but his desire to prioritize the "freedom" of systems over those systems actually doing anything useful is totally unreasonable.

That's a great theory, but it doesn't agree with actual practice. In practice, freedom is a very important part of doing things that are useful. With proprietary software, you are limited to what the authors' decide to give you. Proprietary software authors routinely leave out important features or include anti-features like spyware because they make more money that way. With free software, the main limit is on what the authors can produce, not on what is in their best interest to provide you.

Software freedom is so much less important than other forms of freedom (freedom from slavery, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc) in the real world that I can't take his writing seriously.

Where does he suggest that free software is more important than those freedoms? I haven't seen it in any of his writings. And if you're just saying that he should concentrate on other kinds of freedom because software freedom is too low on the scale to be worth the effort, that's a bad argument. Things that are worth having are worth having even if there are other things that are more important. The amount of effort RMS has put into free software would be a drop in the bucket compared to all the effort that's gone into the kinds of basic human rights you mention, but he has produced real and important results for that relatively modest effort. He has almost certainly done more real good by creating a new concept of freedom than he would have by joining an existing cause.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!

If you want to get a decently priced higher resolution display, you can try getting one of the cheap Korean WQHD (1440p) displays; they sell for around $300 on Ebay. They're a bare bones monitor- a single Dual-link DVI input, no speakers, etc.- but the actual screen is just as good as you'd get in a much more expensive name brand model. I think it's actually the same part, just packaged as cheaply as possible.

Intimidation. It's a lot easier to find space to merge over when everyone wants to get out of your way for fear of being crushed like a bug.

And acceleration despite a relatively wimpy engine is on major problem that hybrids are designed to tackle. The electric motor isn't enough to drive you very far or very fast on its own, but combining the power of the relatively wimpy internal combustion engine with the power of a relatively wimpy electric motor gives you enough power to merge onto a freeway or go up a steep hill with some confidence. When you don't need that extra power, the relatively wimpy engine is well chosen to give you good fuel economy at highway cruising speed.

You'd think they'd clear to make sure things are cleared before allowing the money to go through.

The problem is that they have very little incentive to fight fraud. They're more worried about people giving up on them as a payment processor if they wait for a few days on every transaction to make sure it's legitimate. As long as they can stick their customers with the cost of fraudulent transactions, they aren't going to make a serious attempt to prevent them.

I've been less impressed by the Scooba (iRobot's mopping robot) than Roomba. It's slow, requires quite a bit of maintenance on every use, and can't cover a very large area on a single tank of water. I haven't found that it saves much time compared to scrubbing the floor by hand.

That's nice, but they've got a long way to go to compete with the La Brea Tar Pits. When they were building a new parking site for the LA County Museum, they found an almost complete mammoth skeleton, not just one tooth. That and a whole bunch of other incredibly cool fossils. One more reason to prefer Southern California.

I've had good coffee brewed with both kinds of filters, though I agree and lean toward the Chemex ones. I think the big difference is that they're quite thick and do a better job of filtering all of the fines (i.e. very fine coffee particles) out of the coffee. If you leave the fines in, the coffee is unstable and tends to get bitterer on sitting. You could also look at getting one of the more expensive brands of pour-over, like Hario, which may sell a better grade of filter than Melitta.

That's interesting, because I've had no trouble finding them in person in my area. I've seen them for sale both at Pete's and at Cost Plus World Market. Both places also sell the Chemex filters.

A French press is not as fast. It's slow and fussy in comparison.

Don't discount the importance of ritual as part of the coffee experience. Many people enjoy the process almost as much as they enjoy the final product, which is why people argue passionately about processes that produce a fairly similar final product.

The special spout kettles are really nice, but you can brew fine pour over coffee without one. It just requires a degree of patience and care.

I use a Chemex, which is a manual drip system where you heat the water and pour it over the grounds by hand. The Melita filters are essentially the same thing. It gives you the best aspects of drip coffee- no fine particles left over from grinding to make the coffee bitter on standing, like a French Press- while letting you get the water as hot as it needs to be to get a proper extraction. There's a reason it's the preferred non-espresso method at so many fancy coffee boutiques.

I don't have a server room, you insensitive clod!

Actually, looking at phones, Android is the market leader.

Now it is, but would it have gotten there if everyone had the attitude that they needed to pick the market leader or nothing? Maybe the iPhone would have managed to overtake the Blackberry that way- it was clearly more popular from the day it was introduced- but Android took a long time to get really competitive. Would Google have kept pursuing that market for as long as they did if nobody bought their phones until they were better than the iPhone? Would they have been able to make them competitive with the iPhone if they hadn't been selling enough phones to get some useful customer feedback?