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That is utter nonsense. Many computer geeks seem to have difficulty understanding how the intended meaning and literal meaning of words can differ from one another, despite the fact that such occurences are commonplace. This classic Usenet post fairly well sums up the idiocy of complaining about phrases like "could care less".

If you take a simplistic logical reading, there's a flaw in the original post--agreed. However, it's pretty idiomatic, and language is not always logical.

However, try this page (near the bottom) for a good explanation of why it's perfectly logical, correct and even clever. The phrase is sarcastic!

And that is what sealed the fate of Beta. It wasn't just a question of not wanting to license, but not wanting to license production to cheap, mass market producers in hong kong and taiwann, that did the format in.

More info on copyright traps in maps here

In his 1843 report to Congress, the then commissioner of the Patent Office, Henry L. Ellsworth, included the following comment: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." As Jeffery shows, it's evident from the rest of that report that Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to emphasize that the number of patents was growing at a great rate. Far from considering inventions at an end, he outlined areas in which he expected patent activity to increase, and it is clear that he was making plans for the future."

Yeah, just like no one will ever need more than 640k of RAM!

PSA: This is an urban legend.

I can understand spending the disk/cpu for lossless compression on, say, a 96khz classical recording, but most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources. for live recordings, ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.

Because we're talking about audiophiles here (who else would *complain* about the previous audio format on the Phish site). You know. These are the people who think they can hear the difference between a CD and a CD with green ink on it. The same people who insist that vinyl has higher fidelity than CD. The same people who compare the dry tonality of different digital interconnects.

Even supposedly decent sites make so many mistakes when discussing digital audio that they'd fail an undergrads signals course. "No information is lost" my arse. And what sort of nonsense is that idiot trying to pass off as a digital signal; don't these "experts" know what low-pass filtering means?

Audiophilia. It's a disease. Kill it before it spreads.

On the "10% of your brain" legend, here is a pretty cool writeup. The best quote from the article:

In other words, the "humans only use 10% of their brains" canard would more correctly be phrased "humans only use 10% of their brains for walking around and smelling things"...

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong (I can certainly count on that around here...) but I thought it was pretty widely accepted that the Dvorak keyboard being faster or better is a myth.

...

Alright, a quick Google reveals that this is not commonly accepted. The defense is pretty shaky thought ("the Navy wouldn't do that.")

Anyways, repetitive movements are what cause the (quetionable) RSI condition, and I don't see how changing the keyboard layout would help, short of something more radical like one of those Logitech/MS 'natural' keyboards... and I don't believe Dvorak is inherently any faster than Qwerty; when comparing two people who know both very well, the typing speeds are probably the same.

You'd do much better to lower your keyboard to take the strain off your wrists. Most people keep their keyboards too high.

Everyone knows that you can't keep a Beowulf cluster of penguins up for too long; the nodes will all go down as soon as a plane flies over them and trash your uptime.

Whoops.

When I first read the headline, I was thinking, not that old urban legend again! Well it appears it's coming true -- sort of. Unless this is another go-round of the same.

You're right on the falling penny issue, at least according to this empirical report. Isn't it nice when someone actually tries the experiment rather than accepting the conventional wisdom?

It's intuitively correct, but I should warn that the physics of sleeker objects like cellphones are quite different, judging from the one dropped on me while descending a staircase last Memorial Day. Fortunately for me it was a glancing blow -- the phone shattered after deflecting from my head. Apparently a cellphone in freefall is not accompanied by an apology, but I took satisfaction enough in the destruction of the phone. :)

As far as the brilliant minds who were involved in the design being dead, well, yeah, that's true. On the other hand it's a bit of a stretch to assume that no one as bright as Wernher Von Braun is around to take their place.

Now, the big issue is that the Saturn V tooling is lost. This is criminal, but the Saturn V would be a good design starting point. The US designed these things in the early 1960s and managed to land 12 men on the moon with them and do a bunch of other cool stuff. This is not a bad place to start from.

