I am paradoxically pleased to hear that a FidoNet node is still active.

I don't like the idea of metal filings falling into my power supply.  Especially aluminum filings.

The secret is, chemists who know what they are doing focus a lot of expertise and effort to do it as simply as it can be done, and still work.
If you try to do it simpler than a consultant tells you to, something will go very wrong.

No.  There will be lots of tannins, the brown colors.  There will be much more of them than caffeine.  Google has some of the Pavia book, but a couple of pages are missing.  Any nearby college library should have a copy of this book.

http://books.google.com/books?id=S8HNyKfaz20C&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=organic+lab+extract+caffeine+from+tea&source=bl&ots=cr1apAfsE1&sig=GD24h5iLQcC2EOXfH65gnwoISl0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YG1CUffPBojaygGJmYCwCA&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=organic%20lab%20extract%20caffeine%20from%20tea&f=false

Source?

Would it make any sense to set up a "register" web page where people could disclose whatever they wish about their Batch #1 order?

Just like developing your own film is more expensive than taking it to the photoshop, extracting your own caffeine is more expensive than just buying it.  When I have 30 students do this extraction, it probably takes $100 in consumables, and $500 or more in lab space, plus 150 hours of (their) labor.  The total yield for the entire class is probably only 300 mg.

If I count their labor at $8/hr, the cost per gram would come out to be about $6,000 / gram.  I am pretty sure you could get paid to remove bucket fulls of it from any commercial coffee producer.

But you want to put baking soda into the extract to get all of the caffeine out.  The tea will not taste good, but the goal is to get the caffeine, not drink the tea.

This should be changed to a greener solvent.

This is a standard lab for 1st semester organic chemistry.  Go to your local college and buy a copy of "Pavia."

An ordinary teabag will yield between 0 and 10 mg of caffeine, depending on your skill.  I think the Pavia book uses dichloromethane in one of the steps, and this should be changed to a greener solvent.

I suspect it would be just as easy in a home environment to put the tea into an evacuated home canning jar, and deposit the caffein on the lid using dry ice to cool the lid.  I have not, however, attempted this.

The miner reward has dropped from BTC50 to BTC25 per mined block.  This was planned from the beginning, and it will drop again.

If the value of BTC doubles, this is ok.
If the value of the transaction fees increases to fill the void, this is ok.
If miners make less money, this is ok, but does put an edge on my mining aspirations.

I am assuming that it is consistent with the original program design that some transactions, which I will call dross in this posting, are left behind:  when the Pullman is full, there are no free loads.

Some people may feel urgency to have their transactions confirmed.  The original model allows for variable auxiliary payments, which I will call bids in this posting, and unfortunately named fees, to expedite confirmation.

As a complete noob, I went to Daily Bitcoins, the site that gives  BTC 0.00005 to look at an ad.  I authorized BTC 0 transaction fee to pay out my new precious, and the transaction did not confirm until 4 AM.  I repeated this for 3 or 4 days, then moved on to a verified account, connections with my bank, and a more solid connection to the Bitcoin community.
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I find myself fascinated by the SD dust conversation.  I have read much this week, and my thoughts are slowly forming into an opinion.

It seems to me that having more transactions than space in the block is a wonderful situation for Bitcoin.  There is clearly demand.  For the moment, a noobie can try a zero fee transaction, go to the rest of his life, return in a day or so and explore his transaction on Blockchain without begging or being forced to pay or abandon his exploration.  When I was moving real money on a bank holiday to a special auditing address for my Avalon purchase and time seemed precious, I had the easy option to pony up my bid and make it so.

I did grow up in a part of the country where anything in any way connected with gambling, sexuality, tobacco, alcohol, or excessive recreation was severely censored and suppressed.  I still carry the legacy of that upbringing, and I cannot envision myself building a business in those areas.  I find the values clarification conflict between neutral currency and judgement of SD or Silk Road to cause me some discomfort.  I do wish they did not exist during those times I want to explain Bitcoin to people in my day life, but nonetheless, they do exist.

Nonetheless, I think that the existence of a full pay load for every block is healthy, provided that the miners are common carriers.  I think that everyone who grew up in Dallas will ultimately decide that same thing, regardless of the nature of that pay load.  I think that competition is healthy, and I think that a defining characteristic of competition is the possibility of loss.  In this case, it is the loss of inclusion in the currently block.  Without that possibility of loss of priority, it is not actually competition, it is rather theft of services by the customer.

My prescription at the moment is:
Keep the blocksize at the 0.7 level, but move to 0.8 in order to remove the problematic BDB code. 
Distribute the configuration recommendations that make the 0.7 & 0.8 outputs remain compatible.
Segregate the SD transactions into two categories of blocks, those that exclude them, and blocks that are only them, when it does not violate any other rule or custom.

That is all.  Miigwech bizindawiyeg.

Thank you for a factual, clinically dispassionate report.

Equilibrium is an old Indian word that means "nobody is happy."

A brief Google search takes me to their web page, where it is all marketing speak but no information on how much storage (RAM, Flash, whatever) is on-board.
It may be time to move beyond my DL-524 :-)
I want to be able to use openwrt or dd-wrt.

Is there a link to "the best" thread to place the future SD impact discussion?

Your bug icon is very disturbing.  I have finally trained myself not to try to squash it.

What do you call a spymaster who spies on his own spies?
Prudent.

Go to a notary public with your identity and residence documents.  Fill out a statement that the phone was stolen, and have it notarized.
Include a bank account under the same name.
Scan all the documents and send them in, and ask for a release of funds to the bank account.

A different question comes to mind.  Is there any interest in a product that lists the top n pending transactions sorted by their transaction fees?

Perhaps changing the bid after the fact is not the correct approach.

Is there enough information under control of the Satoshi reference client -- what do we call this, just bitcoind, SRC, or what --- to predict how many blocks later the transaction will be processed, based on work already in the queue?