12 ms·

Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

246 points by magsafe 12y ago

Nanzikambe 12y ago
A contract "poison pill" or litmus test. Pretty ingenious, is that sort of thing common practice in contracts?
- 0x0539 12y ago
  Yes its quite common now. Working in my high schools theater which was the largest in the town we'd get these types of requests so I imagine in they would be even more common for something that mattered
  - Nanzikambe 12y ago
    Care to give an example of the sort of thing you encountered? Purely to satisfy a curious mind :)
    - bgarbiak 12y ago
      Here's the selection of various artists' demands/riders: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstage http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstage Sometimes these riders serve a purpose (Van Halen's case), sometimes they are indeed a caprice, or a joke. If I recall correctly it was Pearl Jam, who once demanded their M&M's to be segregated into jars, and each jar could only contain one color of a candy. There were photos floating around the net with the band members laughing and posing with that jars and the guy who felt into the trap. Oh, life of a rock star ;)
      - judk 12y ago
        That's just obnoxious and undermines Van Halen's meaningfully safety-oriented gesture.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Maybe something like this should appear in the legal stuff everyone always just clicks I agree -> next on. Instead of an 'I agree', you are to send a picture of a jar of M&M's with a certain color missing. Cleverly hidden somewhere deep in legalese.
- peteretep 12y ago
  I heard a rumour of technical specification including some of the jokier RFCs to check that people were really reading them... http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
  - tragic 12y ago
    Don't laugh too quickly. Given a slow enough connection and a big enough file, the pigeon (with flash drive strapped to leg) will win. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#Other_avian_data_transfer_methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#Other_av...
    - TheCoelacanth 12y ago
      Except that RFC 1149 specifies a single IP datagram per pigeon, which means it will be slower than even the slowest of dial-up connections.
      - rasz_pl 12y ago
        IPv6 jumbograms to the rescue, 4GB per packet
  - rmc 12y ago
    That was published on 1st of April. It's an april fool's joke. There are loads of April Fool's RFCs. It's not a litmus test for reading, it's a community having fun. BTW: A group tried the IP over Avian Carrier: http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ The ping times were unimpressive.
    - porpoisemonkey 12y ago
      I think the litmus test being suggested is to include the joke RFC in the reference section of a different technical specification as a way to verify the specification is being reviewed in detail.
- herghost 12y ago
  That's something that I've done with data processing and security contracts for the last 4 or 5 years. It's an addendum to the main commercial contract and is deliberately long. Almost all of it is non-exceptional "just do it right" kind of stuff, but there are a handful of clauses I've put in that absolutely no company could reasonably agree to. If they agree to it without challenging those clauses, I then know that I am going to need to grill them on the detail of everything that they do. It's proved very effective for me. edit: I actually refer to them as my "Brown M&M Clauses" too!
  - btown 12y ago
    What are some examples of these clauses, if you don't mind sharing them? Presumably you don't actually ask for brown M&Ms, but rather for something technical and infeasible.
    - herghost 12y ago
      for example, the right to audit their premises at our convenience and their expense without giving notice. There is a legit requirement for us to be able to audit, but placing the other conditions on it makes it, at the very least, unreasonable but the "without notice" bit means that if they agree to it we have can disrupt their business at our leisure (since an audit requires their resources to conduct too). another example is requesting infeasible levels of application logging, insane retention periods, and onerous evidence that they're acting on that information.
  - alain94040 12y ago
    Same thing with software outsourcing contracts to China (for instance). On purpose, send the half-finished specs. You know there are huge gaps in the specs, they can't be implemented without asking clarifying questions. What does the outsourcing vendor say? We read the specs, we understand them very well, no problem, we'll do it. Fire vendor.
- borplk 12y ago
  If you install the software I distribute and "agree" to the terms of conditions I own your life.
JonnieCache 12y ago
This seems like a good opportunity to post RMS' rider again: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer... Fabulous stuff. I wonder how often he has/gets to hang out with random parrots since this document became widely known. In my mind he is surrounded constantly by sandal-wearing acolytes wielding exotic birds of every variety.
- rimantas 12y ago
  This was interesting but disturbing nonetheless…
- netcan 12y ago
