Well obviously :) It is possible to get decent ensemble sounds with some work, and piano is pretty well covered these days. But good luck with solo woodwind or strings, the expression takes so long to program.

That said, if I just need some legato violins to pad out a track I'm not going to hire a quartet :)

If you want to record audio, use synths, etc, I'd recommend sticking with one of the big boys: Ableton, Cubase, Sonar, Logic, FL Studio, Pro Tools. Compatibility is a big deal and unless you have a compelling reason to pick something more niche it'll likely cause you more pain than it's worth. Synths are all either VST for PC or AU for Mac, and they work in all the DAWs. You won't want just one, most of us end up with 10's or even hundreds. If you're looking to do anything realistic in terms of orchestral or acoustic sounds expect to spend $$.

The only thing you mention which is a little specialist is notation support - I know Cubase does a decent job of that and some of the others (FL, Ableton) don't support it at all. Something to research.

That's a lot of backdoors being uninstalled!

Sega are anything but happy...

It matters because it demonstrates that current management don't know what they're doing. Given that, there's no reason to expect them to suddenly figure it out and start doing better, which means the losses are only going to get worse. These things rarely come good, the downward slide is VERY hard to get off. Unless they find their Steve Jobs the long term future is bleak.

I think the proportion of the population who have a computer at home and use a different one at work is a lot greater than 5%.

I'm sorry but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. I'm going to talk about iOS jailbreak because that's what's interesting, Android devices are inherently less secure than iOS out of the gate so the conversation there is different.

The jailbreak defeats two primary security measures - the barriers protecting one app from another and the signature checking on the binary to confirm it hasn't been tampered with. If you are running on a jailbroken device it's trivially easy to hook the binary and essentially make it do whatever you want, and it's doing so with the credentials of the legitimate user. So as a simple example for a banking app, I could modify the binary to wait for you to login successfully, then email me your credentials and transfer a couple thousand $ to my account. If I can get physical access to your device I can install it in seconds, if not maybe I can persuade you to download it from Cydia. The server side would not know this wasn't legit, and you wouldn't know it was happening and the device wouldn't have any way to prevent it. That entire class of attack is made basically impossible on a stock device - the app is signed by the publisher and if you start tinkering it'll fail to execute.

Now as you mention I could obfuscate the code, that'll slow down someone trying to hook it but it won't stop a determined attacker. I could pin certs, but again if the device is jailbroken I can just replace the certs with my own. For the same reason it's impossible to really secure a general purpose computer that doesn't use something like secure boot it's impossible to guard against attackers if you're app is running on a jailbroken device - you can't trust the underlying OS and you can't even trust your own binary - you're screwed.

The very first thing anyone writing an app which has security concerns needs to do is figure out an effective jailbreak detect. It's not an exact science, and no detection routine will be perfect, but it's the number one most significant defense.

I find the keywords "public" and "private" work very well for that, no need for a separate file :)

But the problem with religion is because it's made up it can account for any observations - you just change the story. You can't beat fiction with fact that way.

Naturally asynchronous, NodeJS allows vastly more I/O than a similar threaded solution. Need to implement long polling for 2,000 concurrent users? Not a problem

And it's not a problem in any other decent server side language either. Async/Completion Ports for .NET, NIO/Mina/Grizzly/etc for Java.

The ability to share libraries and other code effortlessly between server-side and client-side applications

I'm struggling to understand why you'd ever want this (assuming a web application, which is a fair assumption as you're talking about JS). Your business logic lives on the server, your presentation logic on the client - and never the twain shall meet. The only thing I can really think about is data type definitions, but JSON does a good job of simplifying that (and something like GSON will deal with the conversions). Now I have wanted to share code between server and client in a rich client application, but in that case I could build both sides in either .NET or Java and be perfectly happy.

Because we, as a civilized society, look down on things like human trafficking, organized crime, extortion and so on. These activities require the ability to transact large amounts of value in untraceable ways, and so to the best of their ability the government try to prevent that.

This isn't about stopping this guy from doing what he was doing, it was about making him follow the same rules that everyone else who does similar things follow, which is more about keeping records than anything else. If he doesn't want to follow the rules, then fine, he can stop doing the business. His call - but no one MADE him stop.

It's amazing to me to hear the constant screams about Wall St "criminals" who need to be regulated even more than they already are, but heaven forbid the bitcoin freedom fighters get caught up in some of that regulation! The hypocrisy is truly breathtaking.

Or you could just, you know, walk down the street and pick up packages left by the UPS guy today.

I see this type of comment all the time and yet I get packages from Amazon left on my doorstep multiple times a week. They're left in plain view, just like the drone would, and in 5 years of living here I haven't lost a single one. Sure if I lived in a large city I might not have a doorstep to leave it on, but I get the impression they're aiming this plan pretty squarely at the suburbs, and package theft just doesn't seem to be an issue here.

What's to stop someone from forcefully taking a UPS truck, then placing it into a garage while they disassemble it and get the free hardware?

Not much, other than the law. People steal delivery trucks sometimes, and they're a lot easier to steal than an aircraft in flight. The concept of delivering packages by wheeled vehicle still seems to work despite this flaw.

The old one was a panny 42" that weighed 70 something pounds and pulled nearly 400w! The new one is 50", 50lbs and around 140w. Still heavier and thirstier than an LCD but so much better looking.

I have a plasma TV that's about 10 years old. I just replaced it with a new screen because it was getting to the point where the contrast was noticeably low. Still works just fine (and no burn in), just the picture isn't as good as it used to be. It's probably done I'd guess 20k hours and this is 10 year old technology - the plasma I replaced it with will last much longer.