While I generally agree that it's a huge WTF to think a consumer phone would be like that, when Android first appeared one of the most popular phones was the Maemo-based N900, a Linux smartphone that did indeed ship with a terminal client. Many Slashdotters seemed to consider it the pinnacle of phone design at the time, so it's perhaps not too surprising they were caught off guard by the notion that a Linux-based iPhone killer would have completely different priorities than preceding Linux-based phones. (Or, to paraphrase: "No terminal. Fewer buttons than a Nomad. Lame.")

In retrospect, it was obvious that this kind of n-1 dimensionality reduction was implausible. There'd be more people named "A. Sphere" and "A. Tetrahedron" if it were true.

I'm sure those are on YouTube too. In this case, however, The Devil Wears Prada is just a really solid film. Disparaging it as a chick flick is rather presumptuous.

Allow me to help you overcome that particular myopia.

I think the criticism is actually fair; it's stupid to always quote humans saying "Xchryxchub" when they're actually saying "Krikoob," as that implies they're better at pronouncing the weird alien name than they really are. Going to the trouble of inventing an orthography for their weird alien language in our alphabet, and then disregarding it, is part of the superfluous exotica complaint that Orson Scott Card levelled (and in the fantasy department, I believe Diana Wynne Jones has said something similar.) For that matter, maybe "Krikoob" should be spelled "Crickube"—a completely natural English spelling, but nothing disappointingly baby-ish.

There's an exception, of course: eventually the weird orthography would become legitimate if the two cultures remained in contact long enough and the aliens were thoroughly studied by our linguists. The onus is then on the author, like any explorer describing a newly-discovered civilization, to document and explain the correct pronunciation as best he or she can. (And if that gets tedious, perhaps a civilization with thirty different velar plosives isn't really appropriate for writing stories about. Much like diarrhea, comparative shopping, and trying to get ketchup stains out of a casual shirt, not everything makes good reading material.)

That's more a product of an inappropriate choice of orthography. I'd be willing to bet his non-English readership was somewhat better at getting the names right, as would those with a Classics education (and given the age of his writings, much of his initial fanbase would've had such.) When a real constructed language is used, the problem of conveying the correct pronunciation becomes hilariously complex, since the orthography has to be internally consistent more than it has to be transparent to the reader.

Still, there are ways authors can provide cues—have characters mispronounce the name ("Leg-o-laz?" asked Frodo. "No, it's more like Le-go-lass," said Gimli. "I wish I could actually hear you saying that instead of just having to read it on the page," whined Pippin. "This example isn't really going where it was supposed to," said Gandalf.) or use an alternative orthography when English speakers use the name in an English context.

In my experience, having been to a university where it was up to the individual professor, they claim it's a matter of copyright, and want to retain the rights to control the distribution of their lectures in case they decide to monetize it or something. And I'm pretty sure some of them just don't want there to be a permanent record if they make a mistake!

Personally I'm a little sceptical about the "last quarter" part. The tablet market isn't saturated like the PC market is, making it an unfair comparison. And since a PC is still more essential to most households (and laptops can be price-competitive with tablets), it's inevitably going to be the preferred thing to upgrade in the long term for those who can't afford both pieces of hardware. It seems much more likely that the demand for tablets will eventually decline once the market's more mature, and stay in the shadow of the PC until the content creation situation changes, especially with cannibalization by so-called "phablets."

Think of all the embracing, extending, and extinguishing they could've attempted! Probably not a good business decision, in retrospect. I bet MS's phone market share would've looked a lot better if they'd developed a super-fancy Exchange-oriented business email client for a line of custom Android phones rather than developing WP8.

I had a somewhat longer post prepared originally, which was essentially a complaint about how no one ever seems to go the imperialist route for naming and call things Betelgeusian (notable exceptions: Martians and Terrans.)

The natural thing for two cultures in contact, at least up until the later half of the 20th century, was for words to be assimilated more fully. The silly letters get massaged into something more legible, and sometimes even calqued or translated. Hence for hundreds of years we had "Canton" instead of "Guangdong" for a certain Chinese province. Still unfamiliar, but not rawly alien.

In my opinion it would make more sense if we saw more of these compromises, particularly for far-future settings where lots of contact would've been standard. Eventually new words, no matter how alien, get assimilated.

As a hobbyist conlanger, I can say with some certainty that very nearly all sf and fantasy authors outsource alien names to infants. The only rule is "if their language consists of nothing but noises humans can't pronounce, just bash your head on the keyboard."

More perplexing still, the funding goal is half a million dollars. Not quite the shoestring budget that Kickstarter dreams are made of. At last, a crowdfunding project that has something for everyone... to sigh at!

For what it's worth, from TFA:

So it looks like the backlash is relatively minor.

That's the key. Make 'em once, and afterwards it's just quizzing and homework help. It's generally less work for the profs and TAs, especially since the students can re-watch parts of the videos at will. (You might be surprised at how many professors still won't let students record their lectures.)