Here's another way to put it. Alumide has a thermal conductivity of around 0,5W/(m*K). Regular nylon is about 0,25W/(m*K) and high density polyethylene is about 0,4-0,5W/(m*K). But aluminum is 237W/(m*K). So nowhere even close;) 0,5W/(m*k) is about half the thermal conductivity of glass (0,8-1.4) and about 1/6th that of granite (1,75-4). You'd literally get better thermal conductivity out of a brick than alumide.
The abrasion resistance is not "quite a bit better", and you're thinking about it totally wrong. It's a plastic and it behaves like a plastic; the aluminum particles are not interconnected into a mesh or anything. When you scratch it, you're scratching the plastic, the suspended aluminum particles just come with. Electricity trying to flow through it still has to flow through lots of plastic. Which means that its resistivity is still in the plastic range, certainly higher than less effective but still insulating materials like glass.
Think "sandy-looking plastic", and you'll understand alumide. Sorry, I know you want something that's like metal, but this is not it. If you want metal, you need to print out of metal - say, laser sintering, or printing a mould for lost wax casting. Not printing a plastic that has some dust mixed in. *Maybe* you could get more metallic properties if the metal in the plastic was in the form of whiskers rather than dust. Maybe.
Oh, hey, here's a better analogy for you for what alumide is like: paint. Polymer-based paints are, basically, plastic containing various dusts. Among the types of dust in paints can include metals, especially if they're trying to make the paint have a more textured or sparkly look to it. Aluminum dust is for example a common additive to car paint.
So if you think you can make the interconnects on a PCB out of car paint, go for it.
Look up "alumide", it's been around in the 3d printing world for a very long time. Primarily you need to think "plastic" in terms of its properties. But that said it does generally have mildly better heat tolerance and higher stiffness than most plastics you'll work with. It generally looks dull and sandy (yet smooth), but iMaterialize now has a sparkly version. Alumide is not like metal, but on the upside its not every expensive either.
You can get real 3d printed metal out there from a variety of services. Laser sintering is the best but it's ridiculously priced. If you want a custom titanium bone implant or a specialty part for a space probe or the like, that's what you want; otherwise, it's probably not for you. The more affordable metals (still much more expensive than plastic but not too expensive for general use in small objects for custom needs) are made by lost wax casting, with a 3d printed mould. The best selection of metals (and finishes) is iMaterialize, but Shapeways is a bit cheaper. Both have rather long turnaround times, but they're improving. The quality however is already superb for both of them.
Instead of simply tossing out vague claims and insults, how about you back up your argument with an example of other companies calling aborts after engine ignition during holddown, replacing a defective part, and relaunching just hours later?
Could you remind me when, say, the Shuttle ever had, say, a countdown terminated after engine fire during holddown, a defective part replaced, and then a launch just a couple hours late? Because SpaceX has done that. Their turnaround is impressive by anybody's standards. Heck, that would be an impressive turnaround time for a broken part on a Volvo, let alone a freaking rocket.
People forget about the costs when they get their bread and circuses, and landing on the freaking moon was pretty much the ultimate circus.
As far as circuses to help ensure that NASA keeps getting the funding it needs to do actual science, rather than a multi-hundred-billion-dollar boondoggle like Constellation or a Mars colony, I really like the idea of capturing a small rocky asteroid (maybe a dozen meters in diameter) and dragging it back to a high-Earth or lunar orbit, then sending humans to explore it and try to learn to mine it. The surface features on small asteroids can be pretty crazy-looking so it'll make for good footage (even if small), it has enough "wow" factor to it to impress (not to mention that any yokel with a 6" telescope could see it with their own eyes), and there's enough legitimate science they could do there (we know next to zilch about mining other celestial bodies, not that much about asteroids in general, and have almost no experience working in such microgravity environments) that you've got that axis covered as well - that could actually be useful data. But such a retrieval mission is only a few billion dollars, so that plus a few billion to pay for whatever field trips you want to make to it once you've got it... it's really an affordable option. Stretch out the build over most of a decade, siphon as much money from it as you can to "multi-use tech" for other more pure-science projects (fission-powered VASIMIR for the tug, perhaps? Maybe a new network of observatories for the asteroid selection phase? Etc), and I think you might have something.
I agree in general in principle, but I'm sure that the A-3 will get lots of use over time. Probably not enough to justify its cost, but "gigantic vacuum chamber capable of withstanding the thrust of a huge rocket" is not something that's going to sit idle forever. I'm more concerned about what it'll cost to reactivate it in the future, though... I mean, if it takes a long time and sits idle for 10-15 years, will they have to spend another couple hundred million dollars to get it back into working order? Is it just going to rust away, or will it last?
Wonder if they could make it into a massive freeze-drying facility in the meantime;)
What I find impressive is SpaceX's turnaround time on scrubbed launches. I mean, sometimes they've fixed problems and relaunched within hours - 3 days is rather long by their standards and may have more to do with launch windows than anything else.
