Most expensive, maybe, but best? Not if your goal is a transparent amplifier: one that takes an input, and reproduces that output as accurately as possible with a higher amplitude. Valves suck at this. An entire branch of mathematics (control theory) was developed to compensate for the horrendous non-linearities of vacuum tubes.

You may like the distortions produced by tube amps (or transistor amps outputting those same distortions via DSP), but don't pretend they're better at reproducing sound. They are demonstrably not.

Do you have anything conclusive that proves official sources (i.e. the IAEA and NISA) have reported anything incorrectly (or without later publishing the correction)? Media reporting inside of and outside of Japan swung wildly between "everything is fine" and "next Chernobyl?!?!?" with dizzying rapidity and little provocation. And I mean 'proof' other than dodgy blogs citing the-Geiger-counter-I-built-myself-but-never-had-calibrated.

The 'Pi can play 1080p h.264. At High Profile level 4.1 too, which means unfettered BluRay streams, not just main-profile low-bitrate transcoded video (as is usually the case with cheap devices advertising 1080p decode support).

This is cheaper, because it only needs 3 servos for the entire arm, rather than 3 for each arm segment, and still maintain independent segment motion. You can lock (jam) all arm segments, release one for motion, move it (reshape that segment) while keeping the others rigid, then lock it again.

The bytes on the NAND itself are encrypted and have not guarantee whatsoever of being contiguous. Even if you have a mythical public-key-breaking quantum computer at your disposal, you'd still need to arrange a few gigabytes of 4kb blocks (pages) into the correct order just to get the ciphertext to start with.

You appear to have fallen to the age-old (or rather, about 15 year old) myth that there is a readable 'echo' of a bit after it has been overwritten. This is false, and has been ever since the magneto-resistive head was introduced (and especially the GMR head around 2000). Even with a magnetic force microscope you're not going to be reading squat other than the current bit value (or rather, the current analogue value that would then have to be processed along with the preceding and following values into what is probably the bit that you wrote). While it may have been true - in the days when a R/W head actually had a little coil of wire in it and capacities were measured in megabytes - that you could throw a few hundred engineers at a platter with a MFM and maybe recover a little bit of coherent data, that is no longer true. The amount of data you'd need to comb through if you could recover it perfectly (which you can't) is so immense that you'd need an army working 24/7 for decades. Even if you knew the precise data you were looking for and it's precise location on the platter, if you wrote a single zero pass over that location no MFM would be able to read anything useful, or the same head that was used in the MHM would be used in HDDs and you;d be back to square one.

The ATA SECURE ERASE command tells the head to write zeroes over the entire surface of the platter. Regular write-random-crap-a-bunch-of-times software such as DBAN fail to erase sectors in the G-list, which could subsequently be recovered (albeit unlikely to contain anything interesting). it won't erase sectors in the factory P-list, but nothing was ever written there in the first place. This is sufficient to make any data that was on the drive totally unrecoverable. Hell, ATA SECURE ERASE is NIST-approved for government and military data destruction at the same level as physical destruction of the platters.

More like years rather than months unless you're pumping through terabytes of data a day. The point is moot, however: SSDs do not store data continuously like HDDs do: your data can be spread across blocks, across chips, compressed AND encrypted all at the same time. Take out the allocation table, and all that data is now randomly arranged bits. And because erased data on NAND is truly erased*, you just need to wipe that little bit of memory to effectively securely erase the whole SSD. If you wanted to be hilariously over-cautious, keep your allocation table on fast volatile memory.

* This is also true for any HDD in the last decade or two if you run ATA SECURE ERA SE command. All those fancy multi-pass erasers and mechanical destroyers are essentially pointless.

All we've got are Mini-Coopers with regular old bricks in 'em.

The hardware based transcoding is not necessarily better (see: the dire state of BBC's terrestrial HD broadcasts compared to the earlier 'test' HD broadcasts, and their stonewalling whenever people call them out on it and explain how to improve it). Hardware transcoders are used
1) Because they're guaranteed real-time, so you can pipe video through and just factor in a set time delay
2) Designed to be robust, so you don't need to worry about overheating, or the encoder choking on a certain bit of video

If you're not working on real-time video, you're always going to get better results with x.264 (and competence) than with a hardware box, or a hardware solution like QuickSync or the like. Hell, if you turn the quality settings down so the x.264 output looks as bad as QuickSync, the two work at roughly the same speed anyway.

Because Dropbox was a totally innovative startup, and nobody, NOBODY ever thought of some sort of way of remotely storing files before, no siree! And certainly noone ever had even the slightest idea that synchronising files between different machines could be a useful idea.

Yep. It's not a hologram, it's not 3D (volumetric or multi-plane), it's not even stereoscopic! It's a 2D cylindrical display that tracks the viewer's head location (i.e. only one viewer at a time) to simulate a moving perspective, along with a depth-camera (e.g. kinect) derived model of the target.

Have you tried MPC-HC? With the addition of MadVR for video rendering (processing at 16bit then downsampling/dithering for a surprisingly significant reduction in gradient banding) and Reclock for audio synchronisation, it's probably the best video playback you can get, from a PC or otherwise, before you start investing in expensive dedicated postprocessing hardware.

Not when your screen is several meters high. Gradient banding becomes VERY evident there (4:2:0? Hell no!), among other things.

Occasionally, but more often the footage and audio are just sped up, at least for the video and DVD eras. No longer an occurrence with Blu-Ray, except in cases of egregiously bad mastering.

This would be an incredible disincentive for me to buy your single-player game. I do not want a bunch of extraneous shit that requires me to buy your other shit in order to unlock parts of the game, I just want to buy the damn game. If I enjoy the game, I will retain it to play again. If the game is no good, it gets sold.

The trick to preventing single-player game resales is to make good games.