OK guys - this subject is a favorite of mine because I've always been fascinated by history and the Mayans are a wiked cool society (fun as hell to study!)
Fact: The Mayan Calender ends on December 21, 20012.
Fact: the mayans were obsessed with time and calenders (thay actually had 14 major calenders they used for daily living)
Fact: the main calender (and cause of all of this hoppla) is more astronomically accurate than our own.
Fact: the Mayn calender predicted the year and month of the end of their own empire (weird but true). the story was of the white bearded God that would come and destroy them. In that exact month and year, the Spaniards arrived. this little tidbit is supposed to "prove" the validfity of the end of the world
Fact: NOWHERE in traditrional Mayan beliefs does it state thet the ACTUAL WORLD will end. That new age crap is from a guy and his book called "The Mayan Factor". He is a fraud and a charlatain and is disavowed by every Mayan Shaman on the planet. The actual belief is that the world will forever be altered - signifigantly - by the events leading up to and caused by the astrological alignment of the solar system on Decmber 21, 2012 at approximately 10:10 at whatever they now call the international date line (didn't they recently change the name? I can't remember)
Fact: In late December, the earth will be directly between the sun and the center of our galaxy
Fact: THere is a small black holw at the center of our galaxy- the Mayans knew this, we figured it out a few years ago.
Fact: The Mayan culture did NOT disappear. It was destroyed, but because they believed in their calender, Mayan Shaman had left the cities several months before the Spanairds arrived with more than 17 Codecise (their version of writting) and hid in caves and other innacessible places until they slowly reintegrated thamselves into other villages and such. We westerners have relied on one main historical source for our information on the Maya for several hundred years - a book written by a Spaniard. Meahwhile, outside of the book, the Mayan teachings survived. I beleive we now have 13 codices validated as authentic besides the one that was claimed to be the last by the spaniard and his book.
Fact - there are several prophecies of doom centered around December 2012 - that's why it's getting such great press. Some quack even "decoded" the I-ching and showed that it represented a calender of soprts that ends in December 20012.
Now then - I'm not a believer, but I do love the hype! I find it more fun than a good movie.
In fact, I highly recomment the rather hystrerical (pun intended) book "Apocaltpse 2012" by Lawrence E Joseph. Several times in Barnes and Noble I actually burst out laughing at sections - and not always at the parts he intended to be funny...
http://www.apocalypse2012.com/book/
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There was certainly quite a bit of hype surrouding the situation but I think many reasons why everything went well was because a lot of companies did testing of their systems and hired folks that worked their butt off trying to close holes in code. 
