Yeah, it works far, far better with XML which opens up a lot of new stuff you can do for web publishing and other non-printed documents.

Also, you need be grumpy no more. Microsoft has a free pack you can download that makes it so Office 2003 can read and edit .docx files, although the XML stuff doesn't transfer over: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=3

Also, you're wrong about Detroit's planned obsolescence. The 70's were actually the end of Detroit's grand planned obsolescence tradition. Saying that cars "only" lasted 5-10 years shows how unbelievably spoiled we are by the quality of cars made in the last 20 years-- in the 50's and 60's you were doing really well if you got 5 years out of a car and getting 10 years was unheard of. "Malaise era" cars of the 70's and 80's had lots of mostly smog-related performance issues, but they were no worse than cars from the so-called "good old days" in terms of longevity.

The real classic Detroit planned obsolescence scheme wasn't mechanical, it was aesthetic. In the 50's and 60's, most cars got restyles every year with basically no purpose but making last year's model look old. That, along with huge marketing budgets, meant that most people traded in every 2 or 3 years. Changes in society and economic woes mostly killed this practice, but the crappy-performing cars Detroit cranked out post-Clean Air Act helped, as did the simultaneous arrival of Japanese cars that ran better and actually DID last more than 5 years.

In the end there's no difference, you'll still have an iPad, and you should pay the same price. If you have any questions, the people at the Apple Store will know a LOT more about the device, and they'll be able to help you set it up more effectively, and probably won't try as hard to up-sell you on data plans and such. Personally, I would go with the Apple Store if there's one nearby, but if you know what you want and there's an AT&T store around the corner, you'll walk out with the same thing.

Flash/Silverlight is just a performance hog. You're unlikely to ever stream flash videos without issues.

Even when they're not wrapped in Flash, netbooks usually start faltering when they're asked to play videos higher than 480p as well.

Routers fall into 3 categories:

1) Enterprise level gear, Cisco, Juniper
2) Appliances (hardware and software)
3) Linux/iptables or BSD/pf (or other OS/firewall implementation combos, but these are the most mature and common)

Cisco makes great products that are very expensive, require a lot of knowledge to operate well, and are super overkill with only 100 users. I believe their simplest router is the ASA series and a 5505 costs around $500 for the hardware and a basic license. The more advanced license for more than 2 VLANs (most places need 3 minimum: WAN, LAN, DMZ) and auto-failover costs around $1000. Prices go up exponentially from there.

Hardware appliances have had a long history of putting UIs of varying quality around their own poorly coded blackbox firewall software or, more often, an open source implementation like Linux's iptables or BSD's Packet Filter (pf).

The first thing you should know about hardware appliances is that hardware is for suckers. Everything is going virtual now a days. I got recommended Kerio the other day and their "Control" product seems not shitty. Here is a writeup on it that has screenshots of what you're interested in: http://aplawrence.com/Kerio/winroute-advances.html

But notice it is not a box you buy and plug in. It's just something you install... in Windows. Or virtualize as an appliance in VMWare or Parallels.

Anyway, I have never paid any attention to category 2 of routers because I either use Cisco or use open source solutions by hand. Not much help there.

I am a strong supporter of the third category, specifically OpenBSD and pf. My preferred firewall setup is a pair of OpenBSD routers (~$500-600 in hardware off of newegg.com, I can be specific if you like) in an auto-failover setup. You can pull the power plug out of the "master" one and the "backup" seamlessly takes over without losing any packets.

Routers are almost always a single point of failure so I think it's very important to make them redundant, preferably auto-failover. This is a good argument for keeping your routers and switches separate: it is very easy to make routers auto-failover, but it is difficult to make physical switches auto-failover.

Anyway, in open source land, pf, squid, tcpdump, standard Unix utilities, and your favorite scripting language can do everything you're after. But I think you want something a little more automagic, so go for the craps-shoot appliances.

Not easily with non dual band Airport. Netgear routers have Guest Wifi, and you can allot X ammount of bandwidth. The newer Dual Band Airport's can do it too

My company bought a netgear for 50 bucks, it works quite well.

Here's an article on how to set up an airport for guest access

http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/create_guest_wifi_network

It has directions for securing a non-dual band Airport, but its a real pain. I'd just pick up a cheap netgear, or if you have money, upgrade your Airport.

As capicola pointed out, Flash is already available for Android phones, though you need to have Android 2.2 or higher. Most newer phones have been updated to this version, but if you're unsure of what you have you can check it in your Settings under About Phone.

As for on your iTouch... never. Apple has been very anti-flash. Apple users seem to think that having the option of viewing Flash means they're somehow forced to spend all day running flash and their phone is going to melt down. Flash on my Android phone has been responsive and I've never once had a problem with it. You can make it so Flash objects are "on demand", that is off by default and you choose what you want to load, so you don't have a bunch of ads or Flash files you don't want starting unexpectedly. It's great for being able to view websites that still use Flash or videos that don't have mobile options.

It depends on what you mean by "interactive."

