Persistent, Niggling Questions

[whoiam]

I could type out a nice, long, disjointed rant on this point, but essentially it comes down to: "Most hosting packages and prebuilt servers come with weedy little allocations of disk space and/or restrictions on permanent scripts or data transfer, which, together, make regular/multiple backups unfeasable for any site not backed by a decent amount of money"

[Nate the Great]

So how come the Wayback Machine can keep track of this stuff?

To change direction...

If there was one set of homonyms that you could just snap your fingers and POOF they'd be represented by different words? Its and it's? Their and there? Heck, "bank" is a financial institution, an array of terminals, the area of land on one side of a body of water, etc.

Would it be neat or worthwhile if the tropics could get one decent snowfall a year, with the northern latitudes getting one decent hot summer day a year in return (a la The Year Without A Santa Claus)?

Would it be easier to get ten random people to agree on pizza toppings or ice cream sundaes?

Okay, this is a BIG one: how come we can't get pronounciation guides (whether print or online) that actually consists of letters and phrases that we can understand? To whit: I go to the page for Wikipedia itself and see:
"Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ or /ˌwiːkiˈpeɪdiə/)"
Putting aside the fact that a site shouldn't have four official pronounciations for its own name, what does "wɪkɨˈpiːdiə" sound like? I don't know. What's wrong with phonetic pronounciation guides? "wih-kee-pee-dee-ah." You can pronounce that, right? Oh, I'm sure Professor Henry Higgins knows exactly what each symbol means, but I don't have a clue.

[whoiam]

[long, long, long rant] -I used greater and lesser than, and it thought it was a tag...

Pass

HELL YES. I've been waiting to see a summer's day that didn't have rainclouds in it since my last holiday to America.

Ice-cream, probably. Last I checked pizzas tended to get shared between more people, so more people have to agree on one set of toppings... (Unless this is the 10-person version of each, in which case, probably still pizza.)

As for the wikipedia pronounceation guide, I think it's part of their not-so-secret conspiracy to keep control of the wikipedia in the hands of 14-year-olds with too much time on their hands.

As for in general, beats me. Maybe the guide authors are afraid they'll be considered the idiots of the pronunciation-guide industry if they don't use at least three defunct symbols per every 2 syllables...

[Nate the Great]

At least you Canadians get pleasantly warm (not boiling) summers to correspond with frigid winters, right?

You're right, ice cream and pizza are bad to compare. How about ice cream and coffee? Even though I don't drink coffee, I can see all of the options available...

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks, You've Got Mail): The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self.

[whoiam]

I'm not a Canadian, I'm English. And in England. And it's raining. Again.

I'm with you on the Coffee. Where'd I leave that Anti-Starbucks Revolutionary Army recruitment poster?

[Nate the Great]

I use Canada as a convenient catch-all for 5M.net forumgoers on the assumption that if I don't know otherwise, Canada is a safer bet than anything else.

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Do they say anticlockwise in Canada?

You should go ask a Canadian.

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

I use Canada as a convenient catch-all for 5M.net forumgoers on the assumption that if I don't know otherwise, Canada is a safer bet than anything else.

I should think that, in whoiam's case, "Birmingham Uni" in the location field would have been a dead giveaway.

You do look at those, right?