Who knows whether they'll nail this particular landing. But I'm pretty confident in the long run that they'll be nailing landing after landing with only the occasional random mishap (which is allowable, since it's unmanned). Now, whether they can collect, transport, refurbish, and relaunch cheaper than just building a new one, especially with their proportionally low production costs, that is yet to be seen. Best of luck to them, though!
Part of the problem is that they grew up in an environment where conspiracy is bloody everywhere. I mean, basic, readily-disprovable facts proclaimed daily as truth. Widespread, practically daily use of actors to portray fictional stories in the media. Secret reporting on neighbors - both truthfuly and as lies. Made up charges as a common way to get inconvenient people out of the way. Etc. How can a person grow up in such an environment and *not* end up as a conspiracy theorist?
It's an interesting phenomenon and you see the same thing in Russian science. There are an awful lot of brilliant scientists in both India and Russia doing amazing things. But it's like there's no filter. The unadulterated garbage rises just as much to the top as the actual great scientific work. I can't help but wonder if it's related to the same sort of corruption and patronage systems that you see a lot in the business and political world as well.
It's also interesting that even on things that they innovate on (and there have been a lot), you don't see much commercialization actually within their respective countries. You see a lot more when they leave and move to Europe or the US or whatnot.
Actually, that makes sense - only trying to stop new words when they would replace existing, perfectly fine French words. I think it's different from the common perception of how French supposedly protects the language, and there are languages that do fight foreign words even when they don't replace a native word, but even still, fighting against "foreign replacement words" would indeed be a form of protection,
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the "Latin and Greek count as French" argument does not pass muster. 1, it would apply to Icelandic too, 2) few in France understand either so it's in no way preserving the language, and 3) France borrows just as readily words not of Latin or Greek origin as any other language.
The word was derived into each language from Latin.
Except, of course, that's quite obviously not how it works. It's not like the British coined "electricus" and then every other country went and independently re-coined it. One country did it, the others copied and just made minor tweaks.
Yes you can use Tsunami in French (like you can do in English) but the phenomena is know in French as "raz-de-marée"
Unless Wikipedia is lying (and if it is, please go in and edit it), tsunami is the proper technical term for specifically a tsunami, while raz-de-marée is a sea flood of any type (for example, also including storm-driven coastal floods). The proper technical term in French is a japanese word having literally zero connection with France. The proper technical term in Icelandic is flóðbylgja (or if you want to be more precise, skjálftaflóðbylgja). In what way is having your proper technical term be a Japanese word preserving the language? Why should anyone give French special "protecting the language" credit for stuff like that?
"sarrigue" can be used for opposum, automate is also a synonyme for robot etc
This isn't a "can I think of another word that can also accurately describe the term in question without having to use a loanword?" issue. It's "is it proper French to use these loanwords and do people frequently use them " issue.
Check out, say, an Icelandic newspaper. Search for vélmenni. Tons of hits talking about robots. Now search for robot. Still a fair number of its, but they're all things like the name of the movie "I, Robot", a reference to "which has been called "robot" in foreign languages", Shit Robot, Bad Robot, Robot Kitchen, and a ton of other proper names. Robot is simply not an Icelandic word.
Perform the same experiment with French. Let's say, Le Monde as the paper. First search, second search. Robot gets WAY more hits then automate. And the Robot hits are overwhelmingly legitimate hits, while a number of the automate ones look questionable (for example, the top hit just has "automate" in a long list of tags).
What you did basically is like saying "No no, English doesn't borrow slavic words, see, we can say "autonomaton" instead of robot if we want, see? So no borrowing here!"
These are of course just random examples. I can give you as many as you want, from as many countries as you want that don't include your incredibly broad "Using French words, Latin words, and Greek words are all still preserving the modern French language" criteria). What's French for beluga? Wikipedia says béluga; that's a Russian word (Icelandic: mjaldur). What's French for jungle? Wikipedia says jungle; that's a Hindi word (Icelandic: frumskógur). What about cotton / coton? That's Arabic (Icelandic: bómull). Cola / cola? That's west African (Icelandic: gos). And on and on. But I know that no matter how many I list, that will never be enough.
Don't get me wrong - Icelandic *does* have a lot of loan words. For example kaffi (coffee / café), gíraffi (giraffe / girafe), etc, there's lots. But I can't for the life of me find one where French decided to coin - and then actually predominantly use - a new native word where Icelandic didn't. And the difference is even more pronounced with modern technical terms / device names / etc - Icelandic usually seems to at least try, French almost never does; it seems to coin new "native" words very rarely. Certainly no more often than your average modern European language. So why the reputation as being so "protective" of the language?
Are you actually saying anything different than what I just wrote? I'll repeat: "It's just not economical at this point in time to use at the end-level distribution scale - only for long distance and undersea lines."
Are you just trying to find something to disagree about?
I pointed all of this out elsewhere. Television is from a Russian. Telephone is (contrary to how you portray it) from a German. Electricity is from a Brit. None of these were French words. France simply took, and continues to take, words created by others and adopt them into the language with little to no change.
Despite your strange misconception, I'm not saying English doesn't do this either. English is famous for taking words from other languages. But the simple fact is that France has a reputation for not doing this, and that reputation is quite simply BS. France almost always does it too.
