I don't think you have much to worry about.

First, Drupal 7 has been in development for a *long* time, so I wouldn't worry about when Drupal 8 is going to be released.

Secondly, many projects have rolling support options. Where features have a two version rolling window of support. If you were programming for Drupal 6 you probably should have been keeping an eye on Drupal 7 to see which calls/apis/etc were being discarded. This would have limited the amount of rework to move to Drupal 7.

People here do a great job riling me up

1) destroying the value of the US dollar,

You are blaming the US government for this? First, I disagree that the value of the dollar is 'destroyed'. Since I don't see your citation, I will provide mine: http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol=/EURUS/
Further, do you think the governement has a lot to do with the economy? I think the people who irresponsibly [traded|mortgaged|spent|etc] are to blame for our current condition.

Continue to believe the government when they say there is no inflation

The little I know about economics tells me that much of it is a mind game. If the masses lose faith in the system, the repercussions are magnified. If people keep a calm head and try not to do anything drastic, the 'invisible hand' of the market will correct the inefficiency with minimal collateral damage. I recognize that it is a fine line between outright lying and slowly announcing truth to help minimize effect. Like I started, I am not an economist, and from the sounds of it, neither are you. Let us both decide to keep our sweeping generalizations to ourselves, and try not to believe everything you see on Fox News.

I have been waiting, as patiently as I can, for ARM based netbooks with the A9 chip. The ARM integrators have a window of opportunity to effect the netbook/smartbook market significantly. The current Intel Atom offerings are, IMHO, not very good. The licenced Cortex-A9 chip can compete with the Atom processor on a purely performance basis, and blow the pants off of the atom processor on a performance/power ratio. By delaying, Intel is slowly closing the power and performance gaps with new generation Atom processors. Once Intel gets close enough, the ability for ARM based machines to impact the market will be gone.

I fully understand that it takes time to bring the A9 to market, and a chip that can't run windows (I'm not including WinCE) has little appeal in the broader market. On the other hand, if integrators are going to put time and money behind new ARM products why use the A8? I long for when I can get my 2ghz dual-core ARM netbook with a 10" screen and all the connectivity I can think of.

I think Android has a lot of great possibilities, but putting it on the list of best OSes of the decade is similar to giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not saying it doesn't deserve being on the list, I just think it is a bit premature.

Call me old fashion, but I am a firm believer of do on thing and to it well. Your list of requests have a very broad scope and it wasn't clear if you expected one software package to do all of it. There are many great open source software packages for use with business.

GnuCash is an excellent accounting system to help you keep your financial accounts organized. I'm not really sure what is entailed with 'issuing a W-2' other than handing your employee a form. I have seen various companies use a combination wiki, dms and cms, all of which have many open source choices, to organize corporate data, and serve it in an clean and clear fashion to interested parties.

As far as tax filing software, it looks like this is not a foreign question to slashdot:

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/011259

One of the products offered in the above link is: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ Open Tax Solver

I am unclear what you mean by legal template. If you mean pre-formated document, OpenOffice.org has a large collection of templates you can browse through. If you mean canned agreements and contracts, they are around on the web, if you search for them. I must add IANAL so be careful using any generalized contract.

There are many products that fall under the "groupware" environment that are more standards compliant and easier to maintain than MS exchange. Exchange has long flouted many mail standards, locked you into using Outlook, and among other things is a bear to maintain on a large scale. The unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it will" can, and does, work well to achieve the same functionality:

LDAP for addressbooks
Choose your own IMAP server
Choose your own MTA
Choose your content scanner
Choose your webmail package
Choose your calendar server
(do I need to continue?)

While I admit calendaring is a little shaky as of right now. Things in this arena have been changing drastically over the past 1 to 2 years. Looking at packages like lightning and chandler for clients, and davical, cosmo, Apple iCal server and others. There is a very powerful product that I have not explored yet that does bring all these pieces together called SOgo (Scalable Open Groupware). These options are not perfect but do follow standards and are easier to fit into your work process.

This is great news for the F/OSS world. It will come down to how one defines "no significant overall cost difference". I assume this can be spun to fit anyone's needs. So I guess I am in the wait-and-see camp to see how far the governement moves into the Open Source world.

While I can appreciate your sentiment, you *can't* get a decent laptop for $500. You can get a laptop that will run XP or GNU/Linux or *BSD for $500. But the world uses Windows, and if you are going to be running Vista well, you are looking at $800 for the laptop. And while, that is phenomenal, TFA is trying to convey that over the next few months they want to take the $800 laptop and make it cost $500, and that $500 desktop to cost $400. Industries hurting now don't care where we are going to be in 100 years or even how far we have come in 10. The industry has been chasing this ever increasing sliding scale of performance. Consumers have benefited by getting more powerful machines.

Oddly enough, Moore's observations are still viable, but it is the economy that is going to slow the trend. Demand is shifting from the same price point to one lower. This will cause a momentary dip in the trend. Once the new price point stabalizes Moore's Law will again be relevant.

apt-get install compiz compiz-core compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-fusion-plugins-extra And you're done. There is a neat little window manager switcher called "Compiz Fusion Icon" that lets you toggle back and forth between compiz and metacity. I don't see what the big deal is