My son, who is a talented piano player, disagrees. He has played some of the electric piano `replacements', and he says they are interesting to play, but the real thing is still a far richer and interesting instrument.

There are still plenty of effects in real pianos that are not emulated properly. Two examples: resonances in the other strings of the piano when you strike a string, and striking a key, leaving it half-pressed, and striking again. The piano pedals are also not easy to emulate, I understand, but I don't know the details.

Since the OP asked in parentheses for spectrum analyser suggestions, he seems to be interested in cheap measurement instruments in general. I don't think a logic analyser is too far off topic.

But at that stage the hope is that the masses of voters like these laws so much that voting against them would be political suicide. Therefore, the Super PACs will have to make these laws controversial in some way, and they will have to start as soon as they can. I have no talent in this area, so I don't know whether these ideas grab your guns, are socialist, harm your children, support terrorism, promote unions/homosexuality/abortion/government, continue the war on christmas, are an IRS complot, don't have a proper birth certificate, land you in FEMA camps, deserve a dog whistle, or introduce death panels, but the mud will be ready.

I'm sure the Eye of Sauron is already on this initiative. The memos have been written, and the mud will start flying as soon as it gathers any momentum.

I totally agree, now please explain how am I using this argument, because I don't see it.

The ECHR he is ranting about is the European Court of Human Rights. It is one of the reasons rightwing parties all over Europe are against the EU: it annoying insists that humans have rights.

This is possible in almost any modern language, although in some languages the code will be so horrible you can wonder if the cure isn't worse than the disease. For example, in C you could wrap tainted data in a struct that is only touched by a few select sanitisation functions. (You would still have to make sure no lazy or malicious code pokes around in the struct, or casts away this protection, but you could write a tool to check that.) Similar for languages like Python, although again it is easy to get around the isolation, so discipline and checking is still required. Languages like Java (or Swift :-)) are strict enough that you can almost completely enforce this isolation rather than rely on disciplined programming (I say almost because you cannot block access to I/O functions, so in principle you could still ignore the isolation, and directly access the tainted data). In C++ you can make the isolating `wrapper' almost transparent, but all the C trickery is still available.

I think it is fair to say that an important reason that these techniques are not used is cultural. Building a watertight taint wrapper in C (the most common language for this kind of code) is tricky and boring, and there is a lot of Real-Programmers-don't-Need-Handholding mentality among C programmers.

More like a mixture of functional languages, Python, Java, Objective C, and C#, but you have to know those languages to recognise that.

A pretty solid mixture, in fact. So far what I see I like a lot!

Why do you think Swift is platform specific? I think it is will almost certainly not be; Apple will be more interested in getting the new language adopted rather than locking in people. Therefore at least the core language is very likely to be neutral. In fact, there is a pretty good chance it will be available through the llvm channels, and have a BSD license.

Metal is more likely to be platform specific because the goal is to give more direct access to the hardware.

For sufficiently loose definitions of "working tablet", you are of course right. Like those Microsoft thingies that everyone stayed away from in droves. Or Apple's own Newton.

So why was the iPad the first massively popular one? Because Apple produced one that was actually useful rather than started people cursing in the first few minutes. That took them years of experimentation and polishing; there is a reason there had been rumours about an Apple tablet for years before it was actually introduced.

It's easy to think up the concept of a tablet, and even to build some vaguely functional prototypes, but until Apple came up with hardware that was light and sturdy enough to be practical, and software that made the limited environment useful, tablets were something you only used if you absolutely had to. And Apple had nobody to `sponge off', this was Apple's effort only.

As far as I'm concerned this effort deserves the word 'invented', but by all means go for `reinvented' if it makes you feel better.

By that standard the Wright brothers were not inventors either, because all they did was sponge of real inventors, and bolt a lightweight combustion engine to some pieces of wood and cloth. By any sensible definition, Apple invented the tablet. Yes, there had been attempts at tablets before the iPad, but they were just as effective as airplanes before the Wright brothers. You're still allowed to hate Apple and Jobs all you want, but fair is fair: they did invent the tablet.