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Comment: Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score 1) 323

by ilguido (#43664131) Attached to: English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
The classification of the African languages: literally thousands of dialects that Greenberg reliably classified through the means of mass comparison. His good work with the African languages is acknowledged even by his detractors and it is generally accepted in whole or in part.

Comment: Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score 1) 323

by ilguido (#43661017) Attached to: English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
And yet we have: patèr -> pappas (ancient Greek), pater -> papa (Latin), padre -> papà (Italian), père -> papa (French), but father -> dad (English). In German there are Vater and Papa, but Papa is a French loanword attested since the 15th century. In Latin we have also tata for dad, but after all "pater" is a p-t- sequence.

Comment: Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score 1) 323

by ilguido (#43660413) Attached to: English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
As far as I know Greenberg's mass-comparison method wasn't so mass, it was limited to a statistically meaningful set of words that he thought were pretty "steady", that is numbers, familial words, basic actions like "to be", "to have", "to do", "to go" etc.
Obviously it all depends on the sample, however it is not a method for crackpots, if used correctly. It proved useful a few times.

Comment: Re:As another interesting little aside... (Score 1) 323

by ilguido (#43653157) Attached to: English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
Because "yes" and "no" are very recent words, they were not present in Latin or Ancient Greek for example. Usually they're shortcuts for expression like "so it is" or "it is not"; in Latin "sic" means "so", hence "sì" in Italian, Spanish and so on (even French). "Yes" and "yeah" are related to German "ja", take a look here: etymonline.

Comment: Re:now we wait (Score 1) 586

by ilguido (#43556559) Attached to: Europe Needs Genetically Engineered Crops, Scientists Say

The total Islamic population of France is probably under 10% - the total African and Islamic-descended population is under 15%. Even if ALL of those people wanted Sharia, they would be a tiny minority. I'm calling you on your thesis.

And so what? Those who wanted a theocracy during the Iranian revolution were a minority, still Iran became a theocracy. Same stuff for the Arabian Spring. Mussolini became prime minister with just 35 members of parliament on a total of 535. The Bolsheviks, despite their name, were a minority in the revolutionary forces. The sheer numbers do not matter, but being vocal matters, laissez-faire matters: religious and political extremism in Europe is on the rise.

Comment: Re:Thank you, Apple! (Score 0) 291

by ilguido (#43508867) Attached to: LLVM Clang Compiler Now C++11 Feature Complete
So, to put it straight:
GPL "steals" code from BSD = your wife cheats on you and you feel ashamed because you know it and there's little you can do about it.
Close source "steals" code from BSD = your wife cheats on you and everybody knows and laughs at you, but you don't know so you're happy.

For some reason BSD zealots prefer the latter situation and don't know why everybody laughs at them.

Comment: Re:Thank you, Apple! (Score 1) 291

by ilguido (#43508849) Attached to: LLVM Clang Compiler Now C++11 Feature Complete

Um what? Clang is open source. WebKit was open sourced by Apple. Under the GPL they are only obligated to release modifications to the original KHTML base code. They are under no obiligations to release JavascriptCore or WebCore but they did.

They actually are: JavascriptCore and WebCore are both under the LGPL and KHTML derived.

Comment: Re:Basic summary: (Score 2) 90

by ilguido (#43319281) Attached to: FCC To Update 1996 Cell Phone Radiation Standard

The FCC 'advice' is based on supposition, not science.

Yeah, but science is all based on suppositions.

It goes like this. A -> B (RF causes local heating) B -> C (Local heating causes disease)

So A -> C (RF causes disease)

But A -> C was shown not to be true, and B -> C has never been established, but given the A->C thing, is almost certainly not true.

You made it too easy. First, it may not be as simple as A->B->C; second there's more than heating: "The International Agency for Research on Cancer Exit Disclaimer (IARC), a component of the World Health Organization, has recently classified radiofrequency fields as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based on limited evidence from human studies, limited evidence from studies of radiofrequency energy and cancer in rodents, and weak mechanistic evidence (from studies of genotoxicity, effects on immune system function, gene and protein expression, cell signaling, oxidative stress, and apoptosis, along with studies of the possible effects of radiofrequency energy on the blood-brain barrier)."

I concur that right now it is idiotic to demonize/fear cellphones because they could cause cancer (or other health problems), however it's equally idiotic being dismissive about it. We know well what happened with asbestos and papilloma virus.

Data Storage

ZFS Hits an Important Milestone, Version 0.6.1 Released 99

Posted by samzenpus
from the brand-new dept.
sfcrazy writes "ZFS on Linux has reached what Brian Behlendorf calls an important milestone with the official 0.6.1 release. Version 0.6.1 not only brings the usual bug fixes but also introduces a new property called 'snapdev.' Brian explains, 'The snapdev property was introduced to control the visibility of zvol snapshot devices and may be set to either visible or hidden. When set to hidden, which is the default, zvol snapshot devices will not be created under /dev/. To gain access to these devices the property must be set to visible. This behavior is analogous to the existing snapdir property.'"
Power

Solar Impulse Airplane To Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America 89

Posted by samzenpus
from the guided-by-the-light dept.
First time accepted submitter markboyer writes "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The 'Across America' tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."

Q: Why was Stonehenge abandoned? A: It wasn't IBM compatible.

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