Same here. I'll be acquiring my first HDTV in the next month or so. I've got a few Blu-Rays on account of being able to watch them via my PS3 and because I was able to get good deals that included a digital copy. But, I'm just now comfortable enough with the price and feature mix in the HD space to start caring.

What a whiner. I use a Mac every single day for doing web development. Know how I get over the fact that I'm not deploying to a Mac in production? It's called a continuous integration (CI) and staging setup! You build your app locally and ensure the core of the test suite passes and then you push your changes up to CI where everything gets run against a test server stack that should be nearly identical to your production environment. And if the CI passes then the code get auto-deployed to the staging server for QA evaluation by the client, or other responsible party. And after they've signed off you kick-off a deployment of the code into production. And if I can't, don't want to, run CI and staging environments outside my system, I can fire up Parallels or VirtualBox and create a test environment. Boo hoo! This problem isn't remotely interesting unless you don't know what you're doing.

Banning the possession of firearms by civilians will ensure that only tyrants and criminals will have them.

Unless you are going to do a whitelist approach I would use the hosts file to address adware/crapware issues and then use a content filter to address porn/mature content. If you want to go the whitelist route I'd use OpenDNS or DansGuardian since they both have that capability and then you don't need to worry about the hosts file.

Because it's worth the time to have them start learning what is possible. All my kids, except the youngest ( 2 y/o) work on the computer for school and recreation. They all also go outside and engage with the bright orb of the sky. It is possible to do both and not be any poorer for it. I spent some time at the kids track that was organized for RubyConf a couple of weeks ago and while much of the stuff was too much for my six year old, she still really liked hanging around and doing what her dad does as best she could. She even went home and played "geek conference" with her siblings afterwards, keynote presentation and all. Not to mention all my kids love seeing what can be done with an Arduino. I got started programming not much older than my oldest daughter is now and I was in Boy Scouts, so I spent plenty of time going back and forth between equally fulfilling activities that exposed me to a broader range of what is out there to do and enjoy.

Whether you keep him using Windows or load up a flavor of Linux I'd put a good hosts file on there to block adware and other known sources of crapware. Beyond that, you could setup something like Dans Guardian or set the machine to use filtered DNS services, such as OpenDNS. If you are gonna keep Windows on there then there are tons of commercial filtering products out there, all the stuff I mentioned is free.

I use the output of my test suite. Between the unit, functional and integration tests this provides a great specification of what my software is suppose to do and what the various internal APIs are. And the great thing about the test suite is that I can prove to a certain degree that the software conforms to the spec because the spec itself is executable and actually exercises the software. Specs that you can't prove are accurate are useless anyways, write a good test suite and use testing tools that output human readable results. Since I work in Ruby predominantly those tools would be mini-test, test-unit, rspec and cucumber.

I'm a Ruby developer in New Orleans, LA and I wouldn't want it any other way here in this city. My skills are in high demand, but that is the state of things here in New Orleans. There is demand for other language developers, mostly PHP, but not nearly the quality of jobs as what is available for a Ruby developer. I suspect that the right answer to this question is highly contingent on the place where one wants to live and work. In San Francisco I know the situation is even more exaggerated than it is in New Orleans with Ruby developers being even more highly in demand.

The answer to this question is always to look around and see what is needed where you are. If you want to move then look at what is in demand where you'd like to move to. In either case, answer the market by adapting your skills. And why choose one language when you could choose multiple. Be a polyglot and pick up Python, Ruby and Erlang. Paired with a knowledge of C/C++ and Java those five languages should keep you in demand in most major markets. PHP developers are a dime a dozen, and the pay reflects that. Only the best PHP developers make good money, and even then I've found it more lucrative to know Perl, than PHP.

But that is just what I know.