic suspended animation.

ah conspiracy theories.

read this.

To this speech, often thought to have been written by Bill 'The Borg' Gates, but actually by Charles J. Sykes.

Yeah, Bert is also in league with Osama Bin Laden...

The anecdote should be considered apocryphal, however, because it isn't mentioned in any accounts by Faraday or his contemporaries (letters, newspapers, or biographies) and only popped up well after Faraday's death. As well, the prime minister to whom Faraday supposedly made his remark is often said to be William Gladstone, which is an impossibility since Gladstone didn't first become prime minister until the year after Faraday died.

Don't you mean YELLOW MUPPETS? Or specifically, one particular yellow muppet, with a unibrow?

http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/bert.htm

Yeah, yeah - off topic, blah blah blah. But funny.

When the heck is Boxing day, as mentioned on beagle2.com?

The day after Christmas day. The term originated in Britain but is used in other countries.

Boxing Day

Just point your browser at Snopes , Urban legends or Wikipedia or just about anywhere on the web to find out what utter bullshit this is.

God, I hate these smug, tedious, sub-"Reader's Digest: It's a funny world", lying little fairy stories.

T&K.

Hey, it's better than Osama and Bert....

What I don't understand is what faking an airliner crash into the Pentagon is suposed to achieve, above and beyond the real WTC crashes (I suppose you don't deny those were real?). If only the WTC had been attacked, would there have been any less reason to go after al-Qaeda? Or if there was "only" a truck-bomb at the Pentagon, that would similarly be not good enough somehow? And, well, presumably these conspirators arranged the WTC crashes as well? If so, why couldn't they just arrange a real crash into the Pentagon? Why cause the missing airliner to crash somewhere else and then fake the Pentagon crash?

You conspiracy nuts never see the wood for the trees. You get caught up in these minor inconsistencies and never think to check whether it makes sense in the bigger picture.

That aside, what's done is done, I want to see the White Wilderness episode with the lemming herding. I wonder if filming it was something like heding cats?

pk

We would simply bend over and pay up like good little lemmings?

Aside from the mixed metaphor - lemmings don't commit suicide. You may already know this but I wanted to help educate the general public...

Who knows what other lies Disney has been feeding us? Next we'll find out that there aren't really mermaids!

Oh, and to stay on topic, here is some info on making a complaint to the FTC. Here's the link to the online FTC complaint form. For good measure, you can also submit a complaint to the SEC here.

Urban Legends

"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Norman Schwarzkopf

Ah yes, the old railroad track width due to deprecated specs from Roman times. Refuted by snopes.

Nowadays, most patents are held by corporations. And as we know, corporations do not always share, even in the event of catastrophe.

Here is the link that should have been in the above article, to snopes urban legend site.

http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/cnn.htm

To try it again as a referenced link, go
here .

link so people don't think you're just making things up. But it is 100% true.

Thats an urban legend. If you actually listened to the feminists, you would know that they dont all think that way.

Political urban legends never die. They just move over to Slashdot and infest the minds of right wingers.

Al Gore never claimed he invented the Internet. Read and weep.

1. Use an existing, well established "link story" that everyone knows is true. Insects bite people. Bill Gates talks about computers. People have had their ashes taken up on the Space Shuttle.

2. Put a "twist" in the tale that makes the average listener smile, and raise their eyebrows. Some insects lay things in you when they bite. Bill Gates said we'll only ever need 640K. Ashes don't only go on the shuttle (link left as an exercise for the reader).

3. Get a website. These days this is free (as in beer).

Ah bugger the lesson, I think you lot saw my point 4 paragraphs ago. I'll be happy to wager with anyone on how long it takes before this is credibly and totally debunked. I'm betting 72 hours.

Even though the parent post mentioned it as an offhand comment, Walt Disney was not actually cryogenically frozen. There are some pretty interesting rumors circulating about his post-mortal whereabouts, such as the common "he's frozen underneath the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' in Disneyland". Additionally, Disney Corp's wish to respect Walt Disney's private-life did not do much to dissuade those who believed otherwise. No ice-cube Walt here as it turns out he was in fact cremated. A simple google search turns up some relevant sources. Such as a pretty detailed site here with a copy of his death certificate and of course, nothing beats an interview with the unthawed Walt himself.

...and it's stale BS too; it's been circulating for a long time. Not a single one of the cases checks out. The whole thing is a fabrication. See this page on the ever-reliable Snopes. It's always worth doing a background check on these things before passing them on. A google search on "terrence dickson" brought the Snopes page up first, followed by hundreds of repetitions of the original canard.

As someone already noted, the actual "Stella" McDonald's/hot coffee case is real, but not so easily deemed a "frivolous" lawsuit when you examine the facts and background of the case.

Kiscica

Coke apparently began switching to high fructose corn syrup in 1980, and completed the switch by six months prior to the intro of New Coke. However, the New Coke debacle did spawn the urban legend to which you refer, described on this urban legends page:

An interesting little claim sprang up in the wake of the introduction of Classic Coke, one having to do with its sweetener. People swore they detected a change in the flavor between Classic Coke and the original. This gave rise to the rumor that the product had been reformulated, dropping cane sugar in favor of high fructose corn syrup. Depending upon whom you listened to, either the demand for the return of original Coca-Cola afforded the company the opportunity to switch from cane sugar to corn syrup or the whole fiasco of taking original Coca-Cola off the shelves and reintroducing it three months later as Classic Coke was all a brilliant scheme to mask the change in sweetener. According to whispered wisdom, the company had hoped to slip the modification past consumers by having it take place during the original beverage's absence from the shelves. People would be so darned glad to have Classic Coke back that they wouldn't notice it didn't taste the same as original Coca-Cola. (Another twist to this rumor had it that New Coke had deliberately been formulated to taste awful in order to facilitate the switch -- this supposedly gave Coca-Cola an excuse for pulling the original formula and then putting it back on the market after a brief absence, making it look all along as if they were simply responding to consumer demands.)

