The timbre of any sound is due to harmonics -- frequencies higher than the fundamental. MP3 and other lossy compression schemes do indeed remove some of the quieter harmonics. However, if the harmonics are outside the hearing range, well, then you can't hear them.

However, there may be nonlinear effects which convert some of the ultrasound to lower frequencies. Also, when a frequency exceeds the Nyquist limit (half the sampling rate), it is aliased to a frequency within the sampling range. (Hence "anti-aliasing", which is simply filtering out too high frequencies to prevent this effect.)

Don't worry, I'm sure there will be plenty of wrecking going on.

The case of USA is somewhat problematic -- "united" and "states" are too generic, but so is "America". You could probably blame the Founding Fathers for the lack of imagination, but a lot of other countries have the same issue. It's just that the etymology is lost in history and/or translation.

In other words, UK = {GB, NI}. There's nothing wrong with metonymy (using a part when referring to the whole), but I think we can all agree that NI is a lot (as in "Sir *lot") is more appropriate for the country known for all the knights.

does not compute

This reminds me of my experiences of typing on a Nokia N800, which is too small for any human fingers, and you actually have to peck with a stylus. (Unless you use the mode where the virtual keyboard fills the entire screen.) However, I found that my touch-typing background goes a long way -- there is little hunting involved if you really know your QWERTY, so the pecking with the stylus is surprisingly natural. It is also surprisingly fast due to the small range of movements. I guess it also helps that the stylus does not block your view of the keyboard.

The real keyboard on the N900 isn't actually much better. Sure, knowing the layout helps there too, but it's still using two thumbs instead of all fingers, so it still feels like pecking. OTOH, there is a real touch response. I personally think it's dumb that phones have lost their buttons while people use them increasingly for typing instead of talking, but I don't see any perfect solution around.

As for alternative input methods, I fondly remember how one of my professors demoed Dasher from his research group around 2000, but it hasn't seen much popularity. I think one problem might be that it relies so much on statistics and prediction, thus limiting and guiding what you want to say a little too much (not that we don't have the same issue with Google and Facebook etc. these days).

Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.

life sentences for people who say cyber when they mean "IT related".

Which is funny if you use a language where "real" means float (i.e. a real number, as opposed to rational or integer). At least Fortran does this, and I think we can all agree that Fortran is one of the few languages fit for a Real hacker.

Of course we have a construct for this, for example two is "kaksi", time (of repetition) is "kerta", so double is "kaksinkertainen". But it's a bit awkward, as it is basically just saying "two times" instead of a shorter idiom.

In other words, Nokia N900 for this decade. Unfortunately, the only real upgrade I'm seeing is the Neo900, but I'm not exactly holding my breath.

I'm trying to picture 333000 times the collective human stupidity on Earth. But assuming that population scales with the surface area (R^2) instead of mass or volume (R^3) it wouldn't be quite as bad.

Same here in Finland, it's an endless battle. One common argument for the "illogical" way is to separate the "larger" and "2.3 times" -- it's larger than the original, and it's 2.3 times the original. Of course, if you want to say "2.3 times the original" then you don't need the extra "larger" qualifier.

My usual argument for the logical way is to ask "what about 50% more". It's obviously not half of the original. The illogicians are quick to point out that the meaning changes when you go below 100%.

For an even worse abuse of linguistic logic, we have a colloquialism (not too common, fortunately) of saying "half more" when meaning "double the original". There is of course some "logic" when considering the inverse number, but now we have three different ways to intepret the same thing >.<

In fact, the case of "double" is interesting in that there is no ambiguity, it's always interpreted as "two times the original". However, Finnish doesn't have a direct native equivalent of "double", so we even get the confusion of someone saying "two times larger" when meaning "two times as large". Fortunately, we do have a loan of "double" ("tupla, tuplasti"), but it hasn't quite replaced the "two times" expressions.

Even better, Natalie Portman. With hot grits.

I wonder how much marketing jargon has contributed to these misunderstandings. Using terms such as "bandwidth" and "broadband" when referring to data rate will not make information theory any easier.