A successor to the Saturn V (the Saturn 6, the Neptune? The Uranus?) could start off from the Saturn V design and incorporate 40 years of improvements in materials, design and avionics. This would be much better than hacking away on the shuttle which was a horrid kludge from day 1 and which has never met any of its goals.

Along with the heavy booster replcement a space plane based on X-15 based technology should be built. We were going to build one of these 40 years ago, it was the unfortunately named "Dyna-Soar" project (who the fuck came up with that name anyways? What were they thinking?). Dyna-Soar got whacked by Bob McNamara so that we could spend more money on our Southeast Asian Weapons Testing Project, also known as the Vietnam War.

It is depressing to me that we were closer to space at the time of my birth 37 years ago in 1965 than we are today.

Yeah, and we all (except for you and three moderators) know that it's a fake.

Speaking for myself, I refuse to pay an email tax so Big Brother can filter my emails for me. In such a system, bulk rate fees would become inevitable (big businesses would have a cow if they had to pay "per parcel"). Larger telemarketers would gladly pay that bulk rate, and the problem would persist.

I would much prefer to use about a minute of my time to simply delete the emails that I don't want. Quite simply, I want to be able to choose the status quo, which is fine with me. Let's hope this urban legend stays an urban legend.

The pi == 3 law is not an urban legend. It was an actual bill introduced into the Indiana House. The text of the bill is here, a site dedicated to the debunking of rumours.

Also on that site is a bill about public erections being illegal.

nice.

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.

#8: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.

Funny, but came very close to happening. In fact, in my great state of Indiana, the House actually passed legislation to set pi equal to 3 by a vote of 67-0. Fortunately, it was shot down in the Senate.

That's an urban legend.

Hey moron, it you would check your facts, you would know that Gates never said 640K was the max.

You probably also believe that Bill Gates has implemented an email tracking device and will give you a new car if you forward enough emails to people.

Q. Did you ever say, as has been widely circulated on the Internet, "640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody?"
No! That makes me so mad I can't believe it! Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K? The machine was going to be 512K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement-I said the opposite of that.

QUESTION: I read in a newspaper that in 1981 you said, ``640K of memory should be enough for anybody.'' What did you mean when you said this?

ANSWER: 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.

http://www.urbanlegends.com/drugs/cocaine.money/co caine_tainted_money_wsj.html

You typically use a credit card to set lines of cocaine, of course. Not that I'm sure anyone's actually snorting it anymore.

Who says anyone else has to even if they use Red Hat? Read here and (modesty be dammed) here. Install once, treat the system conservatively, and bang... Bob's your uncle.

if i remember correctly, greedy sony refused to license the technology to anyone else, wanting all the profit for themselves. instead they got nothing.

That's a myth, Sony did initially try to license Betamax to JVC and Matsushita. JVC refused because they were preparing their own technology (VHS).

http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vhs.h tml

Not funny, troll.

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

Urban Legends Research Centre
P-Guard poster (scare the kids into thinking it's true)
A logical argument from UrbanLegends.com
A huge thread archived by google about this topic

• Congress to Block Imaginary Internet Tax Bill from the Washington Post
• E-mail Rumor Completely Untrue from the United States Postal Service
• E-mail Tax Hoax from the US Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability
• No Consumer Per-Minute Charges to Access ISPs from the Federal Communications Commission

I hate to say this, but the idea of doing this in the Phillipines (especially the imposition by a non-Phillipine organization) makes the the referenced newspaper article sound like a hoax too.

Here's a rebuttal to that: at urbanlegends.com and: from a Google search

No, he didn't.

Here's a suggestion. Whenever you come across a quote or fact or story so cute that you can't resist telling it to people, check with Google and see if it's been debunked.

The amount of myth and misinformation circulating through email and around the water cooler is staggering. Do your part to fight it.

I think the "pebbles" terminal velocity would be a lot less than 200 mph. Indeed, the old story about pennies cracking the sidewalk around the Empire State Building turns out to be UL. Here is an account of objects falling with and without air.

