I'd move into a house that allowed my wife & kids to have more property for horses & horse related stuff
I'd put in a food forest, silvo pasture & raise some cows, & more pigs.
I'd put in a nice shop, wood working, metal working, laser cutter, cnc, 3d printer or 2. that way I could get back into wood working & just play doing stuff

I'd probably also take a really long trip (30-60 days) with my family to see the US,
I'd spend more time with my kids camping, fishing, horseback riding, etc.

Then possibly go walkabout when their older.

Who bears the risk of junior spilling a juice cup all over the expensive servers?

http://www.vthreat.com/ was founded, by Marcus Carey, accelerated by http://www.mach37.com/ and recently funded to provide "IT fire drills" to organizations. I'd say if you can get funded & launch a product, it's an important thing to be doing. At the very least have some table top exercises where you or others ask some what if's, then take the answers or lack there of and fix them, and do it again.

Many years ago, I ran a site called Half-Empty. It was an exciting time, I was in college, and had hacked together this site (letting my grades suffer in the process) as a way for people to share stories and vote on them. It was kind of like a ghetto version of Digg, where the users posted content not links.

One of the biggest thrills for me ever was when I sent an e-mail to /. about its initial launch and made it onto the front page. My dorm room was Slashdotted, I pulled RAM out of my roommates computers and threw it into my little server, which somehow survived. I knew it was inevitable my cable connection would be cut off so I sent an SOS out for anyone who would be willing to host the site for free, I was a poor college student, and Krellis from DynDNS stepped in. Half-Empty grew for a few years and became a large part of my life and many others. I owe the experience entirely to that initial Slashdotting, which gave the site the momentum it needed to stay alive. I regret not keeping the site up; it was a victim of a hard drive crash and I was enough of an amateur at the time to not have been making regular backups.

So, thanks again Rob. Good luck, and be proud of all you've accomplished with Slashdot. Cheers!

Passion isn't important. Cost and risk are important. The processes are put in place to (attempt) to minimize cost and risk associated with software development. Experience teaches us that cost and risk are very high when building software.

When it's your money paying for the development effort, feel free to structure it so that you can chase your passion.

I sympathize with the idea that this kind of bureaucracy can suck the life out of developers, but guys, this is work. If it were that fun, they wouldn't have to pay you to do it.

They're pretty close already: http://www.southflorida511.com/Cameras.aspx has pretty extreme coverage of highways in South Florida, and it could easily be upgraded to real-time tracking of cars with higher-definition, faster, and more low-light capable cameras. There's already enough camera coverage to do Open Road Tolling, by license plate tracking or an in-car transponder in the same lane.

Relying on each car to transmit their own position correctly isn't something that will work at highway scales; only now is it proving workable for commercial aircraft (see ADS-B).

PLAY TO WIN! PLAY TO WIN!

CD-R media wasn't terribly expensive as i recall, and as such i'd always get it in bulk and usually split the order with a friend or two.

Why would apple want to allow someone to create and market direct competition for it's own anti-theft service (MobileMe)?

Check this out -

Based around LUA, and its got a full online tutorial. He could be making simple games within a few days.

http://love2d.org/

Very neat stuff.

Uhh... 3 letters for you. D.N.S.

What about "Yes, but for beer"?!?! That's how i roll.
A 12 pack of craft brew and i'll work on most anything for family/friends hehe

My T500's wifi doesn't work in Ubuntu if I want to use the latest server kernel with 4GB RAM. I had no patience so I just bought a pcmcia card (time is money) -- YMMV.

My kingdom for a mod point. Sigh.

This generally isn't true. A VC will get preferred stock and as such in a liquidation event they will be able to recover their money before anyone else can. (So if you take on 1M in funding, sell the company for 500K, you're right, you get nothing and they lose 500K). I'm guessing this is what you're thinking of.

If you sell the company for 2M and they put in 1M, they get their 1M back and the rest of the pie can be sliced up in different ways depending on the term sheet. (Google participating preferred stock cap)