Your comment would be more appropriate if he add written "I have not seen anything in the Bible which is disputed by science."

Anyways, the bible has been used for ages as a source of arguments against science. The most famous are of course
    - Evolution can't be true because all animals and men were created by gods in 7 days.
    - The universe is not older than 6000 years because the bible gives a detailed chronology since Adam.
    - PI=3 because "And he [Hiram] made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one rim to the other it was round all about, and...a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about....And it was an hand breadth thick...." — First Kings, chapter 7, verses 23 and 26.

I suspect that the last one was never really used as an argument for PI=3 but it is so fun :-)

Every few months I spend a few hours browsing through creationist web sites. This can be both very funny and depressing.

And using the new official value of PI=3, Alabama scientists just discovered that the Pythagorean theorem could be simplified to c = a + b

Another potential issue is horizontal gene transfer, that is the ability for genes to be transfered to other species.
In practice, that means that some of those pesticide resistant genes may eventually end up in plants that are supposed to be killed by pesticides.

Walkman is a brand name (from Sony).

Ordinateur was invented in the 50s by someone from ... IBM France as a marketing term for a special kind of computer.
The word 'Calculateur' (or 'Calculatrice') is a direct translation of 'computer' (to compute = calculer) and is also used in France to describe computers (the ones used to make arithmetic computations) .

I suspect that 'Calculateur' was never a very popular term because one of its meanings in French is not entirely positive: someone who is making plans usually for its own benefit (something like 'selfishly scheming').

I do not really agree that deriving words from English is not okay in French. The problem is that both languages are quite close so there is often an easy direct translation as with Calculateur and Computer.

IMHO, Quebec have far more reasons that France to be worried about the future of French.

I am not aware of that restaurant story but I suspect that the problem was not the english signs but the lack of french signs.
Restaurants in France and in most countries are subject to various legislations that make it mandatory to display various information (prices, emergency exits, laws about alcohol, opening times, ...) using one of the official country languages. In France, that would be french.

I understand your point.

The fact is that in French and probably in most languages, we make a strong distinction between protecting the existing language and extending the language. Most of your examples describe concepts that did not not exist before a 'foreign' word was introduced.

Adding 'Belouga' did not remove anything from the French language because there was no french word to describe that animal.

The Academy Francaise will typically be fighting foreign or malformed expressions that would replace existing french expressions.

New words are typically not a problem as long as they respect the french syntactic rules. In some cases, the Academy will try to 'francisize' the syntax of a word of foreign origin (e.g. the 'u' in Beluga is replaced by the french 'ou'). In the rare cases where a new word has to be created from scratch then Latin and Greek elements will generally be used not because the French speak those language them but because they are already part of the language (French is just one of the modern forms of Latin with Spanish and Italian).

Hummm... configuring openssh is really not difficult on most modern Linux distributions.
Install the openssh packages, execute ssh-keygen once per user and you are basically done.

The only tricky part for some novice users is to copy the public key to the server (in .ssh/authorized_keys) but recent versions of openssh provide the ssh-copy-id tool that can do that for you.

If I am not mistaken, the galaxy should could be contain far more orphan planets than stars.
They are difficult to detect (with our current technology) but they could be a good way to leave the solar system.
A wandering planet would provide all the raw material needed to sustain life for thousands or millions of years.
Of course, there would be no sun but, hopefully, our civilization will be able to get almost free energy from fusion within a few decades.

I was searching too far! It was just there on the Proxima Centauri wikipedia page :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

A few weeks ago, I saw a diagram showing how the closest stars are moving over time relative to earth.
I can't find it anymore but it is somewhere on internet.

> Why does French have this reputation for protecting their language so much?
> It sure doesn't look that way. Maybe the difference is with common words?

France is one of the few languages that is controlled by an official organism: L'Académie Française defines the rules since 1635. In practice, that means that French has not changed a lot during the last 2 or 3 centuries (at least in France itself).
Texts from the French revolution (1789) still look very modern ( http://www.matierevolution.fr/... )
New words or rules are of course added every years by the Académie Francaise with more or less success (e.g. "courier" for "email")

Also, France is actively trying to protect the language by laws. For example, French radio stations have a limit to the amount of non-french speaking songs they can play. Some companies were also fined for providing english documents without a proper translation to some of their french employees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

You don't get it. He is not saying that French is Latin or Greek but that French is derived from Latin (and indirectly from greek). French like Italian and Spanish, is basically Latin after 2000 years of evolution.

Even though most french would not be able to understand Latin (as an englishman would probably not be able to understand medieval english), they should be able to guess the meaning of plenty of Latin words because they have a lot in common.

German and several other languages such as english, allow to create new words by combining existing words from the same language. In English, 'hippopotamus' could have be named a "river horse" and later become a "riverhorse".

In french you can't really do that. A "cheval de rivière" cannot become a "chevalrivière" or a "chevalderivière".

However, since the tradition in the scientific and technical community is to create new words using Latin (and Greek), it is very common for some of those new words to be accepted very quickly in French regardless of the country they were created because they share a lot of similarities with existing french words.

The mistake you make is that Seismograph is not a Scottish word but a greek word invented by a Scot.

Automatic translation tools are progressing fast. Within a few years, computers will be able to translate spoken language in real time with a relatively few errors. There are already working prototypes.

It is difficult to see how this will affect the spoken languages over time. If those systems become very efficient then there will be little reasons to learn English or any other major languages. On the other hand, preserving or learning small languages will become less important.
     

Most of those words use latin or greek root, prefixes and suffixes. It is not surprising that those words are used almost unchanged in French since this is a latin language. Generally speaking, French and English are very close. They have been sharing a lot of words since centuries.

Islandic is probably very different because of the lack of latin or greek references. For example, a french speaker will immediately associate the greek prefix 'hippo' to horses (as in Hippodrome, Hippopotame, ...). I do not speek Islandic but I suspect that this is not the case in that language so it make more sense to invent new words in islandic.