As a credentialed geek who loves coffee, I of course purchased an Aeropress straight away upon hearing about it. I used it every day for about a month, experimenting with type of coffee, grind, water temperature, and pressure/amount of time pushing the water through. PROS: It's easy, and the coffee is good. No reason you can't make a delicious cup of coffee with this once you nail down the perfect combination of the above 4 things. CONS: (And this is the reason I stopped using it.) It uses a LOT of coffee to make one good cup of coffee, more than any other method. Your usage will just about double per cup over other methods. The other drawback for some is that it only makes one cup at a time and then you have to reheat the water while you clean it and refill it etc. for the next cup. My recommendation: If you've never tried a "mocha pot" stove-top espresso maker, give it a try. (They have electric ones too but they cost a lot more.) Of course the easiest and simplest to use and clean up is a simple cone filter over a carafe. Many people swear by the taste and simplicity of a French Press pot, but they are a little messy. Enjoy the journey!

I haven't seen the numbers in a year or so, but the last I heard, most people that bought an EV do not buy another one when it comes time to replace it for whatever reason. In other words, people who could afford one and were on board with buying one do not love it enough to replace it with another EV when the time comes. I'd bet a huge percentage of those who say they love it feel compelled by societal pressure, plus the accolades and oohs and ahhs from their friends. Once the long-term limitations begin to chafe, they quietly move back into gasoline powered vehicles. NOTE: These statistics were collected before the Tesla was around, so maybe it's just the carsof a few years ago (Prius, I'm looking at you!) were not there yet.

What about the hole they have to drill in the carapace, and the fact that they have to cut the antennas to attach the electrodes? You had a choice to poke holes in yourself (I doubt you did the equivalent of cutting the antennas, whatever that would be) for a good that outweighed the bad. The fact that the roach has no choice, no ability to choose, is part of what makes this wrong. If we had to chisel out the horse's teeth, or break it's jaw to put in the bit, would that be okay for you?

I'd like to see this put to a poll of the Slashdot users. I have a feeling I know how it would go, but I'd love to see it in numbers and percentages. For myself, until we know how to create a cockroach (not that I would want that!) or any living thing... like an ant, for example, from scratch and give it life, I think we have to be very careful to ask ourselves ethical questions such as this one. Do I believe in killing bugs and such? Sure I do. But I actually try not to unless I think it's necessary. The "ethical dilemna" is embodied in the word "necessary" and that's where you have to answer for yourself what responsibilities we have, if any, to other life on the planet.

I had a very small song I needed to put into sheet music, so I figured I'd download a demo of one of the main (Windows) notation programs, Sibelius. Great program, very full-featured and complicated. Awesome program, but HUGELY expensive for a guy like me. Then I grabbed MuseScore, which is free (as in beer), and WOW! What a fantastic program! It has most (if not all) of the same features as Sibelius, but it's open source! Now they are working to facilitate braille! I know anybody could be doing this, but this is the kind of thing that makes open source stand out. Good for them! A big-name software company selling proprietary software would probably look at the size of the blind musician market and decide it didn't make economic sense. Since open source software isn't about making money on the software itself, they do this because it's a good thing to do and, yes, it raises their visibility for about 15 minutes, but it's really just cool to do! Good job.

But what about my iPhone 3G? (And watch it! This is a family show!) If they were really serious about it being "for the good of the environment" or whatnot, they would take back even the venerable 3G. (And I'm not talking about the 3GS. I know they take those.) I don't see that happening!

You still don't get it. It is radio. You, like a lot of people, think of transistor radios designed to receive AM or FM medium-band broadcasts and convert them into sound. But what you don't seem to grasp is that a WiFi transmitter and receiver is definitely a radio, just like your cell phone is a radio and the remote control to open your garage door is a radio. As a licensed Amateur Radio operator, as long as I make sure the signals are not encrypted (such as with SSL) I can increase the power of my WiFi router way more than the off-the-shelf limits, because I am a licensed RADIO operator. Get it?

This quote is a little off: "The distance between wifi waves is shorter than that of radio waves...". It is radio, at 2.4 GHz. (first post?)

Yes, but how will we opportunity the challenges created when the synergies created by fully incentivized participants don’t leverage the learnings?

So, I guess you haven't bothered to read the previous posts? Amateur radio the world over relies on the non-political, non-commercial nature of the communications. The minute you allow encryption in a way that cannot be quickly and easily decoded by any interested party, this service will go away. Completely. For all of the reasons cited above.

That's an exellent point, and a good topic for another thread. Why is amateur-band equipment with better features cheaper than commercial-band equipment? In olden tymes, "business" or "commercial" grade meant sturdier, able to handle higher duty cycles, etc. but with electronics that's all moot. And when the taxpayer has to foot the bill, and the people buying the equipment don't have to pay for it out of their own pockets (not dirctly, anyway), then we have typical government spending issues to deal with. This just gets added to the (LONG) list.

(I'm an amateur radio operator, btw, and I couldn't agree more with the OP from Bruce. Allowing encryption on the ham bands is a BAD idea for the reasons he gave.)