Even though that particular instance didn't happen, getting someone else's old phone number, or a number close to another number (or a business listing the wrong number somewhere), is common enough that I'm sure people play similar pranks all the time. Coming up with a fictional example of something doesn't prove that that kind of thing happening is an urban myth. Another example would be stringing along telemarketers in various funny (?) ways. Just because it's been featured in stand-up routines, sitcoms and sketches, that doesn't mean people aren't actually doing it.

The full list of word meanings they believe have cognates in many of the language families (indicating that they derive from an ancient, common ancestor language), in order of decreasing confidence:

Thou
I
Not
That
We
To give
Who
This
What
Man/male
Ye
Old
Mother
To hear
Hand
Fire
To pull
Black
To flow
Bark
Ashes
To spit
Worm

(This doesn't necessarily mean that the actual English word listed here is among the cognates in each case.)

Yes it does.

I saw those comments, but unfortunately I don't think they're correct. According to this article, the -es ending in Old English was part of a whole big system of declensions, and initially limited to the singular strong masculine nouns. There's no indication that these endings derived from His-genitive constructions (cf. the OE possessive adjectives here). The Wikipedia article on the His genitive indicates that the belief that -es was a contraction of "his" was a mistaken folk etymology that briefly turned into a typographical convention. In other words, although Old English did have constructions like "X his/her/their Y" as a very occasional form, examples from modern English do not come from this practice, but are in almost all cases just a misinformed spelling of -'s.

It seems like the possessive apostrophe did arise from early printers' feeling that some letters (whether part of -es or, as some thought, "his") were being omitted. Once established as a convention, I guess the apostrophe-final form was then applied to plurals and other words that already ended with an S-sound, just for consistency. It's worth pointing out that among other Germanic languages, only Dutch (to my knowledge) uses the possessive apostrophe. The others just add an S.

How about in a construction like "ladies' choice"? I highly doubt this was ever written or pronounced "ladieses choice" by anyone apart from Gollum.

It's not ass-backwards because "its" is fully consistent with "yours," "his," "hers," "ours" and "theirs," while "it's" is consistent with "he's" and "she's" (and with the general convention that omitted letters in contractions are indicated by an apostrophe). Your claim that "using an apostrophe to indicate the possessive is universal everywhere except in the case of 'it' " is plainly false.

As well as consistency with he's and her's?

I never said the indigenous Americans didn't have technology. (In fact, I didn't bring them up at all.) I implied that hunter/gatherer Stone Age peoples didn't need a "high-technology industrial base" to survive in "fairly hospitable natural environments," and that the size of the smallest viable isolated human populations in the past is therefore not a meaningful guide to what scale a completely self-supporting, independent Mars colony would need to be.

They weren't living on Mars, though. Surviving in a fairly hospitable natural environment where a small cluster of people can sustain itself by gathering, fishing and hunting is one thing. Surviving on a planet without its own ecosystem, where the only way to stay alive over the long term is to maintain a high-technology industrial base is quite another.

The genetic diversity isn't the limiting factor here. For a Mars colony to be self-sustainable (without planet-wide terraforming), it would have to be able to support a huge operation of mining and resource extraction, processing and production, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, waste processing, water reclamation, air filtering and recycling, and repairs. Without huge advances in self-organizing and self-repairing robots, this would require a human workforce of a size that would make inbreeding irrelevant.

And if you're going to assume massive scientific and technological development to make the concept viable (which is probably necessary in any case), there's no reason to limit yourself to natural breeding. We have sperm banks and egg banks on earth already, so it would be relatively easy to provide the required genetic variation through IVF treatments, even if you only have a tiny group of human colonists. Or you could imagine electronic gene databases that could write any desired DNA sequence (stored or procedurally generated) into a sperm or egg cell.

The latter.

Illegal methods can undermine the legitimacy of a government even if they weren't ultimately responsible for winning the election. Just ask Richard Nixon.

What is the basis for believing this option will disappear once Google consolidates its privacy policies? TFA says that on March 1, "after all your odd searches, secret obsessions and kinky lunch reading is ensconced inside a special database, you won't be able to get to the data any more." This claim appears completely unfounded.

Actually, this (the last ten years or so) is widely hailed as a golden age for quality TV shows. You have excellent dramas (e.g. The Good Wife, Terriers, Homeland), comedies (e.g. Parks and Recreation, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Louie), sci-fi/fantasy (e.g. Game of Thrones, Fringe, Doctor Who), animated shows (e.g. Archer, American Dad, The Venture Bros.) and talk shows (e.g. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Late Show). Even in the primetime soap genre you get addictively watchable shows like The Vampire Diaries and Revenge. What more do you want of a mainstream entertainment medium?

If you are looking for an original adventure game title, Gemini Rue was released yesterday. It's made with the same engine and runs in the same resolution as KQ3, but rather than reusing an existing property it creates a new science fiction game world and story (though fans of the genre may find many elements that remind of Blade Runner, Beneath a Steel Sky etc.). It was made mostly by one guy, and it won the IGF student competition last year.

They did make an original game before this. It was called Al Emmo, and it wasn't very good.