English has mostly celtic, german and latin roots, while French has mostly latin and celtic roots, so obviously they share a lots of similar words that Icelandic doesn't
Might want to brush up on your European lingustic families. Icelandic is, like English, a Germanic language. More than that, viking raiders actually *took over* parts of the UK (just like the Normans did) and re-intersected the languages. I'm about to write in Icelandic that I'm talking about a dog, a worm, a hen, a pig, and a fish; tell me if this looks familiar to you:
"Ég er að tala um hund, orm, hænu, svín og fisk."
Which looks more related to English for dog, hund (hound) or chien? Which looks more related to English for worm, orm or ver? Which looks more related to English for hen, hæn(u) or poule? Which looks more related to English for pig, svín (swine) or cochon? Which looks more related to English for fish, fisk or poisson?
You just assumed that Icelandic is unrelated to English. That is incorrect. The two share a common history. Icelandic actually has good bit of resemblance to how English used to look, even still retaining the thorn and eth, concepts like hither and thither, etc.
And to reiterate, I'm not *faulting* French for just adopting international terms with only slight spelling / pronunciation changes. That's what most languages do. I'm just pointing out that it's BS to claim that they're somehow unusually protective of their language, which is a stereotype about French.
Take a simple exemple: Geography this word was made in french from the greek words ge and graphy (earth and to write) this word was then imported in the english language during the XVI century
What's with all of this revisionist history? Seems like everyone is trying to take the opportunity to misattribute the coining of words to French. No, the French did not coin the word geography. The word geography was coined by the ancient greek philosopher Eratosthenes. The French took the word from the Latin geographia, who in turn took it from the Greek.
French is a romance language (use wikipedia to understand what it means)
Why not just explain to me what the word "cat" means is while you're at it? I'm sure I know far more about the flow of languages in Europe than you do. Without looking it up: tell me, which major branch of proto-Germanic has no modern descendents? Which modern eastern European language is related to Finnish? Which modern western-European language is not descended from PIE? Which languages apart from classic Greek has it been suggested that ancient Macedonian was related to? I can keep going.
and it is a basic feature of this language to use latin to coin its own words
But they're not coining these words. They're just taking them. And they take them regardless of the origin. Robot has a slavic origin. French? "Robot" (Icelandic: vélmenni). Tsunami is Japanese. French? "Tsunami" (Icelandic: flóðbylgja). Opossom comes from freakin Algonquian, but even that hasn't gotten them to pick anything more French than "Opossum" (Icelandic: pokarotta). Even the "Latin and Greek still count even though neither are understandable in French and Greek isn't even related" excuse doesn't remotely stand up to scrutiny.
The simple fact is, French does very, very little to what it's stereotyped as doing (re-coining international terms into French), while there actually exist languages that *do* change international terms.
That argument doesn't fly in face of the fact that it still goes on like that to this day here in Iceland, and we're not at all isolated. It's not like in 1850 there were people coining words for smartphone (snjallsími), tablet computer (spjaldtölva), coelecanth (bláfiskur), muon (mýeind), hybrid car (tvinbíll), etc, etc. This is not some old phenomenon, it's actively occurring to this day. Tablets are a great example because that was a really recent thing, when they first came out stores were selling them as "tablets", but once the word spjaldtölva started to hit the public sphere, there was a large-scale shift, and now all of the stores sell them as spjaldtölvur. Probably 90% of new things** that become popular eventually follow that pattern. Not 100%, and it's not an instant shift, but a large majority get there eventually.
And again, I'm not faulting French for taking English words straight out or English for taking French words straight out or anything of the sort. That's actually the most common thing to do. I'm simply pointing out that the reputation of French for "coining their own words rather than adopting international terms" doesn't even remotely seem to pass muster. If someone in another country invents or discovers something, it seems that almost always the French name for it is just a pronunciation-and-spelling-adjusted version of the international name. That's hardly "preserving the language", at least compared to what happens here with new words.
** The big exception nowadays, and the one that's causing a lot of concern with lingustic traditionalists, are *software* terms, things like, for example, what you may see in your menubar. Relatively few apps have Icelandic support. Heck, people even say "CVS" as "See-Vee-Ess" rather than "Seh-Vaff-Ess", they pronounce the letters as they're pronounced in English. Where this will all lead, I don't know....
Born in the US. Not much of a fan of the US, though. Then again, Iceland's current government is doing its best to try to turn us into mini-America. They even went so far as to have hundreds of machine guns secretly smuggled into the country in a plan to militarize our (currently mostly unarmed) police forces (per capita that'd be way higher than the number of machine guns with US police forces). Their economic reforms... well, let's just say that Ayn Rand would be tickled pink with most of them.
It's funny how many people picture Iceland as being some sort of socialist paradise. It's become so much of a running joke here that they poked fun at it during the last áramótaskaup.;)
Actually thought about Iceland but it seem to just have grass.. Guess it's colder too.
