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Also, if terrorism is their job, does that mean there are classified ads for terrorist employment in Middle Eastern newspapers? Do they have their own union? What kind of rates do they pay? Do they get paternity leave?

Cut government subsidies to the terrorism industry! Maybe they'll go on strike.

I believe a person should be smart enough to know what is propaganda and what is not.

And if they don't, for example because they're schoolchildren, screw them! Let them eat lies! Maybe they'll find out when they're older, and either go into denial about it or end up with a hostile stance to the society they grew up in. That's their problem.

Seriously, this isn't like telling children there's an Easter Bunny or something. This is the important stuff. When you're about five years old, the Easter Bunny may be pretty important to you, but it's rare that anybody isn't able to deal with the fact that it doesn't exist when they grow up. And a person for whom this information leads to a severe crisis of faith would have to have a lot more wrong with them. This, however, is serious real-life stuff. And you should start giving children the truth as well as you know it, as early as you can - without scarring the minds of seven-year-olds by telling them in graphic detail about the horrors of war or NS concentration camps, of course, but don't, e.g., turn $historical_figure into another Santa Claus-like creature of pure good or tell them that $country has only ever done (good|bad). Or if you do something of the sort, stop doing it as soon as possible. People can look back at when they believed in the Tooth Fairy and smile. Disillusionment with reality is much harsher, especially if it's something part of your Pride in the Glorious Fatherland is built on.

An addition:

I didn't criticize Moore for creating a biased documentary, but for this statement: "if you just give the people the truth ... the Americans will be saved", when it is clearly not what he did.

How many textbooks have you read that contained a statement to the effect of "Oh yeah, and a lot of this isn't really true, or not completely. We made some stuff up and left some more out to make you feel good about your homeland's history. Sorry."? I don't think I've ever seen anything of the sort, and I doubt you have. And don't ask back whether textbooks generally include the phrase "this is all 100% TRUE!!" - the authors know their work is mostly going to be presented as fact, or at any rate it's their intention.

It's interesting what you can learn by talking to old people, people who were actually around then. For example, the house in Lübeck where my grandmother lived was destroyed in a bombing raid. When it was over, the family grand piano was somewhere on the pile of rubble, miraculously non-smashed. She went up to it and tried to play the freaking national anthem, the silly girl. It didn't work because the piano was full of dust. The more she learned in the war and subsequently about what can happen to people (and what exactly happened with that war), the more that kind of absurdity was driven out of her, she says.

But this can work (sort of) the other way around as well. The mother-in-law of the owner of this house (I've rented a small room in somebody's basement, it's nice and cheap) comes from an area that is now part of Poland, and I'm sure there are plenty of people with similar histories. As far as I can understand: after the war, she and many other women in the area worked on a farm under various Polish people, who were very angry with Germans in general. This led to mistreatment of the workers, many of whom, like this woman, didn't (and don't) really understand what was going on. Ordinary people who didn't pay enough attention to politics, who'd seen their sons and so on forced to march off to war and whatnot, and who, now that the war was over, were spat on as well. They thought they'd never done anything wrong, it's always just them people up there in the guvmint keeping the little man down, oh, what a world, what a world, oh my. (This view was then amplified by living in the GDR through all its life.) And on the other side you had people who'd been on the receiving end of the Nazis' offensive war. I don't think there's any need to clarify why they'd be resentful - but some of them bore uniform hatred towards the Germans, that swarm of locusts that had brought so much ruin, and the ones who had to bear that had, again, mostly no idea they'd done anything wrong at all by not voting for parties and politicians that weren't insane, or not speaking out when things were done that were clearly not right, or by profiting from the initial successes of the war.
But what I was going to say is: I was talking to her this winter (or rather, she was talking at me, as some elderly people tend to do - I'm not heartless enough to just walk away), before the EU expansion, and she was afraid of it because of a prejudice about Poles which developed later, and which was exceptionally easily accepted and furthered by people like her because of the unpleasant experiences of her youth. She basically thought that now the borders would be opened, the Poles would come streaming through and steal, steal, steal.

