It's plausible enough that Django released 1.5.4 to limit password length. Yes, they later 1.5.5 which removed the limit, but it still showed that it was a possible problem in some implementations.
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - I chose it because it matched the OS we were running on our servers, so matching environments made my life as easy as possible. I've also used Ubuntu extensively in the past, along with other linux environments (Linux Mint and ArchLinux come to mind), but went back to Ubuntu because it was my first that I spent a lot of time in. It supports everything I needed for school (LibreOffice for documents, OpenJDK for most things Java) and gives me the flexibility I need. The LTS allows me to ignore the 6 month releases and still know that I am one a supported platform.
You don't need a MacBook Pro to program, and in many cases it's useless for some applications (Windows applications). You can get away with a really inexpensive computer, which really lowers that number of resistors. But the important part is that you can just buy one of them, unlike resistors where you will always need to buy more to continue innovating.
While I definitely won't be using Visual Studio for web development (it just doesn't feel right to me), I wouldn't say Visual Studio is an awful product that should be avoided. Compared to VS 2005 (remember those days?), VS 2012 is far faster and much less of a pain to use. For anyone starting out with web development who has used VS before, it would probably work fine and suit their needs.
That is, unless your projects are giant. Then you might start running into a bit of unresponsiveness, but nothing worse than Sublime Text or comparable editors.
https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/sep/15/security/