You have to wonder, then, what will happen in the United States a few years down the line when the many social programs implode. Digging out of it seems impossible given that unfunded liabilities are, as of this writing, over $818000 per taxpayer (see bottom line) and that is an optimistic number (pessimistic numbers more than double that). Food-wise, with cuts to Social Security, I expect we'll have senior riots - old and slow and easy to machine gun down, but who knows what kinds of people the failure of the health programs will bring. Since I will be approaching being a senior around that time, I've been hedging against expecting anything from the government and likely will move out of the country before then (my wife wants to retire to Ecuador, I'd prefer Europe, as my German is far better than my Spanish).

And the NSA has nobody to blame for it but themselves - they've been intentionally weakening encryption for years just so they could crack it, so now it's come around and bitten them in the butt.

While mainly attributed to Franklin, that quote and similar ones were used widely before and during the Revolutionary War. He also apparently said it in different forms at different times. The stairwell plaque in the Statue of Liberty says "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." and attributes it to him. Even Franklin apparently used it with different contexts at different times.

The context of the letter to the governor in 1755 specifically refers to weapons for frontiersmen, which were difficult to procure for non-military personnel (most likely out of fear of a revolution, which was still 20 years away):

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Such as were inclined to defend themselves, but unable to purchase Arms and Ammunition, have, as we are informed, been supplied with both, as far as Arms could be procured, out of Monies given by the last Assembly for the King’s Use; and the large Supply of Money offered by this Bill, might enable the Governor to do every Thing else that should be judged necessary for their farther Security, if he shall think fit to accept it.

The completeness of such a thing is questionable, as speech is still largely protected. The government hasn't tried to push through the Sedition Act of 2015 yet, AFAIK (See the Sedition Act of 1918

It is at fault. It's the job of the wrapper to present a consistent interface to the things being wrapped. Otherwise, why even bother?

And yet the only PHP command line utilities I've ever seen are shells for controlling PHP web apps. I've never seen a PHP GUI app so I can't speak to that.

For being as allegedly suitable for developing those kinds of things, almost no one seems to be doing it.

Yes, it is. There are plenty of languages that can cleanly generate web pages and system and application development. Web frontends are important and popular, but hardly the end-all be-all of modern programming. PHP is losing a lot of ground to single-page frameworks like AngularJS. It never had ground for backend platform development outside a handful of visible companies: for every Facebook, there are 100 companies with Java or Python infrastructure platforms.

I contend that PHP is good at exactly one thing: gathering data from backing stores and formatting it as HTML. That's being quickly superseded by browser JavaScript or portable device apps that fetch the same data through REST and format it themselves.

PHP is Turing complete, so it's technically possible to write anything in PHP that you could write in another language. That seems to be about the most it's got going for it. PHP does nothing to help programmers write sane, maintainable code. It's almost impossible to develop without having a browser tab open to php.net ("The online docs are great!" "Well, they'd have to be."). There is zero consistency with things like argument order. Dangerous legacy concepts like "mysql_real_escape_string" are only recently deprecated and don't have a set removal schedule. It's a one-trick pony that's nearly useless outside its niche as a web page generation language. It's just a mess - a dangerous, unmaintainable mess.

I won't refuse to use an app just because it's written in PHP, but I do heavily weight it when comparing alternatives. PHP is a powerhouse in much the same way as McDonald's. It may be ubiquitous, but it still sucks and you have to question the judgement of anyone who chooses it to start a new project.

Well, that and the fact that many of us build ludicrously over-specced machines whenever we actually upgrade. "Well, I'll be watching a lot of Youtube videos, so 32GB of RAM, 16 cores, 16TB of spinning storage, and 2TB of SSD should just about cover it. Oh, and toss in a couple of GPUs because I've deluded myself into thinking I'll write a protein folding simulator some weekend."

Sometimes it takes a while for your technology to become obsolete when you've installed ASCI Red in your garage.

Surely not.

I'm not sure about that. My couch isn't all that far away from our 60" 1080p screen and don't notice individual pixels even in things like the on-screen channel guide. There's an enormous quality leap from 480 to 1080, but not as much of a visible difference after that. You'd hear a big difference between 22KHz audio and CD-quality 44.1KHz recordings, but few people except trained experts using special equipment could hear the difference between 44.1KHz and 96KHz. Well, same with video: the current standards are pretty close to the limits of most peoples' perception, and comes at a significant component price, storage, and bandwidth cost.

That's because your MBP has a hard disk drive that adds a lot of harsh harmonics to the signal. People who actually care about their video viewing use SSDs, which have straighter 1's and rounder, more organic 0's that improve depth of field and staging.

Tell your ineffective boss to GFY and upgrade to a real job. I'm not even joking a little. A shop that won't give you the tools to effectively do your job is a special kind of hell that no one deserves. Get out of there before your skills fall so far out of date that you're stuck for life.

Agreed, and I'd never do that. I asked it OP was sure that they weren't hardware problems on his own computer and not something more widespread. I did that because I haven't seen any of those problems myself and hadn't heard of them before now.

Also agreed. I've filed plenty of bugs to Apple's tracker over the years so that they know someone's affected by them.

Of course not. Apple makes Xcode available for free and you can use it to your heart's content. The paid license is for distributing apps through Apple's store. That's almost a requirement for iOS development (although you can install home-written software on your own stuff, I think), but not at all needed for Mac development. Lots of software is available via the Mac app store; lots more is available through developers' own websites.

They wouldn't be. Fortunately, they don't have to be.

What's the free equivalent?