It is so, but I don't think it is wrong. It has a good cause - raise and educate children on values of patriotism and national pride.

Going even further off-topic, I'm not sure if you're not just trolling here, but I very strongly disagree that this is a good cause. These are "values" that IMO should much rather be eliminated than elevated to the ultimate virtue (though I'm not saying you're advocating this extreme either).

This is strongly linked to what I said above, of course. National pride leads to national resentment when that pride is harmed, and national resentment tends to lead to actions (of any kind) harming the national pride of the group responsible for the previous instance of pride-harming, and it can go on like this for a long time if people don't get over their patriotism.

Start with the HTML 4.01 spec. The first sections have some general information that will help you understand how it all works. It's not rocket surgery, honestly, though you might run into some problems with IE's generally awful and broken implementation of various standards, which you may unfortunately have to work around if you wish to accommodate those poor souls who still use it (they are, regrettably, the majority).

Also, read (and bookmark) the HTML and CSS specs at w3.org. IMO you're not really qualified to do anything public at all with HTML until you're able to do it manually with a pure text editor without syntax highlighting and autocomplete, e.g. Notepad. I'm not saying everybody should actually do that, but I really think you should be able to. There's far too much shoddy workmanship tormenting the web, and there's no good reason for it at all.

Whoops! Sorry for not judging for too long - Haddas wins. IMO, his was the only entry that really evoked any kind of "future" feeling, I'm sorry to say.

I make judgements on people based on their race.

What kind of judgments, exactly?

Let me knock down a strawman or two.

4. Don't want non-European immigration.  This is racist.  But it's not "hate", and not very extreme...

Oh, yes it is. Refusing to let people immigrate based on to what race you consider them to belong is saying "people of this race are inferior, they're unfit to live in my country". It also massively alienates other people of this category already living there - after all, if you don't want to let them in, nobody can guarantee that you wouldn't try throwing them out as well.

And imagine if you were to try to enforce racial segregation. Let's assume for the moment that you'd be trying to do this without the appearance of hate or considering members of one race inherently less valuable (in toto) than those of another; and for the sake of simplicity I'll pretend sharply separating people into races is possible, and that there are only two of these. How could you do that?

Take any arbitrarily chosen "good part of town" where people would want to live. Most likely, there will be both white and black (the terms "Caucasian" and "African American", quite apart from the inapplicability of the latter outside the US, seem rather silly to me - not only can I think of no good reason why they should be considered any less offensive, but they also take longer to type/write/say and add a ridiculous geographic component) families living there (ignoring the possibility of mixed-race marriages). If you want to separate the races, one of them will have to move.

But which group will you evict? Either way, many of them will have lived there for quite a while, and will be attached to their homes. Do you decide by majority? That would be hardly fair: after all, it's a fact that there are more white people in the US than black. You'd end up throwing a huge lot of black people out of the pleasant spaces - they mostly wouldn't be able to move to another because you would not have enough good "black sectors".

Since you don't hate and therefore can't possibly think the ever so noble goal of racial purity would justify the amount of suffering caused by deporting vast numbers of people to poor and/or otherwise unpleasant places, you wouldn't want that. But similar problems would arise with any way of choosing. Eventually you'd end up having to look at a big list of communities and try to figure out which ones to give to which race, and then making nearly everybody move.

In other words, it would be stupid. All that effort and all the cost of moving so many people and their possessions around for a cause with absolutely no rational justification behind it; if there's anything approaching one, this clearly outweighs it.

Now, about affirmative action - I don't pretend I know a lot about exactly who does what in that respect, but generally I think treating people better because of their race is wrong.
However, and this is a big however, if a group is regularly treated unfairly, e.g. passed over because of prejudices towards their race, harming their changes of finding a job, getting research grants, and so on, then that certainly justifies helping them in some way. Affirmative action is one of the possibilities, as are anti-discrimination laws. I'm by no means claiming that what of this sort there is in the world is perfect, nor in many of the cases even very good at all, but I certainly don't agree with people complaining about such measures as long as they're still necessary.

