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The idea is to make people feel stupid for being a part of the chain letter, not to insult them.

This works for me as well. I usually refer them to the following hoax busting sites:

Snopes
Urban Legends
Symantec Hoax Warnings ("$800 from Microsoft" is listed first on this page!
Hoaxbusters
VMyths

If more gullible journalists and people would think a little and do some simple, quick research before hitting the SEND button then we'd all be a lot better off.

This process is still young, but the eventual direction this will take is 3d apps over PHP and the web. It's bound to go that way. How could you deny that?

You're the one making the outlandish claims; the burden of proof is upon you to prove it to us. Explain how we get from today to your described situation.

You sound like Bill Gates when he said that computers will never need that much memory.

Bill Gates never said that.

Currently, no, but that is bound to change when Gamespy figures out how to exploit this into Flash-like popup ads that can't be disabled, at all.

If you knew anything about how the web works, you would understand that this simply can't be done. It requires something completely different to render OpenGL on behalf of websites.

I think it's extremely viable for a plugin to be designed that will use this

Please show me a) the people pushing for PHP in-browser, b) how they intend to get it installed on everyones machines, and c) how they intend to force you to keep it enabled.

There are systemic misuses and outright exploits.

Yes, and misuse implies that you are running untrusted code. Given that this doesn't give any new way to allow untrusted code onto your system, it boils down to "don't run bad stuff", the same as every other language under the sun. This is not a new attack vector.

I'm saying he has triggered the inevitability.

This isn't the Matrix, buddy. Saying stupid things like that is just as bad as the laughing. Grow up.

If I said something embarrassing I would want to deny it too.

Problem is it's not his responsibility to deny he said it; it's your (or whoever's accusing him's) responsibility to prove he did. Anybody can just accuse anybody else of saying anything; doesn't mean they did. Show me the proof. And the fact that a bunch of Slashdotters think he said it is not proof, so don't pass it off as such.

Nobody has ever come up with an original cite for this alleged quote, in all the times it's gone around the net. See here for Gates' own response, including his own call for a citation that he knows doesn't exist (and if it did, he'd finally be able to disprove this silly quote once and for all by digging up the original article cited and showing the world that the quote is not in it).

As Gates himself admits, he's said plenty of real stupid and dumb things, so I don't see why he'd choose to deny this particular quote and none of the others if he's lying about it.

Hmmm.... it looks like Sony's version may be more accurate than my prior understanding: Beta vs. VHS.

In any case, isolation through proprietary standards in order to maximize profit seems to be the current modus operandi of Sony. Though this strategy may reduce their market, if they profit from it, they may still consider it a success, and less risky than cooperating with others.

Erm, yeah... except that's a four-year-old HOAX!

From here

In any case, for a year Sony had the VCR market to itself, selling 30,000 Betamax VCRs in the US. [2] But when JVC came out with the VHS format VCR in 1976, the stage was set for the format wars. JVC had a machine that already doubled Sony's recording time of one hour, and that difference would prove crucial.

By January 1977, JVC was joined by four more Japanese electronics manufacturers to build and market VHS format VCRs. Then, in February, Sony abandoned its long-standing policy against OEM deals and joined forces with Zenith.

Sony was eventually simply FORCED to license due to competition and market conditions.. I forsee the same future for Apple.

this is too funny for words ...

Hitler really did oppose most private gun ownership,

as documented here

really bought big computers (for his time)

... the famous margarine-powered NAZIVAC ...

and really did create a lot of internal passports

didn't have to, as he merely inherited that system.

Far more important is the fact that he was a non-smoking, teatotalling anti-vivisectionist.

Maybe if we put a chain-smoking red-meat eating drunk into the Oval Office, our civil liberties might be safe again ??

Note: If you're moderating this, please read Godwin's law before thinking it applies to all posts that contain the word Hitler.

Note: American universities are home to some of the world's foremost historians. Now why doesn't this quality percolate into the classroom?

You are hopeless, and you do not know what you are talking about.

Read and learn.

Do you have any references you can give for these claims? Some people are pre-disposed to make wild claims about the intelligence of animals, and others are pre-disposed to believe them, but they often get inflated in the telling. I would expect that if there was a scientifically confirmed mythology being transmitted by other primates, I would have heard about it; that would be amazing news, and the fact that I hear about it from a Slashdot comment makes it highly suspect.

For instance, see this on Koko the Gorilla, among others. I find this article fairly compelling and don't see much response to it, nor do I think there can be much response to it. Is your post able to be backed up with science, or is it third-generation hear-say and wishful thinking?

Mind you, I'm open to the idea, just being properly skeptical about what are really very strong claims from a dubious source.