No no, you get much colder than us in the winter. But our summers are colder than yours. We have very little average change in temperature between summer and winter, no more than 15 degrees or so in the Reykjavík area - more in the north, less in the far south. The reason there's not many forests is because of heavy deforstation and overgrazing long ago; before settlement about a quarter of the country was forested. The amount of forests bottomed out in the early to mid 20th century but since have been slowly recovering due to extensive replanting efforts. There's some actually quite lovely forests today. Still, it's going to take a long time to get back up to even a small fraction of what we once had.
Personally, outside of the current political situation, I find it extremely fun here. We have a massively disproportionately large music scene, we're an international tourist draw for our excellent outdoor opportunities, and if you like soaking in hot geothermal waters, there's no better place in the world.:) It's a beautiful, peaceful country with lots of spectacular wilderness and a huge arts scene. Unfortunately the political system here is a disaster, with biased vote weighting that helps ensure that we almost always get a conservative government, tons of corruption, lots of buisiness fields dominated by monopolies, etc. And our current government is succeeding quite well destroying everything that makes the country good. Someone recently asked me to write a year-in-review article for them and I sent them this picture.
(At risk of going even more off topic... what's up with the whole watching-donald-duck-on-christmas-eve thing over there?;) )
Here's an example ("writeOutput") from the official Sun Java Tutorial on how you're supposed to write out a UTF-8 file. And it's broken. It works when your text never takes up more than two bytes per character but when it does it translates the multichar UTF-16 representation incorrectly and produces a non-standards-compliant UTF-8 that some readers will read but others won't. here's someone posting a workaround and several dozen people talking about having that problem and thanking them for the solution.
That's just one problem among many - Java's unicode support is a bit clunky. Don't get me wrong, it's leaps and bounds better than what C/C++ have, but that doesn't make it great. I tend to concur with the argument that UTF-16 is in general harmful. You tend to get these sort of problems on pretty much every platform that uses it. People know that it can take up more than two words yet there's always someone who makes the mistaken assumption that all characters are one word, and because longer sequences aren't used that commonly, the code often ships broken rather than being caught in development.
Most of the words you used as exemples actually have Latin or Greek roots
So is French equivalent to Latin? If you went around in France today speaking Latin would people understand you? No. Is French Greek? Would people in Paris understand a man from Athens speaking his native tongue? No. Is it French people who made up the vast majority of these terms? No. So in what manner is adopting them as French protecting the French language? You could bloody well claim that anything in German or English is acceptable for Icelandic because they're all Germanic languages.
(More to the point, not only is French not Greek, but it's not even descended from Greek.)
sismique/séisme (earthquake)
1. Seismograph was a word invented by a Scot, David Milne-Home, describing a device invented by another Scot, James David Forbes. It was taken into French with only minor spelling changes, again, the typical French pattern of simply taking foreign words and minorly changing the spelling rather than making up their own - despite having a clearly undeserved reputation for making up their own.
2. Sismique/séisme itself was also taken straight into French, not from its Greek origin, but from its modern use in scientific circles where it was coined by Robert Mallet, an Irish scientist.
Once again, they just simply took words used by others and changed the spelling slightly rather than coining their own based on French words.
I didn't say English was any better about taking words from other languages. Both English and French seem to just grab whatever words others are using, change the spelling a little, and use them as their own. The strange issue is that French is for some reason have a reputation for going on full-linguistic-protection mode and insisting on making up and using "proper French words" rather than the international terms. But this quite obviously is not true.
By the way, the word telephone was coined by a German (Johann Philipp Reis), the word television by a Russian (Constantin Perskyi), and the word electricity by a Brit (William Gilbert). None of them were French. I don't know where you got the conception that it was the French who made up those words.
So why should they not protect their language?
That's precisely the opposite of my point. My point is that they clearly don't protect their language, they just take up whatever term other people are using for 98% of new terms.
Sure we do, efficienct high voltage DC switching hardware is readily available. It's just not economical at this point in time to use at the end-level distribution scale - only for long distance and undersea lines. That may change in the future, however.
Icelandic is a North Germanic language. English is a West Germanic language (whose root is confusingingly called "North Sea Germanic")) with significant influence from Old Norman and a lot of minor influences). Both of their main roots, however, are Proto-Germanic.
I think it's pretty obvious that the French aren't re-coining the imported technical terms based on roots in a manner that just happens to sound essentially identical to the English. They're just simply taking the English terms and making minor spelling adjustments.
As a side note, hippopotamus in Icelandic is flóðhestur, or "flood horse", which is obviously a native-coined word based on Icelandic roots. The French word, according to Wikipedia, is "L'hippopotame amphibie", which they seem to shorten to "hippopotame". Wikipedia states that the origin of the French hippopotame is straight from the greek "hippopotamos", so again, they just took the word directly from another language (in this case, Greek rather than English) rather than coining something. French has this reputation for coining their own words, but I honestly don't see where it comes from. If French was handled the way Icelandic was, hippopotamos would be something like "cheval de la rivière".
Java's unicode support is a bit half-arsed - they started out making all characters take two bytes because back then that was enough to cover all unicode characters, but then the standard changed and they got stuck having to shoehorn wider characters into their system in a way that usually works but is sometimes blunder-prone. That said, it's certainly miles better than what C / C++ have to offer (which is almost nothing natively.... std::string("köttur")[5] is "u", not "r", and the same happens with char*).
