Well, TinEye can find pictures on the internet that match ones you upload.

Imagine a hybrid diesel-like OPOC engine!

You say you can learn the syntax and basics of a language in a weekend. You're probably right. What you can't learn in a weekend is the standard API that comes with each language, defining all the standard objects and methods you'll want to use. That's probably the biggest change in the last 10 years. What you want to look for in a language is one that makes it easy to do stuff. What you want to look for in an API is good, usable documentation.

Javascript, for one, is a pretty bad language with hardly any standard API (aside from the browser's DOM). Fortunately, there are free add-ons, like jQuery, that add both language features and an API.

Java was one of the first languages with a large standard API. It has nice documentation, but the language is barely better than C/C++. An ecosystem has developed around Java bytecode, however: languages like JRuby and JPython can run like Java and interface with Java code. There's also "groovy", a "modern" language built entirely around Java bytecode.

The major competing bytecode standard is .NET, from Microsoft. They offer free-with-certain-restrictions .NET compilers for C/C++, C#, Visual Basic, and more. All of them can use the .NET API which is documented on the MSDN site. I never found the documentation quite as nice as Java's; but it's usable. Again, other languages have been made to run .NET bytecode: IronRuby and IronPython.

Python and Ruby outside the bytecode versions have their own APIs. If you liked Perl and like object-oriented programming you'll love Ruby.

Finally, if you find you can't stand all this object-oriented programming, try PHP. It's used widely for making dynamic web sites, and has a nice, large API with documentation; but it rarely uses user-defined objects.

(In heat production) I stand between the candle and the star.

You're confusing temperature and heat. A candle burns hotter than a person, but a person puts out more heat (100W) than a candle (80W). Likewise, Ivy Bridge puts out less heat than Sandy Bridge, even though it's hotter.

We also have to pay money for the "right" to eat, and not go hungry, to heat and light our homes - even to own the property a home is on. I expect we'll have to pay for internet service too.

Although, if food was so available that we didn't have to pay for it, that would solve a lot of problems.

What if somebody else hacks your car? E.g. so that it won't drive slower than 80MPH, and if you try the batteries explode? Yeah, that particular scenario is probably impossible, but the point is that the electric car version of cutting the brake lines or making the throttle sticky, though harder to do, could also be harder to detect, and harder to stop.

I have no problem with an NDA in this case. But at college I had one kid ask me to promise to work with him on his idea, before he'd tell me what it was! I said no. I still have no idea what it was, but it was probably stupid.

Recall that more recent missions have analyzed the soil of Mars, and have found "interesting" chemicals like perchlorates. Chemicals which might mimic the signature of life in this experiment. We need to run a test, on Earth, using the best lifeless analogue to Martian soil we can come up with, including perchlorates, and see if the results match.

I'm surprised nobody's linked to Why's stuff yet. (Since it's a free online book and all.)