Something something Kool-Aid pickle.

I think Jonn makes an excellent point. Even if you only have three guitars, the cost of installing the N-Tune on each of them would net you a Strobo-stomp or something equally fancy.

However, it seems like the N-Tune would double as a kill switch (although it would be significantly less effective and more expensive than a simple momentary switch from Radio Shack), so if you're in the market for both, it could be a good choice.

Just an fyi: I don't know if these kegs will fit the Krups machine (though I don't see why they wouldn't), but beergeek.biz has a dozen or so different German beers (including the tasty EKU Pils) available for sale. Also, breworganic.com has 5-liter mini-kegs that can be filled with homebrew, if you're set up for kegging. If the Krups machine doesn't work for any of this, there's several other machines designed for dispensing beer from 5-liter kegs that aren't quite as swill-oriented.

As to the USA vs the World beer debate, I say Germany wins for ubiquity, Belgians are the first extreme brewers, I'm envious of the cask ale scene in the UK, and the US has enough of everything to basically satisfy anyone who's interested in beer. Prost!

Many single malt scotches can benefit from being mixed with a small amount of water, which brings out the bouquet and helps keep the alcohol from numbing the tongue.

I'm not the most experienced scotch drinker in the world, but I think a purist would rather have his scotch a little too watery than a little too cold.

"Theoretically, it should be possible to do some not-so-simple operations, like switch between different tunings on the fly. Previously, that's required having multiple guitars handy."

Not necessarily. Hipshot (hipshotproducts.com) sells several different aftermarket mods designed to change tunings on the fly. The most interesting is the Trilogy bridge, which allows 3 different preset tunings for each string, for a combination of 700+ tunings.

I'm all for innovation, but it seems like Gibson could stuff more than an automatic tuning system into a guitar that's almost guaranteed to cost more than $4k. Besides, we all know Steinberger is the original robot guitar.

This is a neat invention (though it solves a non-existent problem), but I don't think I've ever seen any guitar gear this overhyped or (almost definitely) overpriced. Doing one fairly simple operation does not a robot-thing make.

This is like if you made a device to automatically crack eggs and named it "Robot Kitchen."