Assuming this thread is dying, but not yet dead, I'll charge right in here, and hope someone reads it.

W000T in #6 mentions the Toddy system -- I had a Toddy, and really enjoy the flavor and convenience of cold-brewed coffee, but I didn't care for the hardware: underdesigned, overpriced, and requires proprietary filters. After trying several different methods, I came up with the optimal way to make cold-brewed coffee.

You will need:

A two-liter diet soft drink bottle, well-rinsed (no detergent). Naturally sweetened soda is harder to clean out.

11 oz coffee -- cheap coffee is good; I like Stewart's Red Eye. If you go varietal, the winy African or Asian varieties are better than the robust Columbian-types. Forget dark roasts.

Cheese cloth -- about 4 inches square.

6 - 7 cups cold, filtered water

1. Pour 2 cups of water in the bottom of the bottle.

2. Using a funnel, add the coffee.

3. Add 2 more cups of water.

4. Put the cap back on the bottle, and gently shake it back and forth until you have a nice suspension -- the coffee-water mixture will be the consistency of quicksand.

Don't overshake it, or you'll get a layer of "foam" on top that will inhibit draining out the extract the next day.

5. Add 2-3 more cups of water, until the bottle is full to the top.

6. Wait 12 - 18 hours. 12 hours is plenty, but 18 won't hurt. In warm weather, put it in the fridge.

7. The next day, replace with the bottle cap with a small square of cheesecloth. Secure it below the lip on the bottle with a twist tie or rubber band.

8. Upend the whole thing over a carafe or large jar.

9. Take a sharp knife or icepick and poke a hole in the bottom of the bottle.

It may take up to an hour or more to drain the extract completely. You'll get about 4 cups of extract, which is enough to make about a gallon of coffee. Just mix 1:4 extract to water. Boiling water for hot coffee, cold water and ice for iced coffee. If you like sweet coffee, you can presweeten the extract.

There is no clean-up; just dispose of the bottle. You may not be recycling, but you're re-using, and that's pretty good, too.

Raise your hands everyone who's read The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Nothing has changed since 1907.

The purpose of terrorism is to cause govenment overreaction, which turns the populace against the government. This is so fucking basic. People understood this a century ago. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Note to Boing Boing: The Secret Agent is absolutely fundamental to understanding what's really going on w/r/t terrorism and government power. It's well worth a FPP.

I don't know much about physics or aviation, but there's a third possibility here everyone is ignoring:

When the conveyor belt starts, the ultralight will roll off the back of the conveyor, flip over, and be moderately damaged. The pilot will be unhurt, but the whole deal will be embarrassing and anticlimactic.

If the ultralight doesn't roll of the back of the conveyor, it will likely veer to the left or right, going off the side of the conveyor, flip, and break a wing. Same outcome.

Tom @9: Only the code developers would ever have to deal with the complexity of the proposed blog-neutral standard. You develop a blog-neutral XML schema, and then develop translators that write out the neutral format to blog-native code.

Then you create a client GUI in which the users do their authoring. When you hit Post, the client does the translation and sends the appropriate code to your blog using the parameters you specify. To change blogging software, just change the parameter settings. The developers could even create predefined output parameters, and the user could just select Wordpress or Blogger or whatever from a menu.

You could use the same client to translate existing blog data into the neutral language, and then into the target language.

I'm a technical writer, not a code developer, but I've worked on projects that involve doing this sort of thing with CAD and PLM data (which I'm guessing is a lot more complicated than blogging software), so I know it can be done.

It wouldn't necessarily solve Matt's permalink problem, but one step at a time, eh?

Any steampunk modders out there reading this?

Because, as a recently diagnosed diabetic, what I really want is steampunk diabetic lancet. Combine the form, function, and sterility of a modern diabetic spring lancet with the aesthetics of a 19th c. presentation spring lancet (used for bloodletting, cupping, and leeching).

Medical practicality, esthetics, and the everpresent suggestion of blood. It would have everything.

If my sense of the overlap between geeks, medical collectors, and diabetics is right, you could make a million.