I know nothing about.NET.
Python 2 was bloody awful, it gives you just enough rope to hang yourself. Python 3 is a big improvement, fairly tolerable.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another way to put it. Alumide has a thermal conductivity of around 0,5W/(m*K). Regular nylon is about 0,25W/(m*K) and high density polyethylene is about 0,4-0,5W/(m*K). But aluminum is 237W/(m*K). So nowhere even close ;) 0,5W/(m*k) is about half the thermal conductivity of glass (0,8-1.4) and about 1/6th that of granite (1,75-4). You'd literally get better thermal conductivity out of a brick than alumide.
Think plastic, not metal ;)
The abrasion resistance is not "quite a bit better", and you're thinking about it totally wrong. It's a plastic and it behaves like a plastic; the aluminum particles are not interconnected into a mesh or anything. When you scratch it, you're scratching the plastic, the suspended aluminum particles just come with. Electricity trying to flow through it still has to flow through lots of plastic. Which means that its resistivity is still in the plastic range, certainly higher than less effective but still insulating materials like glass.
Think "sandy-looking plastic", and you'll understand alumide. Sorry, I know you want something that's like metal, but this is not it. If you want metal, you need to print out of metal - say, laser sintering, or printing a mould for lost wax casting. Not printing a plastic that has some dust mixed in. *Maybe* you could get more metallic properties if the metal in the plastic was in the form of whiskers rather than dust. Maybe.
Oh, hey, here's a better analogy for you for what alumide is like: paint. Polymer-based paints are, basically, plastic containing various dusts. Among the types of dust in paints can include metals, especially if they're trying to make the paint have a more textured or sparkly look to it. Aluminum dust is for example a common additive to car paint.
So if you think you can make the interconnects on a PCB out of car paint, go for it.
Look up "alumide", it's been around in the 3d printing world for a very long time. Primarily you need to think "plastic" in terms of its properties. But that said it does generally have mildly better heat tolerance and higher stiffness than most plastics you'll work with. It generally looks dull and sandy (yet smooth), but iMaterialize now has a sparkly version. Alumide is not like metal, but on the upside its not every expensive either.
You can get real 3d printed metal out there from a variety of services. Laser sintering is the best but it's ridiculously priced. If you want a custom titanium bone implant or a specialty part for a space probe or the like, that's what you want; otherwise, it's probably not for you. The more affordable metals (still much more expensive than plastic but not too expensive for general use in small objects for custom needs) are made by lost wax casting, with a 3d printed mould. The best selection of metals (and finishes) is iMaterialize, but Shapeways is a bit cheaper. Both have rather long turnaround times, but they're improving. The quality however is already superb for both of them.
Instead of simply tossing out vague claims and insults, how about you back up your argument with an example of other companies calling aborts after engine ignition during holddown, replacing a defective part, and relaunching just hours later?
Could you remind me when, say, the Shuttle ever had, say, a countdown terminated after engine fire during holddown, a defective part replaced, and then a launch just a couple hours late? Because SpaceX has done that. Their turnaround is impressive by anybody's standards. Heck, that would be an impressive turnaround time for a broken part on a Volvo, let alone a freaking rocket.
People forget about the costs when they get their bread and circuses, and landing on the freaking moon was pretty much the ultimate circus.
As far as circuses to help ensure that NASA keeps getting the funding it needs to do actual science, rather than a multi-hundred-billion-dollar boondoggle like Constellation or a Mars colony, I really like the idea of capturing a small rocky asteroid (maybe a dozen meters in diameter) and dragging it back to a high-Earth or lunar orbit, then sending humans to explore it and try to learn to mine it. The surface features on small asteroids can be pretty crazy-looking so it'll make for good footage (even if small), it has enough "wow" factor to it to impress (not to mention that any yokel with a 6" telescope could see it with their own eyes), and there's enough legitimate science they could do there (we know next to zilch about mining other celestial bodies, not that much about asteroids in general, and have almost no experience working in such microgravity environments) that you've got that axis covered as well - that could actually be useful data. But such a retrieval mission is only a few billion dollars, so that plus a few billion to pay for whatever field trips you want to make to it once you've got it... it's really an affordable option. Stretch out the build over most of a decade, siphon as much money from it as you can to "multi-use tech" for other more pure-science projects (fission-powered VASIMIR for the tug, perhaps? Maybe a new network of observatories for the asteroid selection phase? Etc), and I think you might have something.
I agree in general in principle, but I'm sure that the A-3 will get lots of use over time. Probably not enough to justify its cost, but "gigantic vacuum chamber capable of withstanding the thrust of a huge rocket" is not something that's going to sit idle forever. I'm more concerned about what it'll cost to reactivate it in the future, though... I mean, if it takes a long time and sits idle for 10-15 years, will they have to spend another couple hundred million dollars to get it back into working order? Is it just going to rust away, or will it last?