The change in sweetener wasn't anything that diabolical. Corn syrup was cheaper than cane sugar; that's what it came down to. In 1980 -- five years before the introduction of New Coke -- half the cane sugar in Coca-Cola had been replaced with high fructose corn syrup. By six months prior to New Coke's knocking the original Coca-Cola off the shelves, there was no cane sugar in American Coca-Cola. Whether they knew it or not, what consumers were drinking then was 100% sweetened by high fructose corn syrup.

• Somewhere to plug in the I.V.
• Contamination Detector, just in case...
  

please?
read this? [http://www.snopes2.com/business/genius/spacepen.h tm]

http://www.snopes2.com/science/greatwal.htm

"If we take "space" to mean a low Earth orbit such as the one travelled by the Space Shuttle (roughly 160 to 350 miles above Earth), the Great Wall claim fails twice. First of all, it's not the only object visible from that distance: NASA's Earth from Space photographic archive (particularly the Human Interactions section) shows that pictures taken from low orbit reveal human-built structures such as highways, airports, bridges, dams, and components of the Kennedy Space Center. Secondly, even though other objects are visible at this distance, according to Shuttle astronaut Jay Apt, the Great Wall is barely discernable, if not invisible"

If you fear bin Laden or Al Queda I think you're taking the threat a little too seriously. Since the attack on Tora Bora there simply haven't been any new bin Laden videos with actual new footage of the man himself.

On the other hand, America's enemies are not simply limited to crazy Arabic peoples bitter about America's hegemony. They include a very wary China, a not quite mentally stable North Korea, and a beaten but not cowed Iraq. The thing is, though, that they likely already have our secrets. So basically, it's way too late to worry about the possibility that this game is going to give away military secrets.

>Unfortunately, at least in this part of the world, mingetty really is rather rude if you parse it right (ie wrong). And it is rather widespread in Linux distros.

It's difficult to find a name that doesn't have negative connotations in some language spoken around the world, as many product managers have unwittingly discovered. Big businesses employ branding agencies to help them find good brand and product names, Open Source advocates can't afford the exhorbitant fees they demand (and then they come up with names like "Opteron", gack).

Regarding "mingetty": in Swiss German (at least in the dialects spoken in the eastern parts of Switzerland) it's understood as "My godfather" if pronounced the right way. :-)

...and "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial" (1982) key scene where the film's main human character, 9-year-old Elliott, lured E.T. of the woods with Reese's Pieces...

According to legend, the scene was originally suppose to use M&M's. However, Mars, the candy's manufacturer, refused to allow their name to be used -- and so Hershey's Reese's Pieces ended up being featured instead. According to the link above, sales of Reese's Pieces increased something like 65-85% afterwards.

Untrue! Urban myth! See: http://www.snopes2.com/business/names/worldser.htm .

Seems this whole "New York World" myth was created fairly recently to hide the embarassing fact that 19th and early 20th century Americans were naive enough to name their parochial inter-league post-season series as the "world championship series".

Sorry to burst your bubble, but sponsorship of the "world" series by The New York World is pure urban legend. The New York World never had anything to do with the world series, other than reporting on the matches like plenty of other papers did at the time. It really is plain old America = World arrogance after all.

You can a whole article about it yonder:

http://www.snopes2.com/business/names/worldser.htm

Be sure to also stop by the New Mexico burial site of those ET cartridges

however i work retail, and had i been the ceo when i received your mail i would send it right back being an equal ass. the penny is not legal tender.

The penny is legal tender. You are not required to accept legal tender, but if you don't state up front you won't, you are going to have a hard time justifying your position.

sPh

He is but he didn't invent the toilet.

Yeah, I got yer source right here

That's great, but I think we've all seen this list before.

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in 0 gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.

This is another moldy oldy, and what's more, it's wrong:

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.

-a

And misquoting to boot. Sorry about that.

Yip, and here's a nice link to debunk the $1000000 pen story.

Also see SNOPES.

It's hard to respect a project that plops an urban legend right down in the first paragraph, regardless of the validity or merit of the project. So now it's pretty hard for me to evaluate this project fairly. Presentation matters!

Dr. Dale Dubin put a message into his book (the 50th printing of "Rapid Interpretation of EKGs") that offered up his Thunderbird if the publisher was contacted. Of the 60,000 students who bought the book, only 5 contacted the publisher.

http://www.snopes2.com/college/homework/foundcar.h tm

Umm, take a look Here about the truth regarding our interstate system.

This actually isn't true..

From :

"Richard Weingroff, information liaison specialist for the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Infrastructure and the FHA's unofficial historian, says the closest any of this came to touching base with reality was in 1944, when Congress briefly considered the possibility of including funding for emergency landing strips in the Federal Highway-Aid Act (the law that authorized designation of a "National System of Interstate Highways"). At no point was the idea kited of using highways or other roads to land planes on; the proposed landing strips would have been built alongside major highways, with the highways serving to handle ground transportation access to and from these strips. The proposal was quickly dropped, and no more was ever heard of it.

Some references to the one-mile-in-five assertion claim it's part of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This piece of legislation committed the federal government to build what became the 42,800-mile Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, which makes it the logical item to cite concerning regulations about how the interstate highway system was to be laid out. The act did not, however, contain any "one-in-five" requirement, nor did it even suggest the use of stretches of the interstate system as emergency landing strips. The one-out-of-five rule was not part of any later legislation either. "

bling bling!