If you want to simply have links in the book to other parts of the book, you're in luck, because that sort of thing is very easy, and you can do it using software like iWork Pages or Microsoft Word. Here is a small tutorial with some templates you can use (this is the first result I found in Google, and I don't know this man or anything about his ebook, although he looks vaguely like Bronson Pinchot, who in my opinion is underrated.)

The short version: Create a document like any other Pages or Word document (with some special formatting considerations) and export to ePub. Once you've got an ePub file you can submit it to whatever various e-bookstores (including iBooks, where it will then become available on the iPad) and then sit back and wait for the Pulitzer. This approach is easy, and lets you get the material out to the most possible interested parties with the least amount of effort and hardship. The downside: it's only "interactive" in the barest sense.

If you want a paper doll of William Blake whom you can dress up in various outfits and who will giggle like the Pillsbury Doughboy when you touch his belly, that's harder. Some people mean this when they say interactive book, and if that's what you mean too, you'll need to learn some hard-core programming. That book is more an application than a book, and it was made specifically for the iPad. If you want to do that, you would need to learn Objective-C for the iOS app, Java for the Android app, and for the Kindle and Nook... well, forget it, they don't do that (nor should they, that's not what they're for).

The app was likely put together by a team of people: programmer, illustrator, designer, Lewis Carroll. Unless you are one of those talented and hard-working few can do all of those things, or you are a leader of women and men who can corral some programmers, illustrators, designers and Lewis Carroll into doing that work for you (and you may be!) then this route may be too much to squeeze into spare time between the career you already have. But! If you're up for it, the University of Washington has classes. If you're not in Seattle, it's likely that the university nearest you has a similar program.

If you want something between those things, you might consider HTML5 and Javascript. Check out this beautiful e-book written using HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Pretty, right? The upside of this approach is that it's available to everyone regardless of their platform, and you can do some fancy, William-Blake-paper-doll type stuff using only these tools. The bad news is that it's only really a "book" in that the words and pictures are framed by something that looks like a book; though it renders properly, this particular book doesn't really perform well on mobile devices. You could do something like this with one version for the web and another version for mobile devices, if you were so inclined.

I'll leave you with my favorite William Blake quote:

When ye set out to make an interactive book
In pursuit of understanding literature
Be wary ye don't look up in ten years and say
"D'oh! I accidentally became a web developer!"

Places like Car Toys should carry dock connector cables which provide both cigarette-lighter power plugs and 3.5mm (headphone-style) audio-out. Here's one that converts USB and 3.5mm audio-out:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=108&cp_id=10831&cs_id=1083101&p_id=6226&seq=1&format=2

You can find cigarette lighter to USB power adaptors (monoprice has one for a dollar, back-ordered, and a bigger one for $8), so now you've got you a way to keep the iPod powered, and bypass the dodgy headphone jack.

Mate your audio-out with a 3.5mm female-to-female converter:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10401&cs_id=1040109&p_id=678&seq=1&format=2

... and now you're ready to connect a 3.5mm cassette adaptor or FM rebroadcaster. The FM device should provide better best-case sound quality, but it'll vary depending on its competition for frequency and will require batteries, unless you find a way to run it off the same cigarette-lighter inverter as your iPod. See also:

http://questionland.com/questions/12116-ipod-transmitter-for-car-radio

Outside of the smaller phone-sized "tablets" like the Dell Streak and the Archos 5, there's not a lot of Android tablets on the market currently. There's a couple 7 inch tablets too (Archos makes one), but they're still smaller and pretty bare right now. Android isn't really optimized for tablets quite yet. However, there's tons of tablets coming up that are definitely worth waiting for.

The ICD Gemini looks great. Feature rich, powerful, sleek.
Notion Ink's Adam has been a favorite for a while, known for it's Pixel Qi display; I'm still waiting to see where that ends up (and hoping it isn't vaporware).
Then there's the Cisco Cius (another 7 inch), which is focused on business and video conferencing.
Archos is coming out with larger ones, Google is rumor to be making their own with HTC, Samsung, Sony, LG are all rumored to be coming out with Android tablets. Which ones will be worth buying we'll have to wait and see. You'd regret not waiting until the end of the year to see what comes. If you're really itching for an Android device, there's awesome phones on every carrier (Nexus One, Droid X, Galaxy S, EVO 4g) which will serve you better than a tablet right now.

Ok, you are in a difficult but manageable predicament. You have options.

EDIT: These options will only work on OS X

Free option:

Open your desktop iTunes, create playlist of music you don't have on your laptop (sort by date added maybe?) and burn that playlist to DVD/CDs. Import those into the laptop. Download and install this script (very easy to do, don't be scared) http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=thistagthattag Fix the metadata on the files you just imported so artist/album tags are correct. In iTunes, click View Duplicates and go through and delete the dupes manually.

Pay option (much faster and easier):

Download iTunes Manager ($10)

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/ituneslibrarymanager.php

download Import/Export Between Libraries script

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=exportimportitlm

Follow the included directions.

Download Dupin (not free but worth every penny) (make sure to get the right version for your OS)

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php

Let Dupin do the comparing and deleting for you.

There are two solutions I'd suggest. The first is to string an Ethernet cable, with a repeater. The Ethernet specification says that cable runs without repeaters have to work at a range of 100 meters. There's nothing stopping you trying to work with 200 meters, though it will get flakier with added distance.