  This is a fantastic read! If you have previously done streaming using some streaming service and you can't immediately name the format it uses, chances are it is unacceptable and I won't let you use it for my speech. ..This might seem unfair--if a ticket is lost, it could be my fault. But my income is not large, and I cannot afford to assume this risk myself if the event offers me no income. The frustration I feel when I suffer such a loss is excruciating. It is better for me to decline to travel to a certain place than to take such a risk. ..DON'T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I can close, in order to have some privacy)... ... If you have found a person for me to stay with, please forward this section and the two following sections to that person. ..find out what temperature it can actually lower a room to, during the relevant dates ..I like cats if they are friendly. ..Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me .. .. find a host for me that has a friendly parrot.. ..DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling.. I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol.. .. If a hotel says "We have internet access.. .. What parameters does the user need to specify in order to talk with it?… … Don't rely on information from such a person--talk to someone who knows! .. their phone switchboard may not recognize the tones produced by modems.. When you need to tell me about a problem in a plan, please do not start with a long apology. That is unbearably boring. …If I am typing on my computer and it is time to do something else, please tell me. Don't wait for me to "finish working" first, because you would wait forever. I have to squeeze in answering mail at every possible opportunity, which includes whenever I have to wait. I wait by working. If instead of telling me there is no more need for me to wait, you wait for me to stop waiting for you, we will both wait forever -- or until I figure out what's happening. … Please don't try to pressure me to "relax" instead, and fall behind on my work I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about ..what I will do breakfast. ..Please just do not bring it up .. If there is a chance to see folk dancing… … If you want to give me data about airplane tickets, please send that info as plain ASCII text What a beautiful crazy person RMS is.
rhizome 12y ago
Contrary to Snopes' last-updated, this is at least 10 years old. Summary/spoiler: It was to ensure the contract was read thoroughly.
- Yuioup 12y ago
  The website is running on ASP Classic (.asp)
  - stan_rogers 12y ago
    The .asp extension actually tells you nothing other than that the .asp extension was used. On the balance of probabilities, it's likely the case that the site runs on ASP classic on a Windows server, but it could as easily have been moved to, say, the LAMP stack configured (using httpd.conf or .htaccess) to invoke PHP when files bearing the .asp extension are requested. It's not a common thing to do, but it can be the easiest way to solve the link rot problem.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      According to the headers it returns it seems to be IIS 5 - which is quite impressively old (Windows 2000 era). Of course, they could be faking that - but not sure why anyone would try.
      - icholboy 12y ago
        Security through obscurity?
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      A buddy once had a client that decided their site needed to be in a different technology, "for browser compatibility". A quick remap later and the client was satisfied.
    - brc 12y ago
      The snopes site is quite old. If they did move to a newer technology, it would be better for them to stick with their .asp extension so that they didn't have to change the URLs with redirects. They are well ranked across a lot of keywords - there is no upside for them to change their URL.
saurik 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581
- andreif 12y ago
  inception :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860
pjbrunet 12y ago
I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand contract law, delivering something "close enough" is all that's required to satisfy a contract. Let's pretend everything's perfect except for one brown M&M. I'm sure a lawyer can explain it better, but if everything else is in order, I think Van Halen would have to perform their end of the deal.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Yeah, I severely doubt Van Halen were such primadonnas, and that clause was just a sanity check. I'm somehow sure more modern pop artists took cases like this as an excuse to make exorbitant demands and throw a fit if they weren't met though.
- jmadsen 12y ago
  You really, really, really missed the point of the M & M's thing.
  - pjbrunet 12y ago
    That's why I said let's pretend. I'm not talking about the article, I'm talking about contract law. You "really" missed my point. Before I took a business law class, I figured everything in the contract had to be satisfied exactly. But that's not always how the law works. I'm talking about U.S. contracts. How would the brown M&M play out in Japan?
- icegreentea 12y ago
  In general, you go with 'what would a reasonable person say'. Now, for a rock concert, the color a backstage M&Ms in isolation is probably not enough to convince a judge that it was a good reason to break the contract. But the M&Ms aren't used in isolation. They're used as a flag, where their presence suggests that the venue did not follow through on their technical demands. Once you know that, then you just look for problems (probably the demands immediately around the M&M line first). Once you found an actual problem, well then, there you go.
  - 12y ago
exDM69 12y ago
I recall reading that the "no brown M&M's" clause was added after a near-fatal accident on stage where a member of the Van Halen band got electrocuted because of bad wiring on the stage.
- orblivion 12y ago
  Just a friendly FYI: "electrocuted" implies a fatality. (I learned this similarly on an internet forum I posted the word to years ago.)
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    Lesser severity of unintentional contact with a live conductor could be described as "shocked" (or "electroshocked" if there is potential ambiguity with the emotional state) or "electrotetanized", with the latter reserved for currents strong enough to cause complete muscle seizure (as occurs with a stun gun, for instance). "Electrocution" is a portmanteau of "electrical execution", which not only implies that the person died, but that it was intentional and sanctioned. Lack of a better word has expanded usage to any death caused by electrical current.
