Bush may have hid the facts. But whether or not he did, Bill Gates' opinion was apparently hard-coded into notepad when he developed Windows XP.
The following two screenshots are from my own computer showing what happens when you perform the steps that follow those screenshots.
The steps to perform this feat are simple:
1. Create a new text file (right click on the desktop, go to New -> Text Document)
2. Open the file (with notepad, but that's so obvious I shouldn't have mentioned it)
3. Type the text "%name% hid the facts" (in this case, type in "Bush hid the facts")
4. Save the file
5. Close Notepad
6. Open the file again (with notepad like before)
7. Enjoy knowing that your computer has been programmed to keep you from thinking that "Bush hid the facts", but that by doing this Gates has insured that we all suspect Bush hid the facts.
The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it's forced to guess.
Here's the file "Hello" in various encodings:
48 65 6C 6C 6F
This is the traditional ANSI encoding.
48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F 00
This is the Unicode (little-endian) encoding with no BOM.
FF FE 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F 00
This is the Unicode (little-endian) encoding with BOM. The BOM (FF FE) serves two purposes: First, it tags the file as a Unicode document, and second, the order in which the two bytes appear indicate that the file is little-endian.
00 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F
This is the Unicode (big-endian) encoding with no BOM. Notepad does not support this encoding.
FE FF 00 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F
This is the Unicode (big-endian) encoding with BOM. Notice that this BOM is in the opposite order from the little-endian BOM.
EF BB BF 48 65 6C 6C 6F
This is UTF-8 encoding. The first three bytes are the UTF-8 encoding of the BOM.
2B 2F 76 38 2D 48 65 6C 6C 6F
This is UTF-7 encoding. The first five bytes are the UTF-7 encoding of the BOM. Notepad doesn't support this encoding.
Notice that the UTF7 BOM encoding is just the ASCII string "+/v8-", which is difficult to distinguish from just a regular file that happens to begin with those five characters (as odd as they may be).
The encodings that do not have special prefixes and which are still supported by Notepad are the traditional ANSI encoding (i.e., "plain ASCII") and the Unicode (little-endian) encoding with no BOM. When faced with a file that lacks a special prefix, Notepad is forced to guess which of those two encodings the file actually uses. The function that does this work is IsTextUnicode, which studies a chunk of bytes and does some statistical analysis to come up with a guess.
And as the documentation notes, "Absolute certainty is not guaranteed." Short strings are most likely to be misdetected.
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