I keep seeing these quotes from Linux fanbois about those difficult and counter-intuitive wizards on Windows, but I've never encountered any issue of significance when installing drivers on Windows, and most stuff really does work out of the box (also generally true on modern Ubuntu and halfway modern hardware, but wasn't true even a few years ago). I mean, I'm sure there are some pieces of hardware that misbehave or create issues on any OS, but I really have a tough time believing clicking next through wizards for a few minutes or maybe downloading a special patch or version is in any way harder than grabbing Git versions of drivers and compiling them yourself, or having to remember the Magic SysRq key sequences to reboot when that last modprobe fucked up your video card.

Chrome is becoming a bloated piece of shit too. It used to start up quickly and load pages quickly. That's going out the window in my experience. They are also starting to have bugs that never resolve, or take a long time to resolve. One that's been bothering me recently is that YouTube videos playing in other tabs skip when you do pretty much anything in another tab. It's 2013 and it can't play sound properly under a modicum of load. Ridiculous.

That is incorrect. It has nothing to do with "would", but rather an alternative form of "will" which was "wol", quite common in Middle English (Chaucer uses it a lot).

The ECMWF model is fairly beefy. It's almost American in how many extra layers and grid details it has (bigger is better!). It runs on good hardware and has good data assimilation. It still screws up with regularity, but it's not as bad as the American models. It's not clear that the methodology is significantly different, though. The model uses the same kind framework as the American and other global models. That is, it's not built spectacularly differently, or in a way that signifies that a different underlying philosophy was used.

Uhh, the site linked is not in any way an AGW denialist site, and the article actually refutes a standard claim from the deniers that there was some global cooling craze in the 70s.

I've never read any linguistics book that says anything other than what I wrote above. They all explicitly mention that High German is called such because it came from the higher terrain of Germany.

There's no relevant to what you've said about there being different varieties of low German. That was never in dispute and is not, in fact, in dispute. I even mentioned it in my post.

Don't let the current distribution of dialects fool you. Historically, places like Muenster would have been solidly low German. Once East Central German became the prestige dialect, it spread and supplanted the other dialects, even in the north. The same thing happened in France, where historically, what we now call French was in fact a minority language from the areas around Paris.

High and low refer to terrain and not prestige. Low German languages were spoken in the lowlands along the North Sea coast, and high German languages were spoken much further inland. High German is traditionally further split into central and upper dialect groups, with the upper groups being in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, and central being in between those places and the lowlands. It should be noted that low German languages include Dutch and also English, which derives from an amalgam of Saxon and some other low German dialects (dialects at the time, though everything is now separate languages). English and Dutch are certain prestige languages, but still low Germanic.

Platt Deutsch == Low German. I've never seen any indication that these are anything other than synonyms. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German

I was using "dialect" here to refer to different varieties of continental west Germanic (that is, everything except Danish, which is north Germanic). I should have used the word "language" as that was my intent. Sorry for the confusion.

That's only if you intentionally pronounce each syllable fully (with knowledge of the spelling -- which you have because you are literate). In normal speech, all vowels except for the stressed one (the one before the 'f') are reduced to schwas. The words could be written "puh-SIFF-uhk" and "spuh-SIFF-uhk". Note that there is sometimes variety in the nature of the schwas, but there is very slim evidence that they are different within, say, a word. If there are differences, they are between dialects. If you put your speech into a program like Praat, you would not likely see evidence of the schwas being pronounced differently.

English accents are fairly minimally different from one another. English in the US has had a short history. In India, these languages are mutually unintelligible and some of them aren't even from the same language families as the other (Tamil, for example, is completely unrelated to Hindi -- it's like Spanish and Basque).

Even if that's true (which some other commenters have said is not), it's still exactly the same as the English example given by the parent (orzetto). You said "those things are symbolically different and used in different contexts" -- are windows and mirrors not used in different contexts? And if you found a language that distinguished regularly different types of windows, would you then count English as deficient for generally just using one word in that same context?

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.