The answer depends on where you want your career to go. But, regardless I would say that all programmers should invest the time to understand the business they work for so that they can best serve the interests of their employer. This is different from getting an MBA or studying business in the general sense. Programmers need to understand the problems that their company deals with, otherwise they're not going to see the best solutions.

As an example I currently work for a company that manufactures packaged food products. As the lead developer it is part of my job to understand how the business operates; from how our inventory is managed, to how our customers pay us, to how our shipping personnel process incoming and outgoing items. Understanding this and talking to people in all these areas allows me to spot inefficiencies and address problems, sometimes before others realize they are a big deal. That means I can help put technology to work in a way that makes our business more efficient, which leads to better profits and happy bosses and better compensation for myself and those I work with.

Unless all you ever want to be is a low-rung developer, or if you don't have any desire to stay with the company you're with long-term; then it always makes sense to get to know your business, and it will make you a more valuable employee.

That question would indicate to me that they're doing Agile wrong. Agile development ought to include a short feedback loop that includes not only the client, but automated tests. So, if this question is legitimate, then something is very wrong with how this project has been run.

FOSS ain't exactly a love fest, and they lack to direct profit motive of large corporations. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds aren't consistently known for being just the nicest guys you've ever met. The only open source community that overtly talks about being nice and polite is the Ruby community with it's "Matz is nice, so we are nice" mantra that falls down just as often as it shows through. Competition and even brutal competition are part of life, for good and ill.

At least the court has asked it it's even technically feasible; good luck with that.

Lawyers presenting evidence in a way that is beneficial to their clients? Outrageous!

Wait...Isn't that their job? And isn't the job of the other party's lawyer to do the same and, if possible, poke holes in their opponents line of argument?

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.