And what if by then there is no decent choice.

So you aren't familiar with how stack ranking works?

That is the awesome thing about Office. It isn't compatible with anything.

HP and Dell can give up any hope of a nice Santa Rally in sales this holiday season - for the third year in a row. A shame they took so long to get invested in Android. Samsung and LG are going to clean up this year.

That was one billion unique users accessing the Play store. Some people have multiple devices. Some people's Android devices don't access the Play store - notably Amazon devices and devices sold in China, and much of India. Two years is a long time. That would include the SGS 3 as well. It turns out that about one billion Android devices were sold just in 2013.

But what of it?. Does it offend you that some people prefer a more economical device? That not everyone feels spending $700 a year on a phone is a priority?

Makers are coming up with all kinds of choices. Over the top specs, great value entry levelop devices, long life phones, dual and triple SIM, special purpose devices. It is amazing. Let us not complain that at a billion units a year there are too many choices, and they all work together.

This was my first thought. Would be way better with Nexus 7.

There are crypto-currencies designed to be resistant to ASIC mining (though some are starting to get hit with GPU mining), by using algorithms that take enough memory or other complexities that are easy to do in CPU but hard to do on non-general platforms. Litecoin's one example.

Some of them might have enough market depth that a stolen-CPU botnet mining farm could actually make money on them. There was a recent hack where somebody mined a lot of DogeCoins, and supposedly got about $200K worth - it's just appalling, because while DogeCoin is supposed to be ASIC-resistant, it's also supposed to be worth so little that it's purely for fun and nobody could actually make real money mining it.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Most of them can be recycled easily between genres; the drummer jokes (or bass player jokes) are more likely to be about the players, while the others are more likely to be about the instruments themselves, but either way.

I did see somebody the other day with a t-shirt captioned "First violinist problems", showing a musical staff and a note about 10 lines above the staff.

That's what all the weird minor keys and modes are for.

The sitar has several things going on with it

• -- The body has a chamber made from a big gourd, and a wooden neck with adjustable frets.
• -- There's a layer of strings that you pick, optionally pressing on the string over a fret to change the pitch.
• -- There's another layer of strings underneath that resonate when you play the note they're tuned to on the main strings, which provides some amplification and a lot of sustain; that's one of the things that gives the sitar its characteristic sound.
• -- In addition to fretting a string when you pick it, you can also bend it to the side, changing the pitch dynamically, which is another characteristic sitar sound. Guitar and bass players also use this technique, but sitar strings are long enough that it's easier to do.
• -- Generally there are two or three strings that you'll play the melody notes on, and several more strings that you pick without fretting, letting them drone like a mountain dulcimer; that's another characteristic sitar sound.
• That's most of the technology parts; the rest is about the music itself.

Indian classical music theory is complex, at least as much as European classical music theory or jazz. There's a lot of stuff about "ragas", which are a combination of a scale or scales, melodies, fixed parts and improvised parts, with a lot of rules about which ones are appropriate for which situations.

He's not joking.

Open emacs.
Type the command "xdoctor".

Best part: no copay.

The reason why it's so cheap:
We all pay a shitload of taxes to fund wars to conquer lands where we're extracting the stuff.
We don't pay for destroyed habitats, and climate change (yet) from waste, spills, and other pollution. (basically, we're borrowing from the future generations who will suffer directly from these problems).

When compared, as an energy source, with something like solar pv, factoring these hidden costs in, gasoline is astronomically expensive.