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.

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.

The primary distinguisher of the Ivy League schools isn't that they're rich or that they're exceptionally high quality (though generally they are.) They're a group of colleges that a century or so ago made an agreement with each other not to have athletic scholarships, so the students could play amateur sports against each other instead of having to compete with semi-professionals. Yes, occasionally a student at the Ivies is good enough to get into the NFL or NHL, but they've got to spend time being a student as well.

No surprise.

US Courts, particularly the Supreme Court, generally prefer to make narrow decisions instead of broad ones. Occasionally they'll make a fairly activist decision, like the Miranda Warnings, or the Exclusionary Rule that says cops can't use illegally obtained evidence, but most of the time they'd rather decide a case on some relatively narrow grounds, such as rejecting somebody's argument because they didn't file the lawsuit before some deadline, or didn't have standing to make the case, or there were specific details as well as general legal principles and they could get the conclusion they wanted in this case based on the details instead of having to make new laws.

In this case, if I understand it correctly, they went sort of for the middle. They didn't throw out the whole concept of software patents, but there's a large class of software and business method patents like

Claim 1: Something obvious (or well-known, or prior art, or otherwise unpatentable

Claim 2: Do (Claim 1 thing) with a computer! (or On The Internets!)

Claim 3: Profit!!

and they've tossed those out. That's separate from an earlier class of patents, from back in the days that you weren't able to patent software, that would take some algorithm and describe a machine that implemented it, in ways that sort of got around the rules by claiming that some competitor's software was a software implementation of their hardware design and therefore infringing.

Vacuum tubes weren't particularly quantum, as long as you don't count "electron acting like a charged particle" as quantum and are dealing with large enough currents that you don't care about counting the precise timing of individual ones. Basic electrical forces do the job fine.

Transistors may be doing quantum stuff, and tunnel diodes are the classic quantum thing.

That's been the big question with D-Wave all along. What does it really do, how does it really work, what's it good for, is it real?

Everybody knows what a universal quantum computer is good for - running Shor's algorithm to do factoring and totally wrecking public-key cryptography, plus whatever other problems people care about in the real world. But general-purpose quantum computers so far can't keep enough qbits entangled together to factor numbers bigger than 21 = 3x7, and if anybody's figured out how to do significantly bigger than that, they're keeping it Really Well Hidden (either because they're a government, or because a government will want them to do stuff, or because a government will want them killed.)

Meanwhile, D-Wave has 512 qbits that they claim they'll be able to do something with, and maybe it'll have a chance of being cool or useful. And maybe if you kick in enough megabucks to get a non-disclosure agreement, you'll be able to get some information beyond vague quantumy handwaving. They are the only game in town, after all.

An ordinary $1000 i7 laptop or Xeon server? Or an ordinary $10million mainframe (if you can still spend that much for a mainframe)?

Traditionally we use half&half (causing the rest of the world to ask for a translation; it's a thinner cream that's halfway between milk and whipping cream.) It's available in little ultrapasteurized single-servings as well as fresh.

But if keeping the dairy products refrigerated isn't convenient, there are powdered imitations that deserve the contempt you've expressed, and liquid imitations that are excuses for corn syrup and artificial flavors, and also non-dairy creamers for people who can't tolerate lactose or want something that's kosher to use at a meat meal.

My high school chemistry/physics teacher would boil water in a beaker over a bunsen burner to make his instant coffee with. The water was hard enough that the beaker had a sludge just from that.

After being exposed to Turkish coffee, my reaction has been "if the spoon falls over, your coffee's not strong enough."

But even when diluted by emigration to America, some parts of Scandinavian coffee culture remains. My experience with various church groups has been that the Lutherans (and spinoffs of Swedish Lutheranism) make better coffee than the Methodists I grew up with, and Southern Baptists make worse coffee (they're really iced tea people.)

Mining pools and custom hardware do make it possible for a large enough group to get over 50%, especially as the need for mining hardware crowds CPU and GPU miners out of the game. We'll see whether they decide it's more useful to stay over 50% and cheat, stay over 50% and not cheat, or split the pool into two or more pieces to keep the value of their Bitcoins higher than they would be if the market abandons Bitcoin because of perceptions of cheating.