This pretty much ends the false dichotomy between Science and Faith.
Anyone who honestly believes there is no contradiction between science (the application of critical thinking, the challenging of assumptions, and the use of an ever-expanding body of evidence to understand the universe) and religion (the demonization of critical thinking, the elevation of dogma and preservation of ignorance, and the use of iron-age superstition and irrationality to 'understand' the universe) is either ignorant, stupid, fucntionally schizophrenic (as I said in my first post) or all of the above.
If you've actually read anything in the Quran, you'll know that eveyrthing I said about it earlier was true: it promotes a barbaric value system that any 21st Century child can see is hopelessly flawed. It is useless as a guide to creating a civil, open and free society, and it is useless as a guide to understanding the universe. That makes it pretty darn useless. The only thing it is really good at is perpetuating delusional wish-thinking about a nonexistant afterlife, and making otherwise normal people do diabolical and insane things in order to obtain an imaginary reward after death.
Science is by definition is the domain of Seen by experiment or experimentally verifiable logical conclusions of experiments.
All religions, including Islam, make explicit claims about reality. Reality is "the Seen." That's all reality is, and all it could possibly be. That's all human beings are - by definition - capable of knowing. There is no domain outside of reality. And this is the problem: religion doesn't just make senseless claims about imaginary things; it makes pernicious claims about reality that are patently false.
1. Ph.D. in science. Check.
2. Islamic fundamentalist (is it a movement?). Check.
The ability to compartmentalize one's mind into two entirely separate and contradictory sides is an astonishing testament to the brain's plasticity. It basically makes a person schizophrenic - they operate as if they exist in two different and incompatible realities - and of course that is a very frightening thing when you're dealing with people whose value system dictates that violence, racism, sexism, misogeny, homophobia, murder, rape and plunder are all viable methods for both conflict resolution and conquest.
If nothing else, the fact that a person can possess rational faculties sufficient to obtain a PhD while simultaneously adhering to the totally irrational and delusional tenets of religion is highly entertaining.
its actual a response to a possible panic caused by people using bad detectors
It is perfectly reasonable for legislation to outline the consequences of destructive behavior. It is completely unreasonable to legislate the possibility that someone will do something bad. This is the ground upon which the 2nd Amendment stands, and is the basis for the libertarian approach to every issue of freedom that gets trampled by a Big Brother style police state.
People should be free to own guns, but if they do something destructive with them then that's when they should burn for it. If someone wants to drink, that's their prerogative, but if they kill someone by driving drunk then that's when they should burn for it. Same with drugs. And for Pete's sake, if someone wants to use a fucking Geiger counter they should be free to do so unless they use the information they get from it to start a panic, in which case that's when they should burn for it.
That's a nice theory, but it's utter bullcrap in reality.
Yes, in your situation - talking to other kids on the school bus - doesn't give you much useful information about what's going on in the industry. But when you know all the guys who run the refineries, run the rigs, survey the fields and run the seismic arrays, crunch the exploration simulations, who operate the pump stations at the ports, who put out the fires, who work in the budgeting and procurement offices, who liaise with the local government to cover their payouts and graft, and of course the people who prepare all of the reports that the 'experts' on Wall Street, in Washington and at the Economist use for their bullshit analyses, well, that's quite a different kettle of fish. It may not make me an expert, but I know an awful lot of things the economists in their ivory towers have no fucking clue about, I know which numbers they read are entirely made up and which aren't, and most importantly I know why the bullshitting is all done in one direction: to push the price of oil up to a ridiculous level.
How precisely does living in the Middle East make you an expert on oil?
That's like asking how you know anything about the auto industry if you live in Flint Michigan. All of your friends, all of your business contacts, all of your acquaintances, all of your daily interactions are within the industry and with people who work in the industry. You are totally immersed and information pours in from ALL people from ALL directions ALL the time. After twenty years, a very, very clear picture emerges from this kind of exposure.
This is an excellent point. As someone whole lived in the middle east for nearly 20 years, I can assure you that the crap in the media about oil production costs is complete nonsense. Production costs per barrel - not per gallon - in Saudi are under 50 cents. All they have to do is turn the taps. And there is enough oil there fore decades. Everything we hear to contrary is nonsense spewed by oil companies and governments who are making out like bandits with oil at $100/barrel.
I'm not hearing any good reasons, either in posts or in this and other articles, why Google shouldn't snap up these bands. Getting the 'money' will NOT be a problem - despite what people seem to think here, they will not have to write a check out of a checking account to pay for this...
As for being able to afford it, Google is bigger than Verizon and nipping on the heels of AT&T. Even if they bid an absurdly high amount in order to win - say $30 billion - when they do win, they will make that up the next day on stock gains, mark my words. All my money is on Google playing down the likelihood of bidding to win, and then wolloping the other bidders at the eleventh hour. Definitely what I would do. How could it possibly not be worth it to own the airwaves?
Lack of competition creates a slew of superficial problems - lack of choice, poor quality, high cost, little to no accountability, lack of privacy, lack of security, and so on.
