I use a Contour Roller Mouse and like it very much. It takes a bit of getting used to since its motion is somewhat different than a conventional mouse or trackball. This keeps my hands close to the keyboard at all times. The newer models have a number of buttons. I originally got it on the advice of an industrial ergonomist to address shoulder and neck pain from long hours at the computer (something that it has, indeed, improved significantly), but now find that I am more productive in all applications except CAD and graphics work. It is a bit expensive, but constitutes an interesting alternative.

I have been using an fi-6130 for several months now. It is quite simply the best scanner I have used. It is fast, highly reliable and very seldom misfeeds (1 per 500-800 pages in my experience). I use it for scanning archival financial records and also for technical papers. It includes a copy of Kofax Virtual ReScan, which does a great job of creating readable 1-bit monotone scans of originals with colored backgrounds. There are a number of possible target formats, and it has several automated ways of handling group separator sheets. I highly recommend it. I have seen no evidence of "marketing drone foolishness."

I don't work for Plexus, but I am familiar with some of their projects. From what I have seen they are a first class outfit.

While it is true that fonts may be embedded, it is also true that PDF provides the mechanism for proprietary fonts to decline embedding. This is general feature of some proprietary fonts. I run into this frequently with PDF documents that contain ancient Greek or Hebrew fonts. In about a third of these documents the PDF will not render correctly because they have used proprietary fonts that I do not have on my machine. In these cases, the document is completely unreadable since the Latin font equivalent chosen in no way reflects the underlying text.