I've recently been working my way through an excellent book published by the ACM following the companies and products which resulted in the modern networking stack we take for granted today: Circuits, Packets and Protocols: Entrepreneurs and Computer Communications, 1968-1988. It's an amazing history of dozens of companies, products and people most of which have been largely forgotten or (at best) relegated to footnotes.

I believe all of this is possible (even multiple SSIDs with one router) with OpenWRT or DD-WRT on certain hardware, but I never got it working right. I just ended up using an two Linksys routers (one with open wifi, one encrypted) and pfSense as a router. You can even do this with just pfSense and couple wireless cards. Private wifi bridges to the local network, public is on an isolated subnet. pfSense traffic shaping keeps users in check. I have a QOS class for "public" traffic which is limited to a couple mbit/sec down and few dozen kb/sec up. Rock solid, more than I can ever say for either of the Linksys routers.

I found pfSense: The Definitive Guide to be a decent dead trees source for getting started with pfSense.

While it's totally overkill for the job, I highly recommend you run a Zimbra Open Source instance for yourself. Although you don't need much of what it provides (Calendaring, contact sync, Jabber IM, etc), it will let you store your messages in a stable, searchable and accessible form. Zimbra can directly import from PST or via IMAP (with your mail client or imapsync) and once it has your messages it full text indexes them with Lucene and so you can search them via the web or IMAP clients. You can easily get your messages out via one of the supported export formats or just use your IMAP mail client to dump the messages into mbox/maildir/pst/whatever. While you could certainly roll your own, why not let someone else take care of all the hard work for you?

Create a dedicated Skype account which is set to auto start video and accept calls from it's contact list, add your skype to that contact list and you're all set. All you have to do is click call whenever you're in your kitchen and there will be a video uplink. Runs on windows or mac with any old x86 box and webcam, pretty close to $0. Just make sure the PC doesn't go to sleep (more than $0).

Of course you can. You just need their permission to use the photo for commercial purposes, like an advertisement.

This could have some neat applications. You can encode a large amount of information (like a detailed map of the world) in something the size of a marble and read it without power using an optical microscope. If done well, this could have applications for things from a modern rosetta stone to providing reference material for schools in places without electricity.

Desktop icons, yes. Toolbar icons, IIRC, no.

so I guess only people unsavvy enough to use MACs will have their addresses recorded! Whew!

Sorry dude, that is against the law in Mass. I've even been in a car where the driver was pulled over and given ticket for this. If you enter an intersection while it's green, but cannot make your left turn before it turns red, you've broken the law. :(

From the Mass RMV Drivers Manual:
"If you are crossing an intersection, make sure you have enough room to make it completely through. Never block an intersection."