kodak has been riding on it's own coattails for years, in both consumer and industrial products.
remember the disc camera?
remember the kodak instant camera?
both were crappy products and were only reactions to others who innovated in those respective markets.

i was sad to see scitex and creo(venerable names in retouching and printing) eventually absorbed into kodak to be used as a mean of driving their consumable business: film, chemistry, plates, and inks. kodak never improved or innovated industrial graphic arts production, unless it was thru acquisition.

kodak didn't innovate in the industrial or consumer markets, and as a result are left in the dust by their competition.
most printing presses are direct to plate, with no intermediate film or plate making process.
most contract proofs(color and content fidelity proof prior to press) these days are inkjet or pdf files displayed on color accurate(gracol or fogra certified) displays.
kodak never had offerings in database/dynamic page publishing.

i'm sure kodak had innovated quite a bit in it's day, and those patents are proof of it. but to use a patent against a partner feels a little dirty.
the original apple quicktake camera was a kodak manufactured/apple branded device.

this is the best advise i've seen so far... the best camera to start out with is one that will always be with you.
WTF moderators, why did this get a low score?

OP, unless you're dedicated to becoming a photographer and don't mind carrying around a DSLR all the time, you'd be better off carrying a small compact point-and-shoot camera. get something in the $200 range(8-12MP, 3x optical zoom) they're all pretty comparable, but i've always been partial to the canon xilim or canon powershot series. my criteria was a camera OS that was usable as well as quick and responsive. i've spent time in several stores testing various brands for what i felt were important features: power on to shutter ready; switching capture modes; the ability to turn off startup sounds/animations; size or a pack of cigarettes; sd card. once you've got narrowed you choices down to a couple/three cameras, go to http://www.steves-digicams.com/ and compare your impressions against someone whose tested many evices.

IMHO, if you want to learn how to take photos, you do it by taking pictures. don't get an DSLR. don't get a micro 4/3. you can graduate to these later, when your comfortable taking pictures. don't buy a camera that you haven't actually touched and toyed with.

1) carry a camera with you all the time.
2) take lots of pictures. if you get a one good picture out of 20-36 exposures, you're doing well.
3) not every picture is sacred. capturing the moment with all it's flaws is better than to miss the moment.
4) keep taking lots of pictures
5) don't be afraid to edit out crap images
6) learn the various functions of your camera(night shot, red eye/no red eye, flash/no flash, etc)

i take between 6000-10000 pictures a year(the camera is with me all the time). i replace my camera every year or so(depends on how beat up it gets).
and i get surprisingly good images from a stupid little canon powershot. i have a lot of reject images, but i also more than my fair share of keepers. eventually i'll get a fancier camera, but in the meantime i'm looking at a new refresh(canon s100 is looking sweet) for my daily shooter.

it is a concept after all, so some of it's shortcomings might be obvious to apiarist that aren't to the industrial designer who came up with the concept.

from a non-beekeeper perspective, some things seem lacking:
ingress/egress opening looks too small for proper venting... don't drones need larger openings in the summer to fan cooler air into the hive?
mechanism for extracting honey probably is destroying cells to release honey... wouldn't the bees build around this mechanism after a few uses?
i thought queens needed a special chamber

but i expect that you've inspired enough people to think differently, that you'll at least live on thru the memories and actions of an entire generation.

go analog for longest life span.

HP designjet z2100 or epson stylus 4880/4900.
these printers don't come cheap, but over the lifespan of the printer, i'f your printing 100's or 1000's of prints RIO will be better than paying snapfish.
they are favorite entry level printers in the graphic arts and prepress market due to the fact that:
1) they can produce contone images at resolutions that make dithering imperceptable to the naked eye
2) color fast inks that can be archival for 150-200 years
3) wide color gamut using multiple inksets
4) FOGRA/GRACoL certifiably using approved rip software
many pro photographers are ditching the darkroom in favor of the class of professional inkjet printers for reproducing their images.

two weeks away, and you still haven't spec'ed all your hardware?
c'mon, this is a put on!
if you're getting this monster installation, you would have spec'ed all aspects of the hardware, including 10gb and gpu's and OS months ago.

slightly off topic, but so long as we're discussing edison recording cylinders, i remember watching this poor guy crush an historic, irreplaceable cylinder record on tv. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqZWsJ2oO_E

even if it is an article regarding the evolution of the windows gui, truncating the gui history from engelbart and parc to the original mac os, and then switching to the history of the windows gui is pure horseshit.

windows is what it is today due to the development across many windowing and gui efforts.
microsoft has (often blatantly) borrowed gui metaphors from many of its contemporaries thru several iterations of windows including:
motif(cde) - expand/minimize/destroy window
openlook - WIMP metaphor
aqua - transparency effects, alpha blending
compiz - compositing
so on and so forth...

i'm not criticizing microsoft's efforts, but the skew of the article give the impression that windows 8 is where it's to due the sole development efforts microsoft, disregarding other community efforts. the author get's an "F" for failing to perform minor research on wikipedia for a history of gui's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI

i doubt that my company's customers data will ever move to the cloud... some data and/or customer data might move to the cloud, but not all of it. it's not about arrogantly proclaiming something wouldn't work, it has more to do with contracts and agreements that prohibits our customer data to be moved beyond our data center.

i've experienced over the years that toshiba has some of the best laptops around.
thinkpads were great when IBM was manufacturing them, lenova QC is getting better, but not as good as IBM was back in the day.
whitebooks/barebooks from sager/ocz whitebooks are great, but fit and finish are not as good as they could be...

go to best buy/microcenter/fry's/tiger and kick around a few laptops.
take a look at satellites and tecra models.
wipe the HDD and install just the OS(unless the recover disc restores OS+bloat, then get OEM XP or 7), drivers, and the software your wife needs.