'course, I used Google... http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/april_fools_day_o rigin_of.html http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aprilfools1.html?li nk=tmplnav

To be fair, it seems the (in)famous Gates 640K quote is an urban legend.

Unless the US.mil only use Windows for admin and noncritical purposes, parent scares the holy crap out of me.
You can just imagine it now. Accidental missile launch. Captain stabs the abort key to self-destruct the missile. Suddenly, weapons, radar, comms, guidance & navigation, the whole bridge gets locked in Blue Screen O'Death.
Hell, you'd lose half your technical staff to applying patches, fixing issues raised by applying patches, and sorting out user privileges. And if the ship decides that the bilge stopcocks are closed when in fact they're open and flooding the lower decks... well, it's an undocumented feature and it'll be fixed in about a fortnight.
Frankly, although I actively support the development of alterative (Linux) OSs, I don't believe any off-the-shelf OS should be used for a situation like this - whether it's administering medication, controlling a nuclear reactor, or keeping the USS Enterprise away from the Puget Sound lighthouse (yes, I know it's an urban legend...), a custom, purpose-written OS built on a solid kernel is the way to go, IMHO. If that OS is based on the Linux kernel and it uses plugins for different equipment and systems, fine - just not Microsoft Windows NT for Warfare ;-)

is this another case of humanity losing advanced space travel capability due to neglect, like Apollo?"

...theory is the USA is going to break into two countries, along the Mississippi River...

If things got so bad that secession appeared reasonable to a large block of the populace, my guess is that Texas would withdraw from the Union first, forming a passably viable country. Over and above the economic and geographical diversity of the state, Texans cling tenaciously to the theory that they entered the Union retaining a right to secede. That's not true (although Texas does have a right to break itself up into 5 different states) but perception is a powerful reality and I'd expect Texans to boogie outta here long before all the Eastern Seaboard could get together to agree on anything.

I heard someone in NASA management had all the blueprints to the Apollo rockets destroyed so there would be no choice but to build the shuttle. So it would cost billions to reconstitute the Saturn program -- they'd have to basically start from scratch.

And many others have heard that also, so many in fact that it qualifies as an urband legend.

It's not true however. They're still there. The problem is that you couldn't get the parts (sixties vintage) today, and the launch pads have been rebuilt. We've also learnt a thing or two since the sixties. Once you've resourced the parts and rebuilt the launch pads you might as well have started from scratch and gotten a better vehicle for it.

>VHS vs Betamax

This might draw flames, but VHS won because it was better.

Technically better? So-so.

"Better" Better? Yes.

VHS didn't require special licencing (*), used tapes that could fit most all movies, and had 96% of the technical accuracy of Beta (230 vs. 240 lines). Most of all, it wasn't made by Sony, and therefore made well (talk to anyone who has serviced anything from Sony).

The more verbose explainations.

(*) Yes, the articles mention that Sony tried to licence Beta. Note the active word: Licence. Unlike JVC, who, from day one, worked *with* other companies to get VHS technology into the hands of consumers. Sony just wanted to sell Beta, and only while their hand was forced to do it, not help others develop it. The moment they had stamped out VHS they would have ceased to licence it, guaranteed.

(**) No, Beta isn't BetaCam any more than VHS is S-VHS. :-)

You might find this - Bill Gates never made such a claim.

That quote is in context about the first 8088 or 8086 chip. The manufactures we debating how much of the 1MB addressable memory should be allocated for what.

*at the time* 640K should have been enough for anybody so they went with that and dedicated the other 384KB for other things.

And this has been addressed on Slashdot before. But the existance of facts has never stopped anybody from perpetuating myths if they think it proves a point they'd like to make.

The WHOLE story

A whole two second search on Google cleared that up.

Ben

For your info, that quote is an urban legend. See here

Thats why it is a firing squad, 4 blanks that don't kill, and one real bullet that does.

According to most of the references I've found, it's the other way round. One person gets a blank, everyone else gets live rounds (sometimes everyone gets live rounds and there are no blanks). The idea is that even though an experienced shooter can tell the difference, there are psychological reasons not to pay attention or to believe that you truly drew the blank round. Also, no one person can stop the execution by failing to fire.

Execution by firing squad
Firing Squad Protocol
Death by firing squad

This ripple effect is actualy a result of an imperfect process while the glass was being cooled. Glass does flow, just so slow that no glass that is intact could be ovserved to have flowed. here is a summary of an excelent article on the topic (the article is in a journal that does not publish free on line).

That has never been said. Read here

Betamax WAS ONLY superior in visual quality...