Serious point about Hitler jokes: I think there's nothing at all wrong with them. I'm guessing what those of you who disagree think is that it's disrespectful of the Nazi regime's victims. IMO it isn't at all (Unless it is, of course. Depends on the exact joke and its exact context.) - I don't see how making fun of him would be. Certainly you can't mean that Hitler ought to be respected.

The thing about the man is that he was a complete clown. Nobody really has to do anything much to make him funny. The whole fear and awe comes from the fact that for a number of reasons, a lot of them luck, he had the power to enforce his ridiculous ideas. The whole thing would be quite comedic if it hadn't resulted in millions of unpleasant deaths.

The actor Serdar Somuncu toured Europe for a few years reading from Mein Kampf. I never had an opportunity to see him (or if I did, I missed it), but I've heard recordings. It's quite fascinating, as well as amusing - if you can find anything, be sure to listen. There's a CD available of one such reading in Germany; unfortunately I can't find any evidence of any English language recordings existing, but I know he's read in English as well.

Not true at all, some of the greatest discoverys have been attributed to accident, such as gravity

No. About the Law of Universal Gravitation, which I assume is what you mean (gravity itself is hardly a great discovery - "Wow, things FALL!!!11"): whatever actually happened with that apple - if there's anything to the story at all, it merely gave Newton the general idea. To work such an idea out in detail, to verify its plausibility, is quite a different matter - one that does in fact require a great deal of research, experimentation, and all that sort of delicious tomfoolery. Don't forget that Newton was among the very first to uncover some quite fundamental insights of physics and mathematics that seem obvious to us today - many of what we consider the basics simply weren't available then. This kind of thing was hard work. It certainly wasn't "An apple fell on my head! It all makes sense now! F = Gm1m2/r^2!"

It's the same with every other major discovery or invention. What about the steam engine? Maybe Denis Papin thought of it fairly soon while working on his pressure cooker, but it took many other people and several years, if not decades, before it became really workable.

By the way, do you see something that all these great inventors and whatnot had in common? They generally all tended to know their field fairly well. You can't seriously consider the way things work if you don't know the way other more fundamental things do. How can you understand what a lumberjack does if you've never heard of trees? How can you build a better mousetrap if you don't know anything about mice? And how can you seriously speculate about the way our senses work if you've done no research about their neurological basis?

On the Americanisation front, do you remember FilmFour's 'The Madness of King George'? The name was changed from 'The Madness of King George III' in case American audiences thought it was part of a trilogy.

Whoops! Not true.

I'm 99% certain I've read something either there or on The Straight Dope about what SSH mentioned, too (namely that it is also mostly incorrect; IIRC the origin of the idea was that the pronounciation of English in some parts of the US was more similar to that of the first English colonists than that of any British dialect today, or something of the sort) - but I can't find it at the moment. Some googling yields only more confusion both about the subject and about Bill Bryson's knowledge of it, so I can't really say more now.

The theme this week is:

Music... of THE FUTURE!!

Not just the future, mind. I'm talking about THE FUTURE!! as in, for example, the year 2000 as seen from the first half of the 20th century. Flying cars! Flying ships! Heck, flying cities, while we're at it! Giant Tesla coils everywhere, just for the hell of it! Huge underground cities inhabited by oppressed, disgruntled workers who have to flee from a flood because some jerk of an android destroyed the heart machine! I'm sure you know the kind of vision I'm referring to. Or, perhaps, Jules Verne novels. Or you might be able to dig up similar modes of thinking from even earlier days. Basically, anything older than, say, Star Wars.

Make music that fits in with such themes - but please make a note of what exactly the theme you had in mind is, particularly if it's something interesting that is often overlooked.