  - cbr 12y ago
    Really? https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aelectrocute https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aelectrocute injure or kill someone by electric shock
    - syncsynchalt 12y ago
      It's a portmanteau of electric + execution. It's been misused so often that the non-fatal meaning is becoming a separate line item in the definition, but the parent comment is correct.
      - cbr 12y ago
        By that argument "electrocution" for "accidental death by electric shock" is also misuse, as the initial definition was "execution via electricity".
spingsprong 12y ago
An episode of the TRC podcast covered this, and came to a different conclusion than snopes. http://www.trcpodcast.com/trc-219-can-men-and-women-be-friends-foods-with-animals-van-halen-mms/ http://www.trcpodcast.com/trc-219-can-men-and-women-be-frien...
- StavrosK 12y ago
  What was the conclusion, for those of us who can't listen?
  - spingsprong 12y ago
    Technical requests are usually handled by different people than catering and hospitality requests. The people in charge catering and hospitality would not be expected to read the technical requests to do with electronic and sound systems, and vice versa. The guy at the TRC podcast actually searched out their contracts, and the brown M&M clause isn't in the middle of technical requirements, but is in the hospitality section among requests of meals, beverages and dressing room requirements, and there's no mention that the concert would be cancelled if brown M&Ms were found. So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a fun story.
    - ginko 12y ago
      > So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a fun story. Either that or the no brown M&M's clause became so well known later on that it wasn't useful as a litmus test anymore.
Roonerelli 12y ago
I’ve heard similar stories regarding developers and IT Services Where the devs weren’t allowed access to the Production environment so would have to leave written instructions on how to deploy the software they’ve written. And convinced that IT Services weren’t reading their instructions they would write something really offensive in there and see if they complained Possibly just a myth, but amusing all the same
- lmm 12y ago
  Link for the interested: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Symbolic-Installation.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Symbolic-Install...
- brc 12y ago
  I remember having to do this. And if you left out one single instruction, the whole thing had to be done again from scratch. The power-trippers would say 'it doesn't say here to click on the 'finish' button. You must re-do the entire document and go through QA again. Ugh. Thankfully we live in a world where multiple deployments per day is considered OK.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  well, I've done such a thing, so not a myth.
bjourne 12y ago
Maybe a mathematician can explain whether this "trick" works or not? Intuitively, I can't see that knowing whether the M&M demand was filled makes it more probable that the other demands are filled. Say you have a pile with five black or white marbles. You want them all to be black. So you check that the first marble in the pile is black (ie no brown m&m:s). Is it now more probable that the other four marbles also are black? Because you are just checking one specific marble instead of sampling a number of randomly chosen marbles (which of course would increase the probability), I don't see how it can work.
- collint 12y ago
  Because it's not like marbles. It's not a math thing. It's more like a canary in the coal mine. If the canary dies, you should check on the air quality. If they went through the trouble of removing the brown m&ms you have a fairly strong indicator they actually read the document in the first place. And a strong indicator they have a good attention to detail.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    Exactly, a concept also known as a "litmus test", if you pass the test you may still fail the actual, but if you fail the litmus test there's more or less no way you'll pass.
  - bcohen5055 12y ago
    I'm all about data being presented with confidence bounds but if even 1 canary is dead I'm getting the hell out of there!
- mehwoot 12y ago
  You assume independence between the color of the marbles. This is highly unlikely. Promoters probably don't read the terms randomly and completely randomly fulfill them. Likely whether one of the marbles is black or white tells you a lot about whether the other ones are black or white, especially if it's a marble that you selected before hand in a way that will often change depending on how the marbles are colored.
gnyman 12y ago
There are quite a few applications that do something similar, they leave a "disabled=1" or similar in the config to make sure people look at the config before trying to run the software. I remember the eggdrop IRC bot doing it (http://cvs.eggheads.org/viewvc/eggdrop1.6/eggdrop.conf?view=co http://cvs.eggheads.org/viewvc/eggdrop1.6/eggdrop.conf?view=... , look for the lines starting with die) this and I'm sure there are more.
- edwintorok 12y ago
  The ClamAV daemon also ship with a config file containing a line 'Example'. As long as the line is there it'll refuse to start.
Monkeyget 12y ago
It reminds me of the orange juice test. You organize an annual convention for hundreds of people. You tell the banquet manager of the hotel you are considering that the morning breakfast must include a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for everyone of the attendees. It must be squeezed no more than two hours before the breakfast. It is not possible to do so. Squeezing that much orange in much a short amount of time would be prohibitively expensive. If the manager says yes he is either lying or incompetent and you'd better find someone else who will tell you it's not possible.