The original Betamax was only ~60-90 (I forget) minutes of recorded programming. While they had a lead, the need to fight it out in court cut down their lead in the marketplace, and they lost first mover advantage. The second mover, VHS, provided 2 hours of recorded programming. Coincidentally, 2 hours was the average/max running of movies and movies on TV at the time.

Before the concept of time shifting TV became reality with the time-based recorder (if you have to be home to record the show, there isn't MUCH of an advantage to time shifting), VCRs were used to record movies.

That meant that the VHS was a BETTER VCR because it could actually record the movie.

By the time the extended Betamax came out that could record two movies, VHS had the upperhand in the market, and got economies of scale (which combined with the competition) lowered prices. VHS then got the ability to record up to 6 hours at crappy quality, but given the expense of the tapes, was likely popular (all our old tapes at home had to be trashed, because they were recorded at that quality that degraded to nothing... but I can't guess at actual use in the marketplace from my parents behavior).

In addition, the dirty little secret of VHS was that because it was open, all the porn was in VHS. We now see porn as an easily available vice, but at the time, you choices were go to a seedy theater or VHS. The novelty of being able to watch porn at home likely pushed VHS a bit, even if nobody talked about it. This was in an era before 3 (or even 1/2) adult channels on cable + PPV, Internet porn, etc), and if adults wanted to watch dirty movies in the privacy of their own home, VHS was the only game in town.

However, the REAL reason for VHS's early dominance was the 2 hour recording limit.

While modern TV displays are high quality (especially 1080i/720p HDTV-ready sets), the TVs at the time were MUCH lower quality. The visual difference between VHS and Betamax when actually viewed on a television isn't the night-and-day difference that people make it out to be when using it as an arguement for worse is better.

Facts on the urban legend surrounding Betamax, including Sony's alledged refusal to license betamax.

Alex

VHS and BETA has almost the exact same quality of video. Sony did license and try to share the standard. Get the facts, man. And BETA eventually allowed you to record more than 1 hour. I rented movies in BETA format. They came as one video.

That's an "urban" legend, up there with the supposed bureaucratic folly behind NASA's pens, which is also nonsense. When it shut down the Apollo program, NASA didn't shrug and say "Nice trip, let's throw away the map." They kept the Saturn V plans for the future, of course. The problem with a new Saturn V would be recreating old technology -- making boosters would be a particular sticking point -- and getting the launch pad stuff ready for them rather than, say, shuttles.

(Not that going to Mars necessarily has anything to do with Saturn Vs -- or Atlas-Agena B target ships for that matter, as long as we're assuming we're re-creating old technologies.)

Look at the failures of unmanned Mars spacecraft. Even if we had the technology, you would expect a few human-less dry runs first, much like the Apollo missions.

What does that have to do with anything? Um, yeah, speaking of Agena-B unmanned docking ships, they'd obviously have some steps along the way.

The loss of robotic probes, meanwhile, is a reflection of the way those programs work; they accept higher risks in exchange for the lower costs, because there's not the same safety concern. The rover on Mars right now landed in the higher-risk of the two landing sites chosen by the science team. They played the odds, hoping they'd get at least one of them down safely. You can take chances with robots. Beagle 2 was made on the cheap, for an example, with little redundancy in systems. (Oh, well -- it was really the orbiter with its deep-scanning radar that's the bread and butter of that mission, though we're disappointed in the lost chance on the ground.)

Under -50C?? That's pretty rare even in Norway.

Anyway.. hot water actually freezes faster than cold water.

Urban Legends Beta vs VHS
Now this article does state that there was little, if any, difference between the two in available features (other than tape length) or output quality. It does state that the arms race was led by Sony (Betamax) and that VHS caught up usually in less than a year. So at any point during the (early) life of Betamax, VHS was a up to a half-year behind technologically. Obviously, comparison after (or at!) the demise of Betamax would be stupid.
So from the case for the prosecution I find evidence for the defence.
Your witness I think ...

The Guardian's Why VHS was better than Betamax
Now this article is trying to make a point about how perception colours (or colors for you Yanks) people's views. Because people say Betmax was better everyone believes it, but the article suggests this was an Urban Myth and links to the first article debunked above.
Interestingly, the article actually says ... and maybe it was, in a lab. This is what most people are talking about when they state that (they believe) Betamax was better. Obviously, if you wanted to watch a taped film or TV program, you purchased a VHS machine, because VHS won the battle! So this article proves a different point.
Let it also be Stricken!

I guess the point is that just because something wins a business battle it's not necessarily the best techonology (Mac vs Windows)

now I just had a bit of a google-fest and found the following, some of which simply reinforce the supposition that Betamax was better than VHS, such as ...

Chapter 5 of Beyond Engineering by Luke Rumsey and Rhonda Fetner.

Actually, it's true. http://www.urbanlegends.com/legal/speeding_ticket_ pictures.html.