Wonder if they could make it into a massive freeze-drying facility in the meantime ;)
What I find impressive is SpaceX's turnaround time on scrubbed launches. I mean, sometimes they've fixed problems and relaunched within hours - 3 days is rather long by their standards and may have more to do with launch windows than anything else.
Who knows whether they'll nail this particular landing. But I'm pretty confident in the long run that they'll be nailing landing after landing with only the occasional random mishap (which is allowable, since it's unmanned). Now, whether they can collect, transport, refurbish, and relaunch cheaper than just building a new one, especially with their proportionally low production costs, that is yet to be seen. Best of luck to them, though!
Also: I thought it was pretty obvious that I was talking about the scientific community, not the general public.
Part of the problem is that they grew up in an environment where conspiracy is bloody everywhere. I mean, basic, readily-disprovable facts proclaimed daily as truth. Widespread, practically daily use of actors to portray fictional stories in the media. Secret reporting on neighbors - both truthfuly and as lies. Made up charges as a common way to get inconvenient people out of the way. Etc. How can a person grow up in such an environment and *not* end up as a conspiracy theorist?
It's an interesting phenomenon and you see the same thing in Russian science. There are an awful lot of brilliant scientists in both India and Russia doing amazing things. But it's like there's no filter. The unadulterated garbage rises just as much to the top as the actual great scientific work. I can't help but wonder if it's related to the same sort of corruption and patronage systems that you see a lot in the business and political world as well.
It's also interesting that even on things that they innovate on (and there have been a lot), you don't see much commercialization actually within their respective countries. You see a lot more when they leave and move to Europe or the US or whatnot.
Actually, that makes sense - only trying to stop new words when they would replace existing, perfectly fine French words. I think it's different from the common perception of how French supposedly protects the language, and there are languages that do fight foreign words even when they don't replace a native word, but even still, fighting against "foreign replacement words" would indeed be a form of protection,
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the "Latin and Greek count as French" argument does not pass muster. 1, it would apply to Icelandic too, 2) few in France understand either so it's in no way preserving the language, and 3) France borrows just as readily words not of Latin or Greek origin as any other language.
Except, of course, that's quite obviously not how it works. It's not like the British coined "electricus" and then every other country went and independently re-coined it. One country did it, the others copied and just made minor tweaks.
The point is that the claim was false.
Unless Wikipedia is lying (and if it is, please go in and edit it), tsunami is the proper technical term for specifically a tsunami, while raz-de-marée is a sea flood of any type (for example, also including storm-driven coastal floods). The proper technical term in French is a japanese word having literally zero connection with France. The proper technical term in Icelandic is flóðbylgja (or if you want to be more precise, skjálftaflóðbylgja). In what way is having your proper technical term be a Japanese word preserving the language? Why should anyone give French special "protecting the language" credit for stuff like that?
This isn't a "can I think of another word that can also accurately describe the term in question without having to use a loanword?" issue. It's "is it proper French to use these loanwords and do people frequently use them " issue.
Check out, say, an Icelandic newspaper. Search for vélmenni. Tons of hits talking about robots. Now search for robot. Still a fair number of its, but they're all things like the name of the movie "I, Robot", a reference to "which has been called "robot" in foreign languages", Shit Robot, Bad Robot, Robot Kitchen, and a ton of other proper names. Robot is simply not an Icelandic word.
Perform the same experiment with French. Let's say, Le Monde as the paper. First search, second search. Robot gets WAY more hits then automate. And the Robot hits are overwhelmingly legitimate hits, while a number of the automate ones look questionable (for example, the top hit just has "automate" in a long list of tags).
What you did basically is like saying "No no, English doesn't borrow slavic words, see, we can say "autonomaton" instead of robot if we want, see? So no borrowing here!"
These are of course just random examples. I can give you as many as you want, from as many countries as you want that don't include your incredibly broad "Using French words, Latin words, and Greek words are all still preserving the modern French language" criteria). What's French for beluga? Wikipedia says béluga; that's a Russian word (Icelandic: mjaldur). What's French for jungle? Wikipedia says jungle; that's a Hindi word (Icelandic: frumskógur). What about cotton / coton? That's Arabic (Icelandic: bómull). Cola / cola? That's west African (Icelandic: gos). And on and on. But I know that no matter how many I list, that will never be enough.
Don't get me wrong - Icelandic *does* have a lot of loan words. For example kaffi (coffee / café), gíraffi (giraffe / girafe), etc, there's lots. But I can't for the life of me find one where French decided to coin - and then actually predominantly use - a new native word where Icelandic didn't. And the difference is even more pronounced with modern technical terms / device names / etc - Icelandic usually seems to at least try, French almost never does; it seems to coin new "native" words very rarely. Certainly no more often than your average modern European language. So why the reputation as being so "protective" of the language?
Are you actually saying anything different than what I just wrote? I'll repeat: "It's just not economical at this point in time to use at the end-level distribution scale - only for long distance and undersea lines."
Are you just trying to find something to disagree about?
I pointed all of this out elsewhere. Television is from a Russian. Telephone is (contrary to how you portray it) from a German. Electricity is from a Brit. None of these were French words. France simply took, and continues to take, words created by others and adopt them into the language with little to no change.
