Sorta saw the writing on the walls for this one and stopped buying and recommending HP a few years back. Tell folks to buy Brothers. I got a nice color laser all in one for about $400 four or five years ago and it works like a dream. Can still set your PC to do B&W with toner saver and get lots of life, but when I need color, it is there and very good quality. None of this BS like HP is doing. Fsck HP.

I read TFA all the way through, very well written, plenty of details for a geek to get close to emulating, had me on the hook. Started to look at the current pricing for the various bits and pieces, got to immersed and it it $15/month, a subscription that is quite expensive for as the article states quite wonky and needs lots of fiddling to even get to work well. This seems like just an infomercial for immersed. It is a cool setup I would love to try as I have a similar job that would do well with a much larger virtual desktop like this to keep it all open and available to stay in the mind space. My employer would never pay for it, and would not allow it on their hardware, but for now it would probably work with the HVD setup used in our current remote stance. But one piece of the setup alone is $15 / month, more than most entertainment subscriptions, or even Office 365, very over priced for what looks to be very beta software.

I had a customer way back when that ran an old thin net coax cable from his main building where the office was, across a creek in the air to a warehouse. Any time there was a lightning strike nearby it would ride that cable and fry all of the ethernet cards and if it was a really close strike the motherboards as well. The customer had a service contract with us and we had to tell him each time, this is not covered. Always a fun trip :(.

I am sorry, that is a poor analogy - car would be more like airplane. An hobby RC airplane or helicopter is not required to be registered with the FAA, why should a hobby RC drone? My hobby go cart, or RC car / truck do not require registration then why the hobby drones? They are really no more capable, just popular.

You did not specify where you were building the home - North with heating concerns or South with cooling concerns.
In the North I have found one of the best heating methods that is very comfortable and economical is radiant in floor heating with PEX tubing in concrete floors so you get a nice thermal battery and very good heating characteristics.
In the south some of the posts on ground loop heat pumps are very good advice.
Lots of insulation in either case. Radiant barrier in the roof. Living roofs can be very beneficial as well.
Metal roofs can be very long lived, but can be very noisy during storms.
Maintenance free exteriors are also a godsend.
The comment on the higher basement ceilings is also very good, I wish it was an option when I did mine.
Conduit to at least 2 places in each room is also good to a central wiring / electrical room.
Conduit between basement and attic also is something I wish I had done as we added spotlights out back and security cameras, would have made it much easier.
Home automation systems are a nice to have, control-4 seems to be a very good high end system with good support.
Lots of closet space, more than you think you need, bedrooms, bathrooms, attic floors, etc. people tend to collect tons of stuff.
Over sized garage - wider than the cars you tend to put in and deeper - lawn mower, bikes, patio furniture in the winter, kids stuff, and on and on.
The indoor wall sound proofing is also a great idea - we did a little for the master bedroom and bath, but not enough.

Just get the laptop with the specs / price you want and if it has Windoze 8 on it install one of the many programs, many free, that make it look / act / feel like Windoze 7. My family has had two laptops die in the last month or so, one right before x-mas and one two weeks ago. I replaced them both with good deals, but both had Windoze 8. It is a horrible OS for laptops, but I installed a free program call Classic Shell Setup that makes them look / feel like Windoze 7 for the most part and the wife and son are happy.

I don't know, have you tried Verizon customer disservice recently? My neighbor went with FIOS and they burried the fiber 2" down. His lawn service aerated his lawn and broke the fiber. They came out an ran a temp fiber over the top of his lawn. After 3-4 calls the next crew came and buried a new fiber 18" deep. They would not hook it up though, had to have another appt for someone else to come out and do that. They missed three separate appointments, each 7-10 days out and he finally opened the box on his house and the one in the ground and figured out how to swap them himself. I had a business with DSL and whenever they have an outage (every bad summer storm) the DSL went down. When I would call I would get the same BS and they would not dispatch anyone unless the DSL modem was directly hooked up to a PC, no router, etc. they did not support them. Verizon SUCKS. My last few support calls to Comcast have went well surprisingly, they have actually gotten better in the last few years. I used to dislike them almost as much as Verizon.

Hi, I tried K9 and NetNanny and they caused as many problems as they cured with Windoze errors, etc. I currently use OpenDNS and as they get older allow more and more content through. It has a very nice side effect of blocking all of the nasty virus sites and has pretty much ended the drive by PC infections. If (more like when) your kids get smart enough to learn how to change their DNS manually a simple firewall rule in your router can block DNS traffic to anything other than OpenDNS, just make sure you have a very secure password to your router (I initially did not and the my oldest figured out how to unblock things :) ) If you want to really lock things down you could try something like Untangle - it has a free version for your own hardware. It is a bit more work, but will get you very solid network control and security. All the talk about parenting is of course valid, just not the one stop solution some people think it is. Good luck.

Just about every grid-tied inverter manufacturer offers a version similar to this where it can charge batteries and then run off of them when the grid goes down. The main difference with these is that this packages the inverter, cut-over-switch, and battery in one unit instead of separate ones. It is less flexible, but maybe more convenient for a home brewer. The real need is for an inverter to be able to run off of the panels without a battery when the grid dies. Managing load is the problem here, how to make the best use of the limited electricity being delivered by your panels to a power hungry house.