Betamax was the better format. Yet VHS won; it set the standard.

That's a myth. Read here and here for more info.

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.

But I see on any thread involving spammers a sort of reflexive hatred - and assumption of Evil Intent - which would seem more appropriate for a religious war on some Christian board.

Part of this is a hardware issue. Humans (and many other social animals) have built-in hardware for detecting cheaters, and a built-in bias against them. It's understandable that a lot of techies, who understand what's going on and are forced to deal with the problem, get worked up.

Another part of it is that for a lot of us, this was an obvious problem nearly ten years ago. A decade of seeing something important to us rot has made a lot of people frustrated, furious, or bitter. Especially so given that the problem is caused by a relatively small number of greedy idiots, abetted by a lot of people who either lack foresight or think it's somebody else's problem.

Of course, it's not just the spam problem that Americans are having trouble getting their heads around. Anybody who can read the newspapers and do a little math could see that there are huge problems brewing with Social Security, Medicare, health care costs, the federal budget, campaign finance, and congressional districting, just to name a few. It's as if people of all political stripes are putting their hands over their ears and singing show tunes, hoping the problems will just go away.

It'd be nice to blame this on an evil conspiracy making use of S.E.P. Field generators. But I think the actual causes are subtle and poorly understood. I have my own theories, but I'd be interested to hear how Slashdotters think this has come about.

UrbanLegends.com: http://www.urbanlegends.com/celebrities/bill.gates /gates_memory.html

It's a known fact that Bill Gates never actually said this, or at best, that it is rephrased severely and taken out of context.

Actually, the usual "proof" that he never said this is an
interview he gave in 1996 in which he claimed never to have said it. I'm not sure we should be willing to take Bill Gates' word on this. Or, really, much of anything.

640K is enough for anyone. (that one was easy)

...and also not true.

Gates has actually discounted that rumor several times (one of which can be found here, and I've got to say that it probably *is* untrue, as I really can't imagine anybody ever saying that.

No, he didn't. Not even Michael Sims is capable of that much short-sightedness.

Changingthe value of pi?

(myself included) The story about CD length is debatable: here and here.

(myself included) The story about CD length is debatable: here and here.

There are real cites for this problem. If you're an engineer and don't want to get sued, pay attention.

http://www.urbanlegends.com/sex/vacuum_wanking_cit e.html

This coming from the same person who said 640kb is more then enough for anyone?

He never said it. To this day no one has ever come up with a corroborated source for that quote.

I thought apple invented personal computing?

You realize that "Personal Computer" was a trademark of IBM? Apple made it pretty. I bet you think Apple invented the GUI too.

Bill never said the 640K Quote, and I'm willing to bet he never said the 4GB one, either.
I know everytime this quote is used, someone has to debunk it, but there's no reason to perpetuate a false quote by one of the geniuses of our time.

Vonnegut didn't write the "Wear sunscreen" speech.

http://www.urbanlegends.com/ulz/sunscreen.html

Urban Legend

We know how to make the rocket, the only problem is finding vendors for the vacuum tubes and ferrite cores nad other pieces of late 1950's-1960's technology. By the time we re-did the designs to use modern components, we'd have spent as much as designing a rocket from scratch. I still think a cluster using the Russian engines on the new Atlas in the first stage and SSMEs in a recoverable second and third stage would be able to heft a lot of mass to high orbit.

Of course, we could start with the F-1 plans and build a truly monstrous rocket engine. Problem is it probably wouldn't pay for itself. We rarely need to lift huge masses, unless we're bound for the Moon.

I think thousand of gigs of non-volatile memory will be NOT enough for WindowsWhatever to fill out the entire memory. Gates memory

That's an urban legend.

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time." - Bill Gates

But this theme which says there's nothing else which can be imagined as a future invention reminds me of the patent clerk who quit around the turn of the last century because there was nothing left to invent!

This is really, really stange that they would test this, because it is commonly known that most currency contains traces of cocaine.

This Urban Legends article has a good summary on the problem. Specifically, it mentions that courts and police used to use the presence of cocaine on cash as evidence of its ill-gotten past, but have drifted from that view.

Sadly, it's an urban legend. Great story, though.. :)

Well, there are many websites that vigorously claim that the email tax is a number one hoax....

So it must be true then.

Right?
RIGHT!

Uh Oh.

That was this summer 2003, Sen. Mark Dayton's idea to fight Spam...

Pfew, that was a close call: Senator Downplays E-Mail Tax Idea, Thursday, May 22, 2003.

If they tax email, then the spammers have won.

Now, if 'they' find this posting, they'll probably come up with a tax on hyperlinks...

But will anybody think of the children?