Alternately, you can buy a Ubiquiti Nanostation (A Seattle retailer sells them: http://metrix.net/ubiquiti-nanostation-2-ns2-p-110.html -- disclaimer: friend of mine). You may wind up having to mount it on a pole, as trees and terrain are horrible for wifi signals. You'll pretty much need line-of-sight.

I've worked with Nanostations before, and I highly recommend them. They're really nice: they come with a pole mounting, are pretty much weatherproof, only require a single cable (the network and power are run in the same cable) and have really handy signal-strength lights directly on the unit.

This isn't my particular area of expertise, but this thread implies that you can turn of the OCR option, and that would be the first thing I would try. As you said, it looks like it's trying to recognize something in the document and mangling it, where you just want it to save the PDF without doing and conversions.

http://objectmix.com/adobe-acrobat/214493-disabling-recognize-text-using-ocr-option.html

Well, if you've got a Black Lotus or Ansestral Recall, I'll give you ten bucks for it ;)

Comics shops often buy/sell good cards. Cards worth little won't interest them as much.

Dreamstrands, Gary's Games in Greenwood, Gamma Ray Games, Golden Age Collectibles, & Comics Dungeon would be the first places I'd call to inquire, in that order.

I love the LaCie Rikiki drives in a way that is probably not healthy. A couple reasons why I love them so-

They are:

- small. The entire drive is easy to pack and carry around, and it sits comfortably on the palm of my hand.

- solid. When you pick the drive up, it has a definite heft to it, and the case feels nice and tough.

- backup software. You can take it or leave it, but the backup software the company pre-loads is pretty decent. (Reformat the drive if you hate it though).

- warranty. Something like 2% of external drives will fail within the first year or two you own them, and if you are in the unfortunate 2%, LaCie is really good about warranty service. Just make sure to register your product with them online.

- relatiely inexpensive. LaCie lists them starting at $70 for 250GB and you can find them on sale at different websites.

You might also want to look at the upcoming Epic 4G, which is Sprint's version of the Samsung Galaxy S. It matches the EVO in features, but it has a nicer screen and a keyboard. AT&T (as well as the other two major carriers) are coming out with a Galaxy S variation, but Sprint's is the only one that has a front-facing camera and a keyboard. I'm not sure of its release date, but I would say very soon, and it's something to check out in comparison to the EVO (though both are awesome).

As for syncing, look into doubleTwist: http://www.doubletwist.com/dt/Home/Index.dt Which is a syncing solution for Android.

Yeah, we're aware of this problem, and the cause, but it's not quite as simple as it seems. Our blogging system takes text typed into a web form and converts it to real HTML. That means detecting single and multiple line breaks and translating those into break or paragraph tags, respectively. There are a lot of other conversions going on, too, all through the magic of regular expressions.

The way a blogger typically enters a blockquote is to put a couple line breaks and then start the quote. Since blockquotes are "block elements" in HTML-speak, when it contains multiple paragraphs, we end up with incorrectly nested tags. We've tinkered with it over the years and improved it some, but it still chokes on multiple paragraphs.

Some feed readers are fine with this, but some don't like it so much. We'd love to get it fixed up right, but it hasn't made it to the top of the priority list recently.

iRiver and Griffin both make decent ones. Decent has a caveat, of course, as some people can't abide the sound quality of an FM wireless transmitter no matter what, but you're already used to one.

If you get the iRiver one, be aware of one horrid quirk: while the sound quality tends to be great on it, it shuts itself off if it detects no signal for a few seconds. With any kind of pause between tracks, or quiet stretches of music, that will drive you insane very quickly.

A wired FM transmitter for satellite radio can be wired into the back of your factory headunit quite easily, and you can use the connector for iPod as well (I sometimes do, although I love my satellite radio). Most shops will only charge about $50 to hook it up for you, and the sound quality is miles beyond wireless FM transmitters.
http://www.myradiostore.com/p/metra-antennaworks-44-fmmod02.html?cmpid=f0t90e0110p1629c0001

The other answers here seem to be about adverts/trackers on web pages and similar; but I think there's more in your question, especially since you say that this happens only on the PC, not on the Mac. (For the most part, web pages behave the same on PC vs Mac.) Bubbles that hover over your cursor in Windows Explorer sounds like it might be Window's "tooltip" feature: if you hover the mouse over a folder on the desktop for example, a tooltip will appear with the name/size/location/date of the item.

If that's what you're talking about, you can disable them in Windows Explorer as follows:
* Windows Key + E together will bring up a folder. Any folder will do for this step, actually.
* Alt+T, then press o to select the Folder Options... item on the Tools menu. Folder Options dialog should appear.
* Click the View tab, and scroll down the Advanced Settings list to find "Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items". Click it to turn the option off, click OK, and you should be done.

This will stop some of the tooltips (and likely the most annoying set) from appearing. They'll still appear in other apps - eg if you hover over the toolbar in Office, and in some web pages - eg. hover over the thumbs-up graphic beside the question and the text "This is a good question!" appears - no easy way to turn that off that I know of.