Low taxes? You obviously don't live in Portugal.

Developers have no problems hacking their favorite environment, linux, windows, whatever. It's the hardware that counts. Personally I'd like a development laptop that would be:

• - Very high resolution
• - 4:3 format
• - mate screen, enough of that bright crap
• - Powerfull CPU and RAM
• - No internal DVD drive, swap that for an additional HD or Battery
• - present that in several options, from 12 to 17 inch. Developers do travel sometimes, and they love to take their gear with them.
• - a very good keyboard, with decent feedback. IBM M-Type would be great
• - Button to disable trackpad.
• - A good docking station to hook up external monitors, keyboard+mouse, etc.
• - Easily removable everything, battery, ram, HD, etc.

Do that and I buy one.

Well, according to yesterday's news, they could probably pay for the air conditioning if they stopped recording tv shows.

And why exactly a predictable film can't be great?

I quite agree that it doesn't deserve so many awards, and for me it's a 7/10 (didn't like how they switched from explaining how he knew the answers to the love story), but your points are highly debatable. Good acting doesn't make a good film (see Doubt), neither any of the other components in separate, it's the sum of all parts that makes it, and they don't have to be all good. It helps, but it's not mandatory.

Oscar awards are an expression of how the academy sees film, not public in general. I follow oscar awards for quite some time, and the main reason is too see films that I otherwise would ignore.