You go to the IAU website and it's written in english. No language selections for non-english speakers. (Even IKEA.com does better than this). What does the "I" in IAU stand for, again?

You go to the nameexoworlds.org website - same deal.

You read the rules and all submissions (max 250 words) must be in english, too.

Given that this is about astronomical objects that are so far away, to them The Earth doesn't even register as a blip. Therefore to limit the naming process to one single earthly language seems like an extraordinary limitation. Especially when you consider that so many stars have Arabic names - couldn't we be a bit more inclusive?

Look at the Olimex range of boards.
I've been using these for a year or two and found them to fit the bill nicely.

There are single and dual core boards, with / without embedded flash memory (or micro-SD card slots) and they'll run Debian (or other) Linux They have a lot on on board peripherals and pinouts for their own range of LCD screens - though I use an HDMI monitor for simplicity. The power supply will accept anything from 6 - 16 Volts from a phone-charger type PSU and you can even plug in a LiPo for backup.

I'll stop there before someone accuses me of advertising (I'm not, and I have no connection to the company). But as a last point, they are also pretty cheap.

The problem is, that if you don't know these basic constructs in your native language then you're not really fluent in it. You might think you can speak it fluently - but you're not well enough educated if you lack the basic rules.

Sadly this is very common: just look at all the internet content that confuses they're, their and there. Or mistakes "have" for "of" in written form.

Perhaps Duolingo should have a qualification test to screen out people who weren't paying attention at school (as all these topics are taught, in every english-speaking school) and it could sign them up for a remedial english class, instead.

And who controls the controls, controls everything.

So the guy had an old article removed.
The journalist then writes a *new* article, commenting on the removal of the old article
The guy then requires the *new* article gets delisted, too. So the journalist ....

And so it continues until one party or the other gets bored, dies, or realises that all these article, this MOUNTAIN of articles are all still available (and increasing in number) on other search engines and that since new articles can be submitted faster than old ones taken down (and presumably the guy is paying a service to issue take-downs on his behalf) he's paying money and achieving the opposite of what was intended.

And yet there are individuals who do exactly the same thing every day. I would suggest that there are also organisations that make a positive decision to post content to change the emotions of their readers: whether to make them happy (and possibly tie that happy feeling to the website's message - religious, political, cultural), or angry or apathetic.

Just like every advertisement we see is designed to manipulate our emotions, websites do it all the time for gain, so to have FB do the same is neither new nor unacceptable. It could even be argued that since they had nothing to gain (materially or financially) that their motivations were more benign that those sites or advertisements that manipulate our emotions for their own gain.

Oh do stop being so precious. It's no different from an individual posting a sad or depressed piece, themselves. Should they then be sued, arrested or punished for the "emotional damage" they cause to anyone who reads it?

So basically all they've done is tell us that people respond to their surroundings. Okay, nothing new there. What would be interesting is if FB could somehow start quantifying the level of the reaction. Then, after a few hundred years of study we might start to get the glimmerings of a science.

From the article:

So all the research was based on the native language speakers interpretation of how happy or sad the words were - and then their relative frequency in the texts. If the speakers of each language had a natural disposition to happiness or sadness, that would skew the whole result. And since there's no objective measure of a word's "happiness", the whole thing comes down to interpretation, rather than science.

That whooshing noise you heard just after you read the post ... you have any idea - any at all - even the slightest inkling - what that was?

Firstly, like in an ordinary watch the battery life should be measured in years and it should require no other maintenance.
Second, people should be openly admiring of it - both as a technological marvel and as a timepiece.
If it could do anything else than keep good time, that would be nice but not necessary.

Personally, I consider the first of these needs to be the most achievable.

Maybe the Draper Labs guys misread the project definition.
"Europa??? we thought you meant Europe"

But the demographics of the downloaders varied with the amount offered. So, at the lowest level there were very few westerners who took the bait. As the reward increased, the proportion grew. If you were planning to use a similar process to grab some confidential or profitable data off the participant's machine, you should take into account the likelihood of poor vs. rich participants' computers having anything you would be looking for.

There are plenty of people for whom a dollar is a lot of money. Don't forget, thus was a world wide study - not one limited to your particular country. The paper states that along with running a program, there was a questionnaire (I wonder what languages it was available in, and also what languages the Mechanical Turk posting was wtitten in - surely that is a tremendous skew to the results?) and that 40% of the survey respondents were from India - where english is quite popular (more english speakers than any other country in the world).

So, since purchasing power of the $1 wasn't taken into account, the results are flawed, since the reward will vary so much depending on the wealth of the individuals taking part.

Learning the syntax of a language is the smallest step towards actually using it. If you want to do more than write "Hello World\n" you need to learn an IDE, and all the relevant libraries. That is what takes the years of experience. Especially in these days where people assume (incorrectly) that IDEs are "intuitive". There's nothing worse than having to waste a day clicking around in a piece od code trying to find the one, obscure, little windowy attribute that the guy before you used to set a feature.

Since IDEs make documenting code and teaching the learning process virtually impossible: there's no printable version, which makes referencing it and publishing books on it a mess of pictures of windows and option buttons, while the language structure may be simple the IDE / library learning curve is very long-winded.