I was just pointing out that you could not fully understand the differences between the types of lighting devices. For example, you mentioned halogens - but they're not the same as fluorescents,
I said halogens are an evolution of incandescent light bulbs. If they're not they're not, but fluorescents are unrelated to that statement. I grew up with some rather pleasant fluorescent tubes in our living room—much nicer light than any classic incandescent bulb I've seen. (These were not, of course, those unpleasantly white industrial fluorescents.)
I don't really care as long as it's water and it's free of pathogens.
(I suppose I care in some places. In Luxembourg and some places in Germany the tap water easily equals the best mineral water; in a Dutch expert taste test apparently Rotterdam tap water beat all other water including bottled mineral water. But on the other hand, in France, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan all the tap water tastes odd to me. I don't know what they do with it.)
On a semi-related note, on a Dutch linguistic site I saw a South-African lamenting that if the Dutch hadn't disavowed Afrikaans on account of apartheid, Dutch could now be a strong medium-large international language with close to 50 million speakers instead of a medium-small language with 23-25 million speakers. Nevertheless, Dutch is an official language in the Union of South American Nations, and English is not. Suck on that, English.
Funny, the flickering is the primary reason I don't mind seeing traditional bulbs go—although I think it's quite fair to say that incandescent halogen bulbs are the direct continuation of traditional incandescent bulbs.
Other related terms are substratum and superstratum in language contact theory.
Dutch differs primarily from the East Franconian and other Germanic varieties due to the strong Ingvaeonic substratum. I've heard it suggested that the High German consonant swift is actually a Romance language substratum.
The effects of substrata can be very strong. Dutch is Franconian with a strong Ingvaeonic substratum and English is a variety of Saxon with a strong Ingvaeonic substratum, but that probably makes them more similar to each other than to other varieties of Franconian and Saxon. (Admittedly the effect was destroyed a bit thanks to William the Conqueror, but Dutch is still the language most closely related to English by various measures.)
You have spoken to an idiot. That's it BTW, here in the south (and in Austria) we also say (die) Tram.
Haha, perhaps. I also had some issues asking for Sprudelwasser at this one restaurant. I wasn't then aware that the term in the south was Tafelwasser, but that hardly seems like a reason to immediately start speaking English to me.
"Ein Sprudelwasser bitte." "Do you mean table water?"
From the linguistic standpoint, it's well understood that dialect and language form a continuum.
Whether you call it a "language" or a "group of dialects significantly more closely related than others" is fairly irrelevant to the point that you can divide the Germanic dialect continuum into three primary groups. I called e.g. Franconian a language rather than a group of languages and dialects because I was thinking more about 1500 odd years ago, but I should've made that more explicit. From around the 5th century we start to speak of Old Dutch, Old English, and Old German, so with Franconian I'm talking about the language of the Franks who settled these parts around the 3rd century.
Also, some parts of the dialect continuum might be more akin to a "taalbond," an area of linguistic convergence. A clearer example of this phenomenon can be found in south-west Flanders where Dutch has picked up many characteristics of French, and in the French dialects on the other side of the language border which were strongly influenced by Franconian and later Dutch. As such there used to be a "dialect continuum" between French and Dutch, today much less so primarily due to French language policies, yet French and Dutch are grammatically and phonetically so unrelated that this would seem like a pretty silly proposition. But if you have two somewhat related languages that happen to eventually border each other due to the Völkerwanderung, maybe a "fake" dialect continuum would be indistinguishable from the real thing.
Dialect differences in Germany can be extreme, to a point where a Saxon won't understand a Bavarian or vice versa
Like I said, Saxon, Franconian, and German are three different languages from a linguistic standpoint.
I'm aware that the Bavarian language is extremely odd. In Nürnberg there was supposed to be a Straßenbahn to the Reichsparteitagsgelände, but it didn't seem to be among the trams. I asked some transit employee where to find Straßenbahn 9 (or whatever; that's just what I got from the current website), and he pointed to a bunch of buses while saying something like "over there, of course." How a bus can "of course" be a tram is a secret that eludes me to this day. I'm pretty sure there were no signs about any trams being broken at the tram stop…
Well sure, they use Chinese cabbage (apparently called Napa cabbage in English) instead of some variety of white cabbage, and they don't cut it up. Dutch Wikipedia makes some unsourced claims that Sauerkraut might've originated in northern China, was taken along to eastern Europe by the Mongols, and made its way from there across Germany to the Netherlands with Ashkenazi refugees.
A mammal like homo needs 1) air, 2) air. Are you an ant? I hate the dystopya you tend to configure: the rooms become lower and lower, and people who don't fit the current 1m ceiling get eliminated. Right? Carve a cave for yourself and live there, will you, and leave us the eternity.
You might have a point insofar as people larger than 2.10m or so are concerned, but since my primary point is to insulate the damn floor, ceiling & roof (and outside-facing walls) it's an implementation detail and hardly a dystopia. Also, in this place the doors are a mere 2m so it's really not like they were being the least bit considerate of tall people. I also advocated for compensating for the loss of useless vertical space, especially space exceeding 3m, by more than making up for it in horizontal space.
The US will approve immigration reform? What does that mean? It reminds me of the oracle of Delphi: "If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed."
I'm not even really sure to what extent the American constitution pulls any weight here anyway because this server is not on American soil as far as I know, and trying to insist on "rights" while in somebody else's house never seems to come to a good end.
The Dutch constitution, it's implementation details, and European rules on the matter of freedom of expression are obviously the only ones directly relevant to this forum. As a rule of thumb, article 7 of the Dutch constitution grants roughly the same rights as the first amendment of the US constitution.
Xfce 4.8 and 4.10 made large strides in improving the user experience. It's now closer to where Gnome 2 was in 2010. In any case, do you have any tips for using WindowMaker? Or screenshots of your setup? That reminds me, I promised to share a screenshot of mine.