- majc2 12y ago
  I first heard this in "The secrets of consulting" by Gerald Weinberg. The fuller version is that the manger is only allowed to say 'yes' if they tell you there is a cost associated with it (i.e. it isn't free).
- raverbashing 12y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Orange-Squeezer-Machine-replacement/dp/B0068OK27S http://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Orange-Squeezer-Machine-rep...
  - ryanburk 12y ago
    if you go with an amazon solution, it should absolutely be mechanical turk! https://aws.amazon.com/mturk/ https://aws.amazon.com/mturk/
  - newaccountfool 12y ago
    That would work, can do 7 glasses a min. That means means 420 glasses an hour, which would be 840 glasses in the two hours. The question was about hundreds of guests and not thousands so your operating at the top range of that. Definitely possible!
    - gambiting 12y ago
      Even if it was about thousands of guests, you can buy more than one machine. The only question is, how much is the client willing to pay?
bane 12y ago
One of the interesting things about tech work is that it's almost all "brown M&Ms". It's amazing how important attention to detail is in this field and how quickly something will simply not work if the details aren't sweated. We see it time and again when things go into production where the "brown M&Ms" haven't been looked into and we end up with things like enterprise class websites that cost millions of dollars to produce crumbling under the load of a dozen simultaneous users.
HERRbPUNKT 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwHO2HnwfnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwHO2HnwfnA Interview with Eddy Van Halen, telling the story first hand. :)
- breakall 12y ago
  Cheers for the link! (But that is Diamond Dave telling the story!)
JunkDNA 12y ago
See previous HN discussion (360 points, 1,744 days ago) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860
supergeek133 12y ago
Instantly thought of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7kg5ZzDZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7kg5ZzDZo
- circa 12y ago
  me too! i'm surprised there isn't more mention of it.
emiliobumachar 12y ago
Engineer's version: Write-only memory " Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics management only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the 'erroneous' literature."
bttf 12y ago
This reminds me of some IRCd configurations, in which the server will not function properly unless you've thoroughly read through the conf file and found the single commented line which disables the entire process.
circa 12y ago
How is there no mention of Wayne's World in these comments?
yp_all 12y ago
Maybe a more interesting question is whether they ever exercised their right to terminate for brown M&M's. Is there any notion of material breach, major vs minor breach, etc. in "tour contracts"?
dvanduzer 12y ago
You can listen to Ira Glass and John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants talk about it in the prologue: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/386/fine-print?act=0 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/386/f... "there's 30 people the promoter's going to hire on our behalf ... but in only half of them did we require that they be sober"
harryb 12y ago
Interesting lesson about getting confidence by adding bugs. This was mentioned at a recent tech talk about Java Mutation Testing and PIT http://pitest.org/ http://pitest.org/ - video here http://vimeo.com/89083982 http://vimeo.com/89083982
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
YesThatTom2 12y ago
Once I buried a crazy request in a list of "you need to agree on these points or the book won't make the deadline" email to my publisher. My editor flat out agreed to them all. That's how I knew she was lying about having read them and I had to escalate to the production editor. It saved the book.
quotha 12y ago
You have to remember, it was the 80s!
salehenrahman 12y ago
I'm stealing this tactic when interviewing a QA guy, if I ever do end up looking to hire QA guys, that is. Me: "So here are a set of instructions are programmers were asked to follow. Can you see anything wrong" QA candidate: "Why yes. They forgot to remove the brown M&M's" Me: "You start tomorrow."
ctdonath 12y ago
I've read thru a bunch of other nit-picky riders. Strikes me that an under-discussed factor is that these high-value stars (contracts running into the $millions) are under extreme pressure, which is severely aggravated by so much change on a daily/hourly basis; something as "trivial" as wrong-temperature or brand drinks (I dislike Poland Spring water, and prefer Mt Dew in cans not bottles), uncomfortable seats, or even brown M&Ms (hey, everyone has a pet peeve) can be an unnerving "last straw". Having a few "perfect" arrangements everywhere gives them something to center on for mental stability. ETA: I realize this is a tangent. Methinks it's relevant.
- salehenrahman 12y ago
  I'm curious; have you read the linked article? Because unlike what you stated, the removal of brown M&Ms doesn't have much to do with comforting the high-value stars, but more like a "flag" that Van Halen looks for in order to determine whether or not the stage crew has read the contract properly. If they did read the contract, the crew would have removed the brown M&Ms. If not, then there is a high likelihood that they have not read the contract, and not only did they not remove then brown M&Ms, but they also probably omitted crucial elements in the set-up, possibly to a point it can be life threatening if omitted.
sgdread 12y ago
I've seen same kind of tests on one of the fire ranges. You have to read safety rules. One of the points was to put x mark on the 2nd page if you read that.

