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.

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.

That English is a Germanic language is irrelevant here. The semantic development of the word to mean "poison" is something specific to German, as English retains the original meaning of the word.

I did not know you could do that and it never came up in any of the reading I did on script execution policy. Clearly, I didn't read close enough ;). That looks like it probably solves the problem.

In my post above, you'll note that I did say that signing is not a bad idea and necessary in certain contexts, so I think we agree there.

Fair points. I've also heard that competing products aren't much better. But that only means that MS has a chance to make something really good and blow away the competition. In that area, they failed.

Yep. And if you want OO or real programming, just use Perl or Python.

And for God's sake, the whole signing scripts business with Powershell is a tragedy. I can understand the value of being a little bit more tight with scripts that can do harmful things, but it should only matter for scripts that need to run as admin or do system management tasks. I shouldn't need to cryptographically sign a script to extract tags from music files, for example. The process to do the signing is itself unnecessarily complex.

You hit the nail on the head with many (but not all) MS products. I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. SQL Server itself is a pretty decent DB, certainly better than MySQL, but the tools for extending it are just awful. Sure, SSIS is graphical and you can throw together a pretty flowchart that will make managers and bean counters happy at the demo. Then you actually have to do something real with it and find that you can't, for example, deploy a complex package hierarchy to the SQL Server store without manually changing core behavior of your packages, or you can't import Excel files that have blank columns that start having numbers in them because Excel via SSIS insists on guessing the types based on the first 8 rows (only configurable via a registry setting!) and it may break in production without any warning. The list goes on and on. Here are a few more: http://ayende.com/wiki/I%20Hate%20SSIS.ashx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1.

I've found similar problems in other MS products. Visual Studio is still somewhat of an exception, but probably because it can still get out of your way and let you write code, and it's been around long enough that the good engineers of ages past kept it from turning to shit.