Yay! Thanks. I'll be posting the new one in an hour or so, since I'm going to leave over the weekend.

I'm almost sure I've played that game, Dart, but I can't for the life of me remember the name.

Mine was Utopia.

m0ds: Mathematica and Maple, currently the most popular computer algebra systems, have both been around since the 1980s... and many other systems have been around for as least as long. (for example, GNU Maxima is based on Macsyma, development on which began in 1967)
Of course, it's questionable whether these can be considered "educational software". They're widely used by students in fields connected with mathematics (math itself, physics, IT...), but more as a tool than as a means of education.

edit: Also, by "there wasn't any", you probably mean your school didn't have it, or didn't offer it to pupils. I can't claim I know more about that than you do.

Bio Menace.

Sorry, Geoffkhan, but I have to tell you you've failed the audio engineering exam.

Compression and clipping differ in a quite different way than you describe. Clipping basically takes the signal's waveform and cuts off the bits that go outside a certain range. Compression is a very different beast. Here is a decent explanation, with images and so on. Better than I could do in this post.
Your idea of gating is also incorrect. Gating means making the quiet sounds quieter, not louder, giving a "choppy" sound in extreme cases.

I'm listening a lot to:

Renaldo and the Loaf - Songs for Swinging Larvae
Wrexsoul - Accelerating to the Sun
Venetian Snares - Find Candace
Bohren & der Club of Gore - Midnight Radio
Melt Banana - Cell-Scape
Moloko - Do you like my tight sweater?
Bogdan Raczynski - Samurai Math Beats

...among others.

I think that's Mount Rainier, from Zak McKracken.

Nobody has any idea what mine is?

What, so they blow themselves up just to be jerks? Or because they think it's fun?

You're not getting the point. It's not that we think some obscure sura tells them "oh by the way, start suicide bombing in 1300 years or so" and that every true Muslim should commend them for doing it, it's that they believe it is right. They think it's their duty, they think they're doing God's work. What you (or anybody else) think their ideals should be according to the Qur'an etc. doesn't matter at all to them.

It's a bit more tricky with the people further behind, but I think that they too are mostly in it because of their insane beliefs.

...but saying that Bush and his administration are culpable for the actions of a sick group of soldiers and perhaps their immediate leaders is just silly.

No, it isn't. Let's assume for a moment that some low-end meatheads having fun is really all there is to this. Question: how come these people were running a prison? They were completely unprepared for this kind of task. There's more to prison guarding than shooting people if they try to get out. So why the hell were they there?
They were there because further up the line nobody was paying attention to who was doing what. That's a very, very grave failure. Note that hardly anything happened until the pictures reached the public. And it's not as though nobody knew about it.

And what do you make of the evidence that there's rather more to it? It isn't just aforesaid meatheads trying to save themselves by pushing some of the blame further up the chain of command. Heard the phrase "special access program" recently? The idea that this is one of these gone out of control is plausible enough even for those few of us who don't wear tinfoil hats.

The Arab Shiites and Sunni Kurds, who make up 80% of Iraq's population, were not appalled by this behavior in the prison because Hussein had done far worse before.

Yes. Everybody in Iraq is saying "Hey, these people are torturers too, but they're not quite as bad as the ones before them. GO USA!!"

Plus, they actually have met other U.S. soldiers and they know that the soldiers are not sexual deviants, or rapists like most of Saddam's soldiers.

The ones being taken into the new army the US are setting up, you mean?

[Saddam was bad! It's good that he's gone!]

If you honestly believe any of us think Saddam wasn't a Very Bad Person(tm), you might want to just stop talking.

So these men in the prison are not "true" believers of the faith, no matter how much they claim to be. They are extremists.

All of them? And certainly? Are you sure? And would that excuse anything? Considering the way the US have been behaving over there, I wouldn't be so quick to accept their judgment of who is or might be a Horrible Extremist as gospel.