One thing in particular that bugs me as when service providers sell a variety of packages, none of which actually perform as claimed. Comcast and AT&T provide broadband in my area, but having seen a variety of the different packages first hand it's clear that none of them live up to their billing. More typically, you can rely on getting service equal to the quality level in the bracket below the one you're actually paying for.
False advertising, which is flagrant in these markets, is an unfortunately common side effect of market failure due to monopolies, oligopolies and cartels.
I know it's petty, but my biggest beef with Vista is the 2D graphics rendering. I knew none of the other hundreds of issues wouldn't get fixed. But with all the hype about the Aero Glass thingy, I was at least hoping the new GUI would be rendered without flickering, window-tearing and slow, stuttery drags and moves. And? No joy. Same problems that 3.11 had. Truly pathetic.
How do you deal with this at your place of business
With Gmail. It's intelligent filters screen out the quoted text, and by displaying email as threads (aka conversations) instead of just chronologically it makes dealing with a large volume of correspondence much easier. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than any other email system I've used.
Impervious, no, but any number of simple solutions would be - pardon the expression - nearly foolproof.
The Greeks and Romans voted with black and white stones. It wouldn't be that hard to implement something similar. Picture vending machines that recognize different coins - they are pretty close to foolproof in as far as not mistaking a quarter for a dime goes. Get to the polling station, get a 'coin' (or stone or ball or disc or bill or whatever). From there, how hard is it to only allow one vote per person? Easy - with a time limit (no more than one vote per 60 seconds) and two (or more) synced counters (think of turnstyles synced with the coinslots). So no cheating by dumping more 'quarters' in the machine.
With a simple system like this you can not only count the votes electronically, but you can count the 'coins' too. And just as with real money, you can screen for and discard counterfeit coins.
Of course the real way to have accurate elections is to throw out the secret ballot, but that's another argument entirely.
GUIs are for two things and two things only:
1. A container for multiple shell windows (slrn, irssi, mutt, etc..)
2. Using firefox to look at pictures of pretty women-type people.
Maybe, but the thing is that the number of users who needs these two functions from their computers outnumber command-liners like yourself 100,000,000:1. In this case, the value is in the numbers.
I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill here (imagine a journalist doing that...). This guy said he referred back to his sources for accuracy in data-collection, which is tantamount to accuracy in reporting. Yes, it's great if you can do this all during the interview, but going to press afterwards with reckless disregard for the facts is hardly "letting a source control the story." Moreover, the idea that the journalist 'controls' the story is asinine in itself. In the parent article about SETI, the journalist was obviously 'controlling' the story - thanks to his own moronic misunderstanding of the facts of the situation. I don't know about most readers here, but that's not my idea of quality journalism. Get the facts straight, understand what you're talking about, and fact-check your goddamn articles before you go to press. If that means clarifying a source's information after the interview, whether it's their quotations or the concepts behind them, then so be it: the telephone and wikipedia are your friends.
A good journalist reports the facts accurately and objectively, even if it means going back to get something you missed or muddied during the interview. And the only thing controlling the story should be the truth. If you believe anything else, you're nothing but a hack whose willing to peddle any old dogshit for a moment in the limelight - the world doesn't need any more of those kinds of people.
I'm all for a 'modified' Olympics. There was a funny SNL skit years ago that featured the 'All-Steroid Olympics'. I actually think it's a great idea, and not just with drugs but with any body modification people can imagine. You could have simple rules, like banning wheels for certain 'foot' races, etc, but I'd love to see what people come up with. Hell, major league sports are exciting because of the incredible feats these guys perform. If they need steroids or plastic legs to do it, so what? Given the steroid situation in MLB in the news recently, I think the verdict from the public is already pretty much in on this: if it means they hit more home runs, let these animals juice themselves into oblivion if they want to. They're adults; it's their choice.
You seem, like so many of the neo-athiest set, to conflate faith with religion.
Faith is belief in the absence of evidence. A religion is a group of people who institutionalize their irrational beliefs and call it a 'religious faith'. Is it possible to have 'faith' without the institution of religion? Sure. Does that make it one iota more rational or defensible? Absolutely not. There is no way to make a rational argument for this behavior - your goose is cooked before you even get into the kitchen.
No, it is you, I'm afraid, who are doing the conflating: between 'faith' and 'belief' when you say that "we all believe in something". Believing, say, evolutionary theory or gravity to be true based on the overwhelming evidence has nothing whatsoever to do with 'faith'.
I think you will find secularism has killed and oppressed many many times more people then religion ever has.
You honestly believe this, and you think I need to get out more? At least you qualify this ridiculous statement with a passing comment about religion being "their chief tool" - who is the "they" bogeyman you refer to here? Evil Atheists like Stalin and Mao, no doubt - the perfect paragons of secular society, not - ahem - totalitarian dictators, heavens no...
The day you can point to a secular society that self-destructed as a result of too much rational thinking based of evidence within a framework of free discourse will be the day you can condemn secularism as a destructive force. Until then, well, I hope you like pate de fois gras.
