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.

Most engineers follow UDP protocol. Spewing a bunch of packets into the ether. In light traffic, this isn't a big problem. Plenty of bandwidth and sufficiently capable endpoints that they can reconstruct missing packets, or at least identify when they're missing something. However as traffic increases, packet loss can reach intolerable levels and communication breaks down entirely. If the engineer doesn't adjust to the network load, they can have an adverse effect on the entire network performance. In extreme cases the network admin (your boss) may need to remove the offending device from the network altogether.

They'd be better served to use TCP. Establish a connection. Send information in well defined packets. Confirm receipt. Re-transmit if necessary. Yes, it's slower and more overhead, but reliable information transfer is a must in a robust and useful network.

Oh, and always ACK with a smile :)

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).

Ditto, and mine is convinced it is crossing the Alps, given where my wife usually sets the temp.

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.

Just mention in the ToC that this is a beta service and any claims of warranty or suitability for a given purpose, blah, blah, blah. Then just offer to release a patch once the exception can be reproduced and a suitable bug report has been filed.

I would expect they follow the model many other open source companies have done (deviations from this would probably raise at least one of my eyebrows): services and support.

I've run CM on most of my Android devices at some point. I stay with the vanilla carrier OS for a bit, but it inevitably starts to annoy me, and generally ceases to get updated after a year or two.
The dev community has done a terrific job of making it easy to root and install CM on a wide variety of phones, but everything still comes with massive "if you brick your phone, don't come cry to us" disclaimers all over it. This limits the user base to people that are comfortable hacking around on a command line and are okay with a small chance of owning a $200+ paper weight. Offering support contracts such that the average person doesn't have to dig around for hours on xdadev and cm forums trying to find information when they run into problems would expand their potential user base and be a welcome tool even for us hacker types. I know I've spent way too long trying to get S-off on my HTC One X. None of the wikis or forum posts have offered anything that helps resolve my specific issue. I'd gladly spend a bit of money to have a dedicated support person help debug it with me. Somebody who understands how the exploit works in detail and knows what and where to check to figure out why my phone in particular isn't working. I'm confident I'll eventually figure it out, but it's taking a lot more time than I'd rather spend on it.

They also currently provide premium services like an app that enables OTA updates to any CM rom, automated backup utilities for recovery, themes, launcher apps, etc. There's a lot of potential here for offering paid services that take advantage of your additional capabilities having an open phone.

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?