But a perversely arrow-shaped piece of debris that did not tumble, that could be bad news. Then you just have to rely on statistics.

Trivia: the Shuttle SRB casing fall at about 350 MPH without parachutes, and 50 MPH with. Hey, I was curious....

I gotta say... My dad falls for this stuff. I mean, he warned me about the Klingerman Virus, and countless other hoaxes and such which he fell for completely. I love the guy, but he just grew up in a different time...

-_-_-

--Adolph Hitler, 1935

Nice strategy, to win an argument tell 'em Hitler was on the side of your opponent.

Indiana tried this 105 years ago... That will put Panama about the right technological place in time.

-- Multics

Congratulations, you've vectored that old urban legend again. No, nobody testified that everything's been invented

and not to mention that the "640k" quote often attributed to bill g is an urband legend.

True. See e.g. Urbanlegends.com's beta vs vhs page.

Sumner

here's a link that might help you. Essentially, Beta was first and had most of the innovations, but VHS won out overall. Betas quality was, as everyone will state, better but the record time and lack of pre-recorded media helped to kill it.

--trb

http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vhs .h tml

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.

Perhaps you should read your link because it says both were technically the same in performance and quality. The VHS may have had a lead in recording length though.

It looks like when you have two identical technologies, the cheaper one wins. Surprising isn't it?

So the answer is just simple if you think back a few years.

We have the mid-70's to early-80's rivalry between Sony's Betamax and JVC's VHS formats.

I'll skip the unpleasant details of the war here, but the point you have to remember is that the much more technically appreciated Betamax format lost out.

So the answer to your question is ... the looser will be the most technically appreciated. Bye Bye "+" format ?

According to the alt.folklore.urban FAQ, Disney was cremated.

"The more functional an OS, the more desktops it has."

Yeah, right. That paraphases exactly why we've used VHS for 20+ years instead of Beta. NOT! It is arguable that the Apple was a superior computing platform to the IBM PC of its day. The IBM-PC had the full corporate power and marketing strength of, well, IBM behind it while the Apple had the comparatively limited resources of two guys named Steve.

For the uninformed... Back in the days when the VCR was just being released on the world there were two competing formats, JVC's VHS format (which we all know) and Sony's Beta (a.k.a BetaMax). The latter was far superior but, alas, was first out marketed (a bit of history), then out litigated (Read case story). To date the majority of video production houses still use Beta because of it's superior image and audio quality.

"Medireview" has even made it into someone's resume (PDF); that must seriously reduce his chances of getting hired. Other references seem to have gotten into scholarly works. This is just the latest in a long string of stories about automatic (or semi-automatic) computer correction having serious consequences.

When I was at college, one student ran his doctoral thesis through the spellchecker one last time before submitting it to the binders, and thence to the Board of Graduate Studies. Unfortunately, he inadvertantly selected the "silently accept all suggestions" option, and failed to check the results. The manuscript he submitted was almost incomprehensible. After that, the University added a one-page warning to the spellchecker output (yes, it was in the days of mainframes).

Unfortunately, it appears that the well-known story about "in the black" becoming "in the African American" is only partly true; it was a deliberate practical joke in the newsroom.

You are encouraged to read http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/saturn_v_bluep rints.html before you continue spewing such pointless and incorrect "information".

I hope they're not using normal glass, which is technically a liquid. Look at windows in colonial houses; their bottom is thicker than their top.

3)The temperature at which a rigid glass becomes a supercooled liquid is called the glass transition temperature, Tg. For window glass, Tg (measured) is 550 degrees C. For the limiting case of infinite time the thermodynamically calculated ideal glass transition state Tg(0) for window glass is 270 degrees C. For Pyrex the values are 550 and 350 deg., respectively. [This allone should be enough to put to rest any argument for the liquid properties of glass at room temperature (which rarely gets above 50 degrees C).

Why not? It's suspected they've already killed deaf people when mistaking sign language for gang signs.

Why not? It's suspected they've already killed deaf people when mistaking sign language for gang signs.

Check it out, FUDder.

See this.