Despite your strange misconception, I'm not saying English doesn't do this either. English is famous for taking words from other languages. But the simple fact is that France has a reputation for not doing this, and that reputation is quite simply BS. France almost always does it too.
Might want to brush up on your European lingustic families. Icelandic is, like English, a Germanic language. More than that, viking raiders actually *took over* parts of the UK (just like the Normans did) and re-intersected the languages. I'm about to write in Icelandic that I'm talking about a dog, a worm, a hen, a pig, and a fish; tell me if this looks familiar to you:
"Ég er að tala um hund, orm, hænu, svín og fisk."
Which looks more related to English for dog, hund (hound) or chien?
Which looks more related to English for worm, orm or ver?
Which looks more related to English for hen, hæn(u) or poule?
Which looks more related to English for pig, svín (swine) or cochon?
Which looks more related to English for fish, fisk or poisson?
You just assumed that Icelandic is unrelated to English. That is incorrect. The two share a common history. Icelandic actually has good bit of resemblance to how English used to look, even still retaining the thorn and eth, concepts like hither and thither, etc.
And to reiterate, I'm not *faulting* French for just adopting international terms with only slight spelling / pronunciation changes. That's what most languages do. I'm just pointing out that it's BS to claim that they're somehow unusually protective of their language, which is a stereotype about French.
What's with all of this revisionist history? Seems like everyone is trying to take the opportunity to misattribute the coining of words to French. No, the French did not coin the word geography. The word geography was coined by the ancient greek philosopher Eratosthenes. The French took the word from the Latin geographia, who in turn took it from the Greek.
Why not just explain to me what the word "cat" means is while you're at it? I'm sure I know far more about the flow of languages in Europe than you do. Without looking it up: tell me, which major branch of proto-Germanic has no modern descendents? Which modern eastern European language is related to Finnish? Which modern western-European language is not descended from PIE? Which languages apart from classic Greek has it been suggested that ancient Macedonian was related to? I can keep going.
But they're not coining these words. They're just taking them. And they take them regardless of the origin. Robot has a slavic origin. French? "Robot" (Icelandic: vélmenni). Tsunami is Japanese. French? "Tsunami" (Icelandic: flóðbylgja). Opossom comes from freakin Algonquian, but even that hasn't gotten them to pick anything more French than "Opossum" (Icelandic: pokarotta). Even the "Latin and Greek still count even though neither are understandable in French and Greek isn't even related" excuse doesn't remotely stand up to scrutiny.
The simple fact is, French does very, very little to what it's stereotyped as doing (re-coining international terms into French), while there actually exist languages that *do* change international terms.
That argument doesn't fly in face of the fact that it still goes on like that to this day here in Iceland, and we're not at all isolated. It's not like in 1850 there were people coining words for smartphone (snjallsími), tablet computer (spjaldtölva), coelecanth (bláfiskur), muon (mýeind), hybrid car (tvinbíll), etc, etc. This is not some old phenomenon, it's actively occurring to this day. Tablets are a great example because that was a really recent thing, when they first came out stores were selling them as "tablets", but once the word spjaldtölva started to hit the public sphere, there was a large-scale shift, and now all of the stores sell them as spjaldtölvur. Probably 90% of new things** that become popular eventually follow that pattern. Not 100%, and it's not an instant shift, but a large majority get there eventually.
And again, I'm not faulting French for taking English words straight out or English for taking French words straight out or anything of the sort. That's actually the most common thing to do. I'm simply pointing out that the reputation of French for "coining their own words rather than adopting international terms" doesn't even remotely seem to pass muster. If someone in another country invents or discovers something, it seems that almost always the French name for it is just a pronunciation-and-spelling-adjusted version of the international name. That's hardly "preserving the language", at least compared to what happens here with new words.
** The big exception nowadays, and the one that's causing a lot of concern with lingustic traditionalists, are *software* terms, things like, for example, what you may see in your menubar. Relatively few apps have Icelandic support. Heck, people even say "CVS" as "See-Vee-Ess" rather than "Seh-Vaff-Ess", they pronounce the letters as they're pronounced in English. Where this will all lead, I don't know....
Born in the US. Not much of a fan of the US, though. Then again, Iceland's current government is doing its best to try to turn us into mini-America. They even went so far as to have hundreds of machine guns secretly smuggled into the country in a plan to militarize our (currently mostly unarmed) police forces (per capita that'd be way higher than the number of machine guns with US police forces). Their economic reforms... well, let's just say that Ayn Rand would be tickled pink with most of them.
It's funny how many people picture Iceland as being some sort of socialist paradise. It's become so much of a running joke here that they poked fun at it during the last áramótaskaup. ;)
No no, you get much colder than us in the winter. But our summers are colder than yours. We have very little average change in temperature between summer and winter, no more than 15 degrees or so in the Reykjavík area - more in the north, less in the far south. The reason there's not many forests is because of heavy deforstation and overgrazing long ago; before settlement about a quarter of the country was forested. The amount of forests bottomed out in the early to mid 20th century but since have been slowly recovering due to extensive replanting efforts. There's some actually quite lovely forests today. Still, it's going to take a long time to get back up to even a small fraction of what we once had.
