That's French you're describing there.
At least that's how it seemed to me in school. English on the other hand was a lot easier.
I don't think you can generalize that way and label certain languages easy or hard to learn, it probably depends on how your native language has influenced your brain structure for languages, on the circumstances in which you try to learn another language (I didn't really get along with my French teacher, I don't think that helped) and many other things.

(my native language is German)

They already do sub-contract manufacturers for their hardware. The XBox360 is - like Apples products - manufactured by Foxconn (at least according to wikipedia), so that wouldn't be a huge leap.

... and failed spectacularly?
And seeing how the "make the OS, leave making the phone (mostly) to others" business model seems to be working rather well for Google, I don't see, why it shouldn't for Microsoft.

I'm not following that analogy. I think AVRStudio is just fine as far as IDEs for microcontrollers go.

even though it's called iTex, i isn't useful as a version numbering scheme... \sqrt{2} maybe?

oh great, just what everyone was waiting for.

...in fact, as far as I'm concerned it's about time that someone legislated how companies I have to deal with protect my personal information.
This "Written Information Security Plan"-Thing (yes, I read TFA) sounds like an unnecessary and useless PITA though...

Seconded. I have one of those and it runs a svn-OpenWRT very nicely. HOWEVER, if you live in Europe or other places where radar avoidance is mandated, you can't yet use the 5GHz Band (at least not legally), because Ath9k doesn't do DFS. But it's supposed to be high on the maintainers TODO-list

sorry for double posting, but something just occurred to me: the ratio automatic to manual transmissions is probably just about inverse over here compared to the US. So if it's true that putting it in neutral won't work on the automatic gearboxes, putting it in neutral on a manual definitely works. With that in mind the problem is not quite as critical over here.

uh, I don't know about other countries, but in Germany Toyota has a recall going for the same reason.
I think the difference is merely that our media, while insane as well, doesn't freak out quite like the media in the US. "Oh god, we're all going to die because of a problem that occurred 35 times in a vehicle pool of several millions. Oh, and buy American"

well... to be completely honest: the N900 isn't really for the "normal consumer", is it? At least not yet. But I have two friends who own one and they run pretty much everything on there. From Pidgin to Duke Nukem 3D. And the screen is 800x480, so at least in respect to window dimensions you wouldn't have to tailor that much.

uh, what? Maemo is a Debian-based Linux. There is no sandbox runtime or anything, it's pretty much a standard Linux. Which means you can install a lot of the applications you could install on any generic Linux box. So I highly doubt that there are more apps for Android than there are for Maemo.