The difficulty is in understanding what you want. If I sometimes get choppy performance in a game, does that mean I want faster memory or more memory? If I want good rendering performance in Blender using OpenCL, what is the break-even ratio of core clock speed/core number?

There are some serious questions regarding the history syllabus in Japanese schools.

Freaking love Renoise, but trackers aren't for everyone. I use it in combination with a DAW (Logic when I was on Mac, now REAPER running in WINE like a champ on linux) for beat generation and sample mangling.

Another vote for REAPER here. Runs very well in WINE as they actually test it. KXStudio is a nice distro that provides useful tools for a low-latency setup and will even install REAPER for you.

Is MS Word really "all-purpose"? I'd say it was optimised for middle management.

Mine is idling at the moment; I couldn't get an acceptable audio setup. I wanted it to pair up with one of my synths (Novation X-Station) which has an audio interface, so I could use it for playing long samples, backing tracks etc. Wouldn't have minded if it had just turned out to be too slow or unstable, but I think the problem is a mixture of not enough USB power and general poor linux audio. Ah well, back to my netbook for that application, and it was cheap enough that I don't mind having it kicking around for a rainy day project. Home/SSH file server, perhaps?

Are you seriously using IQ scores as a meaningful reference point while arguing that people may be under-appreciated if you judge them with arbitrary quantitative measures?

(Not that I doubt your story -- depressingly plausible.)

Because the phone manufacturers who use standard usb connectors are having so much trouble...

"Secret codes" or "cipher codes" are countable. So are "weather simulation codes".

You've hit on a really interesting point with construction kit songs. It is now common knowledge that anyone can download the tools, read some magazines and *produce* a track. What's a shame is that there is still very little knowledge of how to *write* a track.

There are plenty of blogs, forums, articles out there, countless books on theory (I'm sure I could find something second-hand for pennies....) So why are there entire subgenres of music that are unable to execute a basic modulation? And why do the handful of pop songs that modulate up towards the end do it so, so badly? Has there ever been a hip-hop track with a tempo change? Why does every emo band think that "vocal harmony" means doubling the line up a third? (Not intended as a slight on the specific genre; at least they acknowledge the presence of more than one musician in the band to do the singing).

We need to get people listening to better-written music. The industry filter was never a big help.

No there isn't. You just don't know what you want or how to find it.

I'm fairly sure that dashes can also be used in the manner of matched commas or ellipses – as is common in gothic literature – but they do carry a little ambiguity. I find the main benefit is that they reduce the formality of the text – as in speech, sometimes the pacing of a flow of ideas is of more interest than the exact relationships.

Perhaps the rule should be that a person has to demonstrate proper use of a semicolon before they are permitted to use a long dash?

We're familiar with RAS syndrome (redundant acronym syndrome syndrome). YAML expands to "YAML Ain't Markup Language", making this his YAML ain't markup language ain't markup language markup language *headsplosion*

[citation needed]

You want to live in a country with no legal system? The judiciary is part of the government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_power