Personally, outside of the current political situation, I find it extremely fun here. We have a massively disproportionately large music scene, we're an international tourist draw for our excellent outdoor opportunities, and if you like soaking in hot geothermal waters, there's no better place in the world. :) It's a beautiful, peaceful country with lots of spectacular wilderness and a huge arts scene. Unfortunately the political system here is a disaster, with biased vote weighting that helps ensure that we almost always get a conservative government, tons of corruption, lots of buisiness fields dominated by monopolies, etc. And our current government is succeeding quite well destroying everything that makes the country good. Someone recently asked me to write a year-in-review article for them and I sent them this picture.
(At risk of going even more off topic... what's up with the whole watching-donald-duck-on-christmas-eve thing over there? ;) )
Here's an example ("writeOutput") from the official Sun Java Tutorial on how you're supposed to write out a UTF-8 file. And it's broken. It works when your text never takes up more than two bytes per character but when it does it translates the multichar UTF-16 representation incorrectly and produces a non-standards-compliant UTF-8 that some readers will read but others won't. here's someone posting a workaround and several dozen people talking about having that problem and thanking them for the solution.
That's just one problem among many - Java's unicode support is a bit clunky. Don't get me wrong, it's leaps and bounds better than what C/C++ have, but that doesn't make it great. I tend to concur with the argument that UTF-16 is in general harmful. You tend to get these sort of problems on pretty much every platform that uses it. People know that it can take up more than two words yet there's always someone who makes the mistaken assumption that all characters are one word, and because longer sequences aren't used that commonly, the code often ships broken rather than being caught in development.
So is French equivalent to Latin? If you went around in France today speaking Latin would people understand you? No. Is French Greek? Would people in Paris understand a man from Athens speaking his native tongue? No. Is it French people who made up the vast majority of these terms? No. So in what manner is adopting them as French protecting the French language? You could bloody well claim that anything in German or English is acceptable for Icelandic because they're all Germanic languages.
(More to the point, not only is French not Greek, but it's not even descended from Greek.)
sismique/séisme (earthquake)
1. Seismograph was a word invented by a Scot, David Milne-Home, describing a device invented by another Scot, James David Forbes. It was taken into French with only minor spelling changes, again, the typical French pattern of simply taking foreign words and minorly changing the spelling rather than making up their own - despite having a clearly undeserved reputation for making up their own.
2. Sismique/séisme itself was also taken straight into French, not from its Greek origin, but from its modern use in scientific circles where it was coined by Robert Mallet, an Irish scientist.
Once again, they just simply took words used by others and changed the spelling slightly rather than coining their own based on French words.
I didn't say English was any better about taking words from other languages. Both English and French seem to just grab whatever words others are using, change the spelling a little, and use them as their own. The strange issue is that French is for some reason have a reputation for going on full-linguistic-protection mode and insisting on making up and using "proper French words" rather than the international terms. But this quite obviously is not true.
By the way, the word telephone was coined by a German (Johann Philipp Reis), the word television by a Russian (Constantin Perskyi), and the word electricity by a Brit (William Gilbert). None of them were French. I don't know where you got the conception that it was the French who made up those words.
That's precisely the opposite of my point. My point is that they clearly don't protect their language, they just take up whatever term other people are using for 98% of new terms.
Sure we do, efficienct high voltage DC switching hardware is readily available. It's just not economical at this point in time to use at the end-level distribution scale - only for long distance and undersea lines. That may change in the future, however.
Icelandic is a North Germanic language. English is a West Germanic language (whose root is confusingingly called "North Sea Germanic")) with significant influence from Old Norman and a lot of minor influences). Both of their main roots, however, are Proto-Germanic.
I think it's pretty obvious that the French aren't re-coining the imported technical terms based on roots in a manner that just happens to sound essentially identical to the English. They're just simply taking the English terms and making minor spelling adjustments.
As a side note, hippopotamus in Icelandic is flóðhestur, or "flood horse", which is obviously a native-coined word based on Icelandic roots. The French word, according to Wikipedia, is "L'hippopotame amphibie", which they seem to shorten to "hippopotame". Wikipedia states that the origin of the French hippopotame is straight from the greek "hippopotamos", so again, they just took the word directly from another language (in this case, Greek rather than English) rather than coining something. French has this reputation for coining their own words, but I honestly don't see where it comes from. If French was handled the way Icelandic was, hippopotamos would be something like "cheval de la rivière".
Java's unicode support is a bit half-arsed - they started out making all characters take two bytes because back then that was enough to cover all unicode characters, but then the standard changed and they got stuck having to shoehorn wider characters into their system in a way that usually works but is sometimes blunder-prone. That said, it's certainly miles better than what C / C++ have to offer (which is almost nothing natively.... std::string("köttur")[5] is "u", not "r", and the same happens with char*).
I know nothing about .NET.
Python 2 was bloody awful, it gives you just enough rope to hang yourself. Python 3 is a big improvement, fairly tolerable.