I'm disappointed that O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference is prohibitively expensive ($1395.00) for independent developers like me. It's one of the drawbacks of not working for a large company, but it seems there should be some sort of sliding scale available. I'm sure it's very expensive to put on a conference like this, and I understand the need to make money. But when the topics include Building Community Wireless Networks, I wonder how many people actually building the grassroots networks can attend.