By "damaging" I mean -- learning something that will be hard to unlearn. Religious themes are present in many many places, fairytales, poems for small children, etc. I don't want to censor them because that would make my children's life poorer. It's easy to balance the violence from fairytales (cutting through wolve's insides?) but when it comes to religion - there's not enough counterbalance in my opinion. There are no "Scientific fairytales for small children" that I've heard of (I'm sometimes thinking of writing such thing but am not good enough in writing; I would love to see people that have "light pens" like Dawkins and specialists from other fields writing a book of short "fairytales" that would have some kind of scientific background; think of Lem's "robot fairytales" kind). Such book would try to "smuggle" a bit of scientific consiousness at a pretext of a fun story -- exactly how religion puts its roots in young minds.

But maybe I'm overthinking stuff. Both me and my wife are atheists and it will be different with my kids than it was with me. I grew up among believers and used to strongly believe in god, too. I never suffered too much because of it or because I stopped believing at one point, but from today's perspective I can see that this religious belief did took away some of things from my youth. I'd love to spare my daughter from this but maybe I cannot or it will Just Work :-)

...not nuclear bombs, because they seem to stabilize this stupid world even if we wouldn't want to admit it.

Are most of your family and your kids' school teachers atheists, too? I don't think so, but if they do -- I envy you. I don't have really strong believers among my friends, perhaps because most of them I know from college. But there are grandmas and there will be teachers that speak of gods as they are real. One of my kid's grandmas even takes her to church when she's with her for a few days. If I escalate it, I think she'll just stop telling me about this. And I'm not going to prevent grandmas "access" to my daughter over religion. I'd love to give my daughter a right perspective on religion, but you know, you won't find that many books on what is psychologically "approved" way to talk to little children about that. My daughter's just 2, she still thinks that adults are always right, etc. -- I'd love to get some insight on what damage can talking about religion to kids so young make.

Do You sometimes regret becoming a kind of an "atheist" role model? Even looking through these Slashdot questions, most of them are about religion, not Your scientific fields...

I cannot stop religion-related things from coming to my children ears. Even though they are not baptised, some teachers, grandmothers, etc. _will_ talk about god and will do so without appropriate distance to the matter. I do not want to force my kids to "believe" in science or evolution, but I would love to balance what they will learn about god with what _I_ and my wife consider truth and I would love my kids to respect science and think critically. Do You have any insights about raising children to be like that?

Also, You have written in God Delusion that if just one person is "cured" of religious faith (I don't remember the exact phrasing), You will consider the book successful. Well, Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype were more eye-opening for me, but I'd like to thank You for all of them :-) They surely cured me.

So? I haven't attributed it to Bill Gates, the quote as I wrote it functions as a meme and it applies well as a comment to EU idea. Get some sense of humour.

640kB should be enough for anybody.

Look at how confident Firefox developers are!

There is no absolute freedom, if someone's freedom to shoot planes high power lasers collides with my freedom to safely do air travel, I say -- fuck THEIR freedom.

So what. If the range is 2-5 meters and bandwidth is in Gbps, it has a potential to remove the cable clutter from my desk, allows me to connect my laptop to my TV just by sitting in front of it and I don't have to worry too much that my neighbours will do man-in-the-middle.

over 50% of US electrical production is from coal it's not like an electrical vehicle produces zero CO2

Then why don't we decrease efficiency loss of electricity production by burning coal in vehicles directly? ;-)

If noise prevents you from working and you are unable to get used to it -- move to a quiter environment. I stopped noticing church bells, police sirens, etc. at all after 2 or 3 months of living where I live now. That's a nice thing about human mind -- it adapts to constant stimuli levels.

$ ls -lAh /usr/bin/disper
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1,3K pa 19 2011 /usr/bin/disper

Is 1,3K app good enough for you? Disper is also great when configured for Meta+Fn keys in KDE, I have a simple way of switching display modes almost as good as the one on Windows 7.

I went Debian->Ubuntu Server on my servers.

Last time I checked, there were more than 1 000 000 000 Chinese people. 5% of it is still 50 million people, they would need 130% market share in my country to have so many users ;-)