Of course this has nothing to do with the fact that Microsoft just moved its German Headquarters with about 2000 employees from Unterschleißheim (near Munich) to Schwabing (in Munich), and is now presumably a major tax payer in the city.

It's interesting that heptatonic is currently at only 5%. The vast majority of western music, both classical and contemporary, is based on heptatonic scales. The same goes for arabic music, most indian music, and many other musical traditions around the world. This makes me think that the poll results are severely skewed by the fact that "pentatonic" is the only term most people will have heard of. And "octatonic" kind of sounds familiar (an octave as eight tones, right?), which probably doesn't help either.

And the dumb will deny that anyone can understand the sampling theorem and the anatomy of the human ear because they can't.

I pity the dumb.

Spatial memory, maybe; but this has nothing to do with muscle memory. The way you hold a cell phone is very different from the way you "hold" a PC keyboard. I for one have never wanted to type on my PC's numpad using my two thumbs...

I thought the PlayBook wasn't even released yet, and they're already thinking about replacing it?

(a confused BlackBerry user)

Best mouse for any work that isn't intrinsically mouse-centric: none

I agree that ALSA sucks (for many reasons, the hideous API probably being the most important one).

But, as an application developer, you simply shouldn't use ALSA directly, it's not worth the hassle. If your app does any "serious" audio work, use JACK. Period.
If you're aiming at the average desktop user, use another high-level audio API. PulseAudio appears to be a good choice.