PHP is the boring, reliable choice. It's popular enough that it's probably still going to be mainstream in twenty years. The ease of entry means a steady stream of neophytes who end up checking out PHP at their first web language.

It's not a pretty language but you can be reasonably certain that for the forseeable future it's going to stay. It's nowhere near as nice as Ruby on Rails or Python/Django but it does have a huge market share so there's both relatively many people who speak it and a lot of ready-to-use code, from snippets to frameworks.

The huge amount of available code is a bit of a mixed bag, though - PHP attracts a lot of entry-level coders and in many cases it shows. On the one hand you have things like Twig (a clone of Django's template engine) that are a delight to work with; on the other hand you have things like most WordPress plugins, which consist of barely-working code written by someone who thinks that "model-view-controller" involves Kate Moss staring at a gamepad. The fact that PHP makes it easy to write code that is wrong but still runs doesn't help here.

PHP has flaws. A lot of them. It's a pretty annoying language to work with. But it's not going to fade away anytime soon and that is its strength. If that makes it desirable to you then PHP is a reasonable choice. If it doesn't you might want to stay with Perl or take a look at trendier languages like Ruby, Python or JavaScript.

It'd probably have a 5" display, quadrophonic sound and an octacore CPU and run an unmodified Windows RT. Due to weight concerns most of the battery had to be sacrificed, limiting its life to an etimated fifteen minutes - but no other smartwatch has both Office and HDMI and you can always use the USB port to hook it up to an external power source if you want to use it on the go. You see, Microsoft gets mobile devices.

Or they decide they actually want to make money and release a generic Android-based smartwatch. Their Nokia arm doesn't seem too hung up about reinforcing the Windows hegemony if it gets in the way of business.

Sennheiser has a lot of stuff on the market. You can get a pair of Sennheisers for twenty bucks. They won't be terribly good but they're actually a decent stepping stone if you want to get people off five $CURRENCY supermarket specials without scaring them off with a huge price tag.

Now, there are great budget earphones. If you like in-ear monitors you might want to try some from Visang/Brainwavz or VSonic. Both companies tend to punch above their weight in terms of sound quality while having reasonable prices.

Thankfully, European DVRs don't need to encode video when they're off. That saves a lot of power. (The 0.5 watt thing only applies to standby mode. While the DVR records it's not in standby and thus the regulation doesn't apply.)

I used to say that SSDs aren't mature yet and cost way too much. These days I find that most of the technical issues I have with them have been addressed, the sole remaining one being that HDDs tend to have kinder failure modes. SSDs have come of age and are desirable even to a relatively conservative buyer like me.

Now if I could only justify the price... (The only computer where an SSD would be relevant for me is a laptop with a 500 GB HDD that typically sees heavy load. An SSD that fits my storage requirements would put a serious dent in my finances. Oh well, perhaps next year.)

Apoc wasn't that bad. It was flawed but still enjoyable, although I think that some of the cut content would've made it even better (like tracking down people to uncover alien infiltration attempts). The premise was silly but I do like the gameplay. Plus, there were these sublime moments like when you realized that your desperate tactic of throwing swarms of hoverbikes at the UFOs was actually pretty effective. Overall it might not have been quite as good as the first one but it was still good.

Now, Interceptor and Enforcer; those games were horrible. I wholeheartedly agree with you there.

I'm pretty curious how Xenonauts turned out. I bought it during the early stages of development (back when it was more "crowdfunding" than "early access") and the last version I played was an alpha where the game would crash if your soldiers tried to pick up alien guns. I remember the ground combat being good but the interception minigame being pretty annoying.

It'll be interesting to see what has changed since then.

You mean something like no more Groundhog Day bug, native multiplatform support, mod support, tons of bugfixes, a replacable soundtrack (with Amiga and PSX and Cydonia's fall, oh my!), three-dimensional explosions, no more Groundhog Day bug, all sorts of XcomUtil-type fixes/mods optionally available, TFTD-style battlescape controls (like being able to open doors without walking through them), strafing, radar ranges displayed on the geoscape, Apocalypse-style persistent soldier equipment, no more Groundhog Day bug...

And did I mention that they added support for shotguns? Because they added support for shotguns. They're fun.

Seriously; the original XCOM was great but OpenXcom makes it better. If you think about starting up DOSBox to run the original try OpenXcom instead. You'll like it. (And no, I'm not affiliated with the project; the closest I came to that was to think about a mod that completely replaces the aliens' equipment. Because the world needs space AK-47s. Alas, I lack the time.)

How do our normal organs keep from gworing anarchically and without limits? They'd presumably try to use the same mechanism for their new organs. As for the immune system, perhaps they could base the organs off the recipient's DNA (such as through stem cells), which would make rejection less likely. It'd be expensive as hell, though. I do agree that we'll take some time getting there.

Another interesting question would be that of failure modes. What happens if your fancy new electric pancreas gets infected or develops cancer? This could make operations rather interesting and lead to some unusual new medical conditions. Nothing insurmountable, I'm sure, but medicine would become more complex when these things are involved.

I mean, on the one hand we're facing the infinite power of bio-augmentation but on the other hand we'd be facing a future full of people who have to wear sunglasses because their vision is augmented, not to mention a transitory period where everyone is hooked on anti-rejection drugs except for a few guys who didn't ask for augs anyway. And things go badly we might end up with a near-omnipotent guy in the antarctic presiding over a world full of forgettable characters and crummy gameplay. What a shame that'd be.

Why? Is there another computer or gaming console with that name? The only other tech-related "Pandora" that comes to mind is a music streaming service and I doubt that anyone is going to confuse those, so a trademark suit seems unlikely to succeed.

To be honest, the Pandora actually looked pretty good when it was announced and still fairly passable when it was released. Nowadays it's decidedly unimpressive for it's price, though.

Remember that many people still use earbuds for five bucks with such a bad quality that they honestly can't tell the difference between a 128 kbps MP3 and CD audio. Beats may not be good but they are vastly better than ultra-cheap earbuds.

Then again, so are other earphones with smaller price tags.

No, that's one problem with Python. There are others like it but this one is mine. (Well, and a few others but most of the good ones were already mentioned.)

Python, the language with radix conversion functions so inconsistent it makes PHP look well-designed.

(PHP: base_convert() can convert from any base between to and 36 to any base between 2 and 36. Python: int() can convert from any base between 2 and 36 to base 10 but String.format() can only convert from base 10 to bases 2, 8 and 16. There are no other built-in conversion functions. Admittedly, converting to thoer bases is rare but they could've at least make it consistent in both directions.)