I don't personally use FB, but my wife has a business with a heavily liked Facebook page. She has made the same observation about many of the likes coming from Egypt, Philippines, etc.

From what she's told me, when you "Like" something you can tell your friends, but you have to be friends with them anyway in which case you can already send them messages. Similarly, you can post on the company's page, but you can already do that without "Liking" it (and her page doesn't get very much spam - maybe one message every 2 days or so). So it doesn't sound as though liking things gives you any ability to send messages to people that you can't already send messages to. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm very curious to know what motivation there could be for people to create fake accounts and "Like" things with them. It's ridiculous that the BBC article makes no attempt to even speculate on the obvious question.

Oh God, I can't not think about it now!

LOL. I'm tempted to say "whoosh" just so I can find out what a hotdog mine looks like.

spend the first sentence wondering why on earth they called this thing "Shortly"?

I can't figure out from your description what the problem is. What do you mean by the "junction of two scopes"? Are the scopes adjacent or nested? Are you intending two blocks to combine into one, or for a level of nesting to be removed? An example is needed.

If there is a genuine problem here I suspect it is with your editor. I've been writing C++ and python code in roughly equal measure (for a living) in emacs for about 10 years, and I've never had any problem along the lines you seem to be describing. I don't really prefer one approach to indentation/whitespace over the other. They both work fine, I have no trouble switching between them and IMO there are vastly more significant factors in choosing a language, as the grandparent says.

Everyone's a noob at something.