246 points by magsafe 12y ago

Nanzikambe 12y ago

A contract "poison pill" or litmus test. Pretty ingenious, is that sort of thing common practice in contracts?

0x0539 12y ago
Yes its quite common now. Working in my high schools theater which was the largest in the town we'd get these types of requests so I imagine in they would be even more common for something that mattered
- Nanzikambe 12y ago
  Care to give an example of the sort of thing you encountered? Purely to satisfy a curious mind :)
  - bgarbiak 12y ago
    Here's the selection of various artists' demands/riders: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstage http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstage Sometimes these riders serve a purpose (Van Halen's case), sometimes they are indeed a caprice, or a joke. If I recall correctly it was Pearl Jam, who once demanded their M&M's to be segregated into jars, and each jar could only contain one color of a candy. There were photos floating around the net with the band members laughing and posing with that jars and the guy who felt into the trap. Oh, life of a rock star ;)
    - judk 12y ago
      That's just obnoxious and undermines Van Halen's meaningfully safety-oriented gesture.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Maybe something like this should appear in the legal stuff everyone always just clicks I agree -> next on. Instead of an 'I agree', you are to send a picture of a jar of M&M's with a certain color missing. Cleverly hidden somewhere deep in legalese.
peteretep 12y ago
I heard a rumour of technical specification including some of the jokier RFCs to check that people were really reading them... http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
- tragic 12y ago
  Don't laugh too quickly. Given a slow enough connection and a big enough file, the pigeon (with flash drive strapped to leg) will win. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#Other_avian_data_transfer_methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#Other_av...
  - TheCoelacanth 12y ago
    Except that RFC 1149 specifies a single IP datagram per pigeon, which means it will be slower than even the slowest of dial-up connections.
    - rasz_pl 12y ago
      IPv6 jumbograms to the rescue, 4GB per packet
- rmc 12y ago
  That was published on 1st of April. It's an april fool's joke. There are loads of April Fool's RFCs. It's not a litmus test for reading, it's a community having fun. BTW: A group tried the IP over Avian Carrier: http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ The ping times were unimpressive.
  - porpoisemonkey 12y ago
    I think the litmus test being suggested is to include the joke RFC in the reference section of a different technical specification as a way to verify the specification is being reviewed in detail.
herghost 12y ago
That's something that I've done with data processing and security contracts for the last 4 or 5 years. It's an addendum to the main commercial contract and is deliberately long. Almost all of it is non-exceptional "just do it right" kind of stuff, but there are a handful of clauses I've put in that absolutely no company could reasonably agree to. If they agree to it without challenging those clauses, I then know that I am going to need to grill them on the detail of everything that they do. It's proved very effective for me. edit: I actually refer to them as my "Brown M&M Clauses" too!
- btown 12y ago
  What are some examples of these clauses, if you don't mind sharing them? Presumably you don't actually ask for brown M&Ms, but rather for something technical and infeasible.
  - herghost 12y ago
    for example, the right to audit their premises at our convenience and their expense without giving notice. There is a legit requirement for us to be able to audit, but placing the other conditions on it makes it, at the very least, unreasonable but the "without notice" bit means that if they agree to it we have can disrupt their business at our leisure (since an audit requires their resources to conduct too). another example is requesting infeasible levels of application logging, insane retention periods, and onerous evidence that they're acting on that information.
- alain94040 12y ago
  Same thing with software outsourcing contracts to China (for instance). On purpose, send the half-finished specs. You know there are huge gaps in the specs, they can't be implemented without asking clarifying questions. What does the outsourcing vendor say? We read the specs, we understand them very well, no problem, we'll do it. Fire vendor.
borplk 12y ago
If you install the software I distribute and "agree" to the terms of conditions I own your life.

JonnieCache 12y ago

This seems like a good opportunity to post RMS' rider again: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer... Fabulous stuff. I wonder how often he has/gets to hang out with random parrots since this document became widely known. In my mind he is surrounded constantly by sandal-wearing acolytes wielding exotic birds of every variety.

