Well, that didn't take long!
Last year, after Coke took 10% stake in the company, Keurig started shipping a new version of their instant coffee machines. The primary 'improvement' was the addition of DRM designed to exclude any coffee not approved by Keurig. It is a scheme very much like the ink cartridge DRM of IBM/Lexmark.
One coffee maker has decided to crack that Keurig's DRM and are now shipping a device you insert into the maker that lets you spoof it into thinking any coffee is 'authorized.' They are capitalizing on their new Freedom Clip by giving it away along with free samples of their coffee.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday February 03 2015, @09:23AM
I'm skeptical. Tomatoes for instance are picked green -- they are much easier to handle being much harder to bruise, easier to store, easier to ship. Of course they end up tasting like cardboard compared to the ones picked from your own garden. I would suspect that many vegetables aren't actually picked at the peak of anything except ease of processing. Food is an industrial process.
As for the ripeness, I can see that for artisan coffees, like the type where the beans are processed inside a bird's digestive system and then collected once the bird ... expels ... them ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak [wikipedia.org] ) -- it is said the bird, a civet, only picks the perfectly ripe cherries -- but I would be totally shocked if Keurig was sending reps to coffee producers and telling them "we want a blend of 50% a day before ripe, 25% a day after, and 25% close to rotten." At that scale, they're just looking for coffee that is made from mostly ripe beans.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday February 03 2015, @09:58AM
sorry, not a bird, a mammal. I need some coffee or maybe to just go to bed.