Ref: Christopher Hitchens. There is no moral action taken or moral statement made by a believer that could not have been made by a non-believer. The corrolary is, of course, that there are any number of wicked acts or statements that ONLY a believer could make (ie: flying planes into buildings).
If you want religion to take credit for the good it does - like the Red Cross - then religion must also take credit for the bad it does. The bad outweighs the good by orders of magnitude. I will get by just fine with nonprofit, secular healthcare from my local hospitals and service-providers as well as with secular international aid via Doctors Without Borders and the UN, thanks very much.
I agree with you completely completely. But of course, what you are saying is basically, "if religion were demonstrably true, it would be rational to believe in it." Um. Forgive me, but that merits a BIG no duh.
I can agree in principle with the presumption that faith in God is well-founded, and faith in human reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) is not so well-founded.
I cannot agree in principle with that presumption. Faith in God (zero evidence, zero logical consistency, negative social utility) "well-founded" but 'faith' in evolution (overwhelming evidence, extraordinary cross-discipline consistency, staggering social utility vis-a-vis the natural sciences) "no so well-founded"? Perhaps you're not living on the same planet is me?
As an aside, I find it absolutely fascinating that there is one non-scientific explanation of the Universe for which there is actual merit: the notion that all of our reality is a computer simulation a la The Matrix. That merit, of course, is that - unlike most other religious explanations of the universe - we at least know The Matrix explanation to be possible.
I know it's apocryphal to even make this point, but is it possible that there is a point beyond which the basic Office-style apps simply cannot be improved? This is a serious question, not troll. Given the constraints of near-horizon technology (no AI, imperfect voice recognition, no brain-computer interfaces), how much better can word-processor, spreadsheet and slideshow programs get? Leave aside databases, design and payout apps, and other things bundled in MS Office for the sake of simplicity. Is there a point at which the three basic apps couldn't get any better?
I'd be very interested to hear people's thoughts on this because I'm guessing it will bring out all sorts of interesting suggestions for improvements that have never occurred me.
I'm surprised you didn't mention testing, and neither have any of the other up-modded posts. Testing is a VERY effective way to implement this addendum to your list:
2.1)In order to 'just work' the UI must function exactly as expected. Expected by who? NOT by you, the coder, but by the user. Which user? The least experienced user you can find. Their expectations will be pure, unfiltered, unbiased, uninformed, and will lay every flaw in your UI design bare. Want to know how the UI menus should work on your cell phone? Give it to grandpa and ask him. Why? Because he won't put up with clicking 18 buttons through a menu tree to get to the second most commonly used feature of the device.
Ah, but why bother to test if you have good design principles like those in your list - KISS, form-follows-funtion, eliminate as many steps/clicks/motions/decisions as possible in any function or process, etc? Because sometimes it just isn't possible to KISS it or make it 'just work'.
90% of your UI will be made of up things you can apply good design principles to. That 90% will utilize 1% of the user's time and effort and cause 0.01% of their frustrations with the device. The 10% of the UI you can't apply your principles to will consume ALL the rest of the user's time and effort and be the source of ALL of their frustrations. THIS is what you need testing for: as long as something works perfectly intuitively - or exactly how you would expect it to work - then it will seem effortless and cause zero frustration, even if it isn't simple or doesn't just work automatically.
Since this project would seem to depend on the participation and good-will of users in order to work, my guess is that a nonprofit version will follow shortly afterwards, paralleling the open-source model. I also predict that without the benefit of a massive Microsoft-esque head start, the for-profit version will be put of business in short order.
I haven't seen a side-by-side of regular DVD vs HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet, but I HAVE seen Star Wars on HD TV, and compared to the regular DVD the image quality difference is night and day. Mind you, this was on my uncle's 60" Panasonic HD plasma TV, so quality differences might be more apparent than on a smaller screen. I was really surprised at the difference myself, as I'd heard the usual "most people can't tell the difference" rhetoric. It was pretty obvious to me. Now maybe the HD broadcast was better than an HD DVD or Blu Ray recording would be, I don't know. And maybe it was just because it was a high definition remastering of Star Wars. But it was by far the best image I've ever seen outside of a movie theater.
You're right, you'd need to do a complete lifecycle analysis for all of these products to in order to properly evaluate them. I'm guessing current incandescent bulbs would fare poorly in any such comparative analysis, but I'm also guessing that the policy makers looking at this bill have done (or rather seen) no such analysis...
I suspect you're being a bit naive - no offense. Last time I checked at Home Depot, there were no incandescent bulbs available for purchase that were expressly designed to last for >100,000 hours. But I absolutely guarantee you that the engineering department here at U of M could make one that would. All it would take is a slightly heavier-duty element and limiters to prevent thermal shock and minimize the impact of voltage spikes. Little additions, not rocket science (NASA could make an incandescent bulb that would last for 100,000,000 hours). In mass production, I'd bet any amount of money that a 100,000-hour bulb wouldn't be 100 times more expensive than ordinary