rimantas 12y ago
This was interesting but disturbing nonetheless…
netcan 12y ago
This is a fantastic read! If you have previously done streaming using some streaming service and you can't immediately name the format it uses, chances are it is unacceptable and I won't let you use it for my speech. ..This might seem unfair--if a ticket is lost, it could be my fault. But my income is not large, and I cannot afford to assume this risk myself if the event offers me no income. The frustration I feel when I suffer such a loss is excruciating. It is better for me to decline to travel to a certain place than to take such a risk. ..DON'T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I can close, in order to have some privacy)... ... If you have found a person for me to stay with, please forward this section and the two following sections to that person. ..find out what temperature it can actually lower a room to, during the relevant dates ..I like cats if they are friendly. ..Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me .. .. find a host for me that has a friendly parrot.. ..DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling.. I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol.. .. If a hotel says "We have internet access.. .. What parameters does the user need to specify in order to talk with it?… … Don't rely on information from such a person--talk to someone who knows! .. their phone switchboard may not recognize the tones produced by modems.. When you need to tell me about a problem in a plan, please do not start with a long apology. That is unbearably boring. …If I am typing on my computer and it is time to do something else, please tell me. Don't wait for me to "finish working" first, because you would wait forever. I have to squeeze in answering mail at every possible opportunity, which includes whenever I have to wait. I wait by working. If instead of telling me there is no more need for me to wait, you wait for me to stop waiting for you, we will both wait forever -- or until I figure out what's happening. … Please don't try to pressure me to "relax" instead, and fall behind on my work I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about ..what I will do breakfast. ..Please just do not bring it up .. If there is a chance to see folk dancing… … If you want to give me data about airplane tickets, please send that info as plain ASCII text What a beautiful crazy person RMS is.

rhizome 12y ago

Contrary to Snopes' last-updated, this is at least 10 years old. Summary/spoiler: It was to ensure the contract was read thoroughly.

Yuioup 12y ago
The website is running on ASP Classic (.asp)
- stan_rogers 12y ago
  The .asp extension actually tells you nothing other than that the .asp extension was used. On the balance of probabilities, it's likely the case that the site runs on ASP classic on a Windows server, but it could as easily have been moved to, say, the LAMP stack configured (using httpd.conf or .htaccess) to invoke PHP when files bearing the .asp extension are requested. It's not a common thing to do, but it can be the easiest way to solve the link rot problem.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    According to the headers it returns it seems to be IIS 5 - which is quite impressively old (Windows 2000 era). Of course, they could be faking that - but not sure why anyone would try.
    - icholboy 12y ago
      Security through obscurity?
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    A buddy once had a client that decided their site needed to be in a different technology, "for browser compatibility". A quick remap later and the client was satisfied.
  - brc 12y ago
    The snopes site is quite old. If they did move to a newer technology, it would be better for them to stick with their .asp extension so that they didn't have to change the URLs with redirects. They are well ranked across a lot of keywords - there is no upside for them to change their URL.

saurik 12y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581

andreif 12y ago
inception :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860

pjbrunet 12y ago

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand contract law, delivering something "close enough" is all that's required to satisfy a contract. Let's pretend everything's perfect except for one brown M&M. I'm sure a lawyer can explain it better, but if everything else is in order, I think Van Halen would have to perform their end of the deal.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Yeah, I severely doubt Van Halen were such primadonnas, and that clause was just a sanity check. I'm somehow sure more modern pop artists took cases like this as an excuse to make exorbitant demands and throw a fit if they weren't met though.
jmadsen 12y ago
You really, really, really missed the point of the M & M's thing.
- pjbrunet 12y ago
  That's why I said let's pretend. I'm not talking about the article, I'm talking about contract law. You "really" missed my point. Before I took a business law class, I figured everything in the contract had to be satisfied exactly. But that's not always how the law works. I'm talking about U.S. contracts. How would the brown M&M play out in Japan?
icegreentea 12y ago
In general, you go with 'what would a reasonable person say'. Now, for a rock concert, the color a backstage M&Ms in isolation is probably not enough to convince a judge that it was a good reason to break the contract. But the M&Ms aren't used in isolation. They're used as a flag, where their presence suggests that the venue did not follow through on their technical demands. Once you know that, then you just look for problems (probably the demands immediately around the M&M line first). Once you found an actual problem, well then, there you go.
- 12y ago

exDM69 12y ago

I recall reading that the "no brown M&M's" clause was added after a near-fatal accident on stage where a member of the Van Halen band got electrocuted because of bad wiring on the stage.

orblivion 12y ago
Just a friendly FYI: "electrocuted" implies a fatality. (I learned this similarly on an internet forum I posted the word to years ago.)
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  Lesser severity of unintentional contact with a live conductor could be described as "shocked" (or "electroshocked" if there is potential ambiguity with the emotional state) or "electrotetanized", with the latter reserved for currents strong enough to cause complete muscle seizure (as occurs with a stun gun, for instance). "Electrocution" is a portmanteau of "electrical execution", which not only implies that the person died, but that it was intentional and sanctioned. Lack of a better word has expanded usage to any death caused by electrical current.
- cbr 12y ago
  Really? https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aelectrocute https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aelectrocute injure or kill someone by electric shock
  - syncsynchalt 12y ago
    It's a portmanteau of electric + execution. It's been misused so often that the non-fatal meaning is becoming a separate line item in the definition, but the parent comment is correct.
    - cbr 12y ago
      By that argument "electrocution" for "accidental death by electric shock" is also misuse, as the initial definition was "execution via electricity".

spingsprong 12y ago

An episode of the TRC podcast covered this, and came to a different conclusion than snopes. http://www.trcpodcast.com/trc-219-can-men-and-women-be-friends-foods-with-animals-van-halen-mms/ http://www.trcpodcast.com/trc-219-can-men-and-women-be-frien...

