How would that apply to 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. generations of Asians?

You read that whole article and *that* is the only thing you came with? I think that speaks more about you than the wikipedia or AAVE.

To me, "specific" and "pacific" sound very similar. The vowels and all the consonants except for the initial 's' in "specific" are the same.

It sounds like they are running their words together because you aren't familiar with the accent/dialect/language. People say that about any speech they can't readily understand. I've heard Americans complain about Spanish (and even German) in the exact same way.

Dropping the "s" off "specific" does not mean the accent is an entirely different language. Do the people in Germany who say "is'" instead of "ist" speak a different language just because of that? No.

It's true that there are many vowel changes, but it's not usually more different than, say, the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_cities_vowel_shift), but I'd imagine you're more likely to have heard people speak with that accent than with the backwoods southern one, due to greater media presence of speakers of the former.

Regarding old northerners in Germany, they *do* truly speak a different language: low German, which is more closely related to English and Dutch than standard High German. The big difference between low and high German dialects is the presence or lack of the second High German consonant shift. Low German dialects (using Dutch as an example) will have "ik", "maken", "appel", "hopen", "tidj", etc., while High German has "ich", "machen", "apfel", "hoffen", "zeit", etc. Here's the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift. As you might imagine, this is a much bigger difference than accents in the US. As a native of the US, I've never been completely unable to understand someone's accent, though I can, of course, have some initial difficulty.

It is actually a dialect, called AAVE (African American Vernacular English). It's still fairly similar to standard American, but it has some additional verb forms and new or different vocabulary. See the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAVE

But even the thickest of southern accents are still English, with pretty the same grammar and vocabulary, and even a lot of pronunciation in common ("well" and "whale" are close, but not the same, however, "well" and "wohl" [the German equivalent] are quite differently pronounced and also have somewhat divergent meanings). What people often fail to understand about Chinese dialects is that they are actually separate languages, and usually only called dialects because of the apparent cultural and political unity of China. As the saying goes: "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

It seems that you've never seen a headline before.

This and the all-powerful teachers' union myth need to die, but doubtless will become even more prevalent as time wears on as part of the right's war on collaborative, socially-beneficial, republican institutions, in favor of greed-based, competitive and antagonistic institutions.

You are free to leave the country if you don't want to be stolen from. Some of us want to pool resources and invest in society, and accept that any functioning society means compromise, rather than absolute freedom (which is neither absolute, nor freedom) for its own worthless sake.

That's true of any measurement, be it student performance, work performance, athletic performance. The people who just care about winning will focus on learning just enough to pass the test. Those who actually care will pass the test and be well-educated, well-rounded people. People in both groups will at least have learned *something* along the way, which is better than just giving up altogether.

I spent most of the time I was reading the summary trying to come up with some really clever/sarcastic/funny comment (Electrons spin faster! -- um, no that's lame. I got it, if you spin it backwards, it just says "Paul is dead" in a chipmunk voice.)

But then I got to this:

That is so indescribably cool I just had to let that stand on its own. There is so much physics wrapped up in this one experiment.
I'll just leave it at an obligatory XKCD:
Science, it works bitches.

... the group of MBAs ...

  - Flop sweating their asses of
  - Furiously searching their email for that ass-covering memo where the IT guy said "Yeah, this should work"
  - Wondering if there is enough coke on earth to get them through the rest of the day

For these guys, there are only two universal truths:
    1) This is absolutely, positively, 100% the IT guy's fault
    2) He can not fix this without the IT guy.
The impotent rage would be palpable.

Reductionists might say that intelligence is an illusion, but they'd say that everything else outside of quantum fields and pure math is an illusion too. If you step away from the absurd world of the reductionist, you will find that atheists aren't saying that it's all an illusion. It's quite obviously not. Things are going on in the brain, quite a lot of them. The atheist would say that instead of copping out with some sort of soul-based black box, that the answer lies in the emergent behavior of a complex web of interacting neurons and other cells.

I was only picking that one part of your post, since I'm linguistically minded. I don't disagree with any of what you say and it's saddened me that Google has squandered so many great opportunities.

I think the phrase "make a good idea great" means to implement it effectively and come up with closely related good ideas so that the net result of the original good idea is beyond what a baseline, minimal implementation would effect.