StavrosK 12y ago
What was the conclusion, for those of us who can't listen?
- spingsprong 12y ago
  Technical requests are usually handled by different people than catering and hospitality requests. The people in charge catering and hospitality would not be expected to read the technical requests to do with electronic and sound systems, and vice versa. The guy at the TRC podcast actually searched out their contracts, and the brown M&M clause isn't in the middle of technical requirements, but is in the hospitality section among requests of meals, beverages and dressing room requirements, and there's no mention that the concert would be cancelled if brown M&Ms were found. So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a fun story.
  - ginko 12y ago
    > So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a fun story. Either that or the no brown M&M's clause became so well known later on that it wasn't useful as a litmus test anymore.

Roonerelli 12y ago

I’ve heard similar stories regarding developers and IT Services Where the devs weren’t allowed access to the Production environment so would have to leave written instructions on how to deploy the software they’ve written. And convinced that IT Services weren’t reading their instructions they would write something really offensive in there and see if they complained Possibly just a myth, but amusing all the same

lmm 12y ago
Link for the interested: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Symbolic-Installation.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Symbolic-Install...
brc 12y ago
I remember having to do this. And if you left out one single instruction, the whole thing had to be done again from scratch. The power-trippers would say 'it doesn't say here to click on the 'finish' button. You must re-do the entire document and go through QA again. Ugh. Thankfully we live in a world where multiple deployments per day is considered OK.
moron4hire 12y ago
well, I've done such a thing, so not a myth.

bjourne 12y ago

Maybe a mathematician can explain whether this "trick" works or not? Intuitively, I can't see that knowing whether the M&M demand was filled makes it more probable that the other demands are filled. Say you have a pile with five black or white marbles. You want them all to be black. So you check that the first marble in the pile is black (ie no brown m&m:s). Is it now more probable that the other four marbles also are black? Because you are just checking one specific marble instead of sampling a number of randomly chosen marbles (which of course would increase the probability), I don't see how it can work.

collint 12y ago
Because it's not like marbles. It's not a math thing. It's more like a canary in the coal mine. If the canary dies, you should check on the air quality. If they went through the trouble of removing the brown m&ms you have a fairly strong indicator they actually read the document in the first place. And a strong indicator they have a good attention to detail.
- masklinn 12y ago
  Exactly, a concept also known as a "litmus test", if you pass the test you may still fail the actual, but if you fail the litmus test there's more or less no way you'll pass.
- bcohen5055 12y ago
  I'm all about data being presented with confidence bounds but if even 1 canary is dead I'm getting the hell out of there!
mehwoot 12y ago
You assume independence between the color of the marbles. This is highly unlikely. Promoters probably don't read the terms randomly and completely randomly fulfill them. Likely whether one of the marbles is black or white tells you a lot about whether the other ones are black or white, especially if it's a marble that you selected before hand in a way that will often change depending on how the marbles are colored.

gnyman 12y ago

There are quite a few applications that do something similar, they leave a "disabled=1" or similar in the config to make sure people look at the config before trying to run the software. I remember the eggdrop IRC bot doing it (http://cvs.eggheads.org/viewvc/eggdrop1.6/eggdrop.conf?view=co http://cvs.eggheads.org/viewvc/eggdrop1.6/eggdrop.conf?view=... , look for the lines starting with die) this and I'm sure there are more.

edwintorok 12y ago
The ClamAV daemon also ship with a config file containing a line 'Example'. As long as the line is there it'll refuse to start.

Monkeyget 12y ago

It reminds me of the orange juice test. You organize an annual convention for hundreds of people. You tell the banquet manager of the hotel you are considering that the morning breakfast must include a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for everyone of the attendees. It must be squeezed no more than two hours before the breakfast. It is not possible to do so. Squeezing that much orange in much a short amount of time would be prohibitively expensive. If the manager says yes he is either lying or incompetent and you'd better find someone else who will tell you it's not possible.

majc2 12y ago
I first heard this in "The secrets of consulting" by Gerald Weinberg. The fuller version is that the manger is only allowed to say 'yes' if they tell you there is a cost associated with it (i.e. it isn't free).
raverbashing 12y ago
http://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Orange-Squeezer-Machine-replacement/dp/B0068OK27S http://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Orange-Squeezer-Machine-rep...
- ryanburk 12y ago
  if you go with an amazon solution, it should absolutely be mechanical turk! https://aws.amazon.com/mturk/ https://aws.amazon.com/mturk/
- newaccountfool 12y ago
  That would work, can do 7 glasses a min. That means means 420 glasses an hour, which would be 840 glasses in the two hours. The question was about hundreds of guests and not thousands so your operating at the top range of that. Definitely possible!
  - gambiting 12y ago
    Even if it was about thousands of guests, you can buy more than one machine. The only question is, how much is the client willing to pay?

bane 12y ago

One of the interesting things about tech work is that it's almost all "brown M&Ms". It's amazing how important attention to detail is in this field and how quickly something will simply not work if the details aren't sweated. We see it time and again when things go into production where the "brown M&Ms" haven't been looked into and we end up with things like enterprise class websites that cost millions of dollars to produce crumbling under the load of a dozen simultaneous users.

HERRbPUNKT 12y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwHO2HnwfnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwHO2HnwfnA Interview with Eddy Van Halen, telling the story first hand. :)

breakall 12y ago
Cheers for the link! (But that is Diamond Dave telling the story!)

JunkDNA 12y ago

See previous HN discussion (360 points, 1,744 days ago) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860

supergeek133 12y ago

Instantly thought of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7kg5ZzDZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7kg5ZzDZo

circa 12y ago
me too! i'm surprised there isn't more mention of it.

emiliobumachar 12y ago

Engineer's version: Write-only memory " Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics management only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the 'erroneous' literature."

bttf 12y ago

This reminds me of some IRCd configurations, in which the server will not function properly unless you've thoroughly read through the conf file and found the single commented line which disables the entire process.

circa 12y ago

How is there no mention of Wayne's World in these comments?

yp_all 12y ago

Maybe a more interesting question is whether they ever exercised their right to terminate for brown M&M's. Is there any notion of material breach, major vs minor breach, etc. in "tour contracts"?

dvanduzer 12y ago

You can listen to Ira Glass and John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants talk about it in the prologue: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/386/fine-print?act=0 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/386/f... "there's 30 people the promoter's going to hire on our behalf ... but in only half of them did we require that they be sober"

harryb 12y ago

Interesting lesson about getting confidence by adding bugs. This was mentioned at a recent tech talk about Java Mutation Testing and PIT http://pitest.org/ http://pitest.org/ - video here http://vimeo.com/89083982 http://vimeo.com/89083982

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

YesThatTom2 12y ago

Once I buried a crazy request in a list of "you need to agree on these points or the book won't make the deadline" email to my publisher. My editor flat out agreed to them all. That's how I knew she was lying about having read them and I had to escalate to the production editor. It saved the book.

quotha 12y ago

You have to remember, it was the 80s!

salehenrahman 12y ago

I'm stealing this tactic when interviewing a QA guy, if I ever do end up looking to hire QA guys, that is. Me: "So here are a set of instructions are programmers were asked to follow. Can you see anything wrong" QA candidate: "Why yes. They forgot to remove the brown M&M's" Me: "You start tomorrow."

ctdonath 12y ago

I've read thru a bunch of other nit-picky riders. Strikes me that an under-discussed factor is that these high-value stars (contracts running into the $millions) are under extreme pressure, which is severely aggravated by so much change on a daily/hourly basis; something as "trivial" as wrong-temperature or brand drinks (I dislike Poland Spring water, and prefer Mt Dew in cans not bottles), uncomfortable seats, or even brown M&Ms (hey, everyone has a pet peeve) can be an unnerving "last straw". Having a few "perfect" arrangements everywhere gives them something to center on for mental stability. ETA: I realize this is a tangent. Methinks it's relevant.

salehenrahman 12y ago
I'm curious; have you read the linked article? Because unlike what you stated, the removal of brown M&Ms doesn't have much to do with comforting the high-value stars, but more like a "flag" that Van Halen looks for in order to determine whether or not the stage crew has read the contract properly. If they did read the contract, the crew would have removed the brown M&Ms. If not, then there is a high likelihood that they have not read the contract, and not only did they not remove then brown M&Ms, but they also probably omitted crucial elements in the set-up, possibly to a point it can be life threatening if omitted.

sgdread 12y ago

I've seen same kind of tests on one of the fire ranges. You have to read safety rules. One of the points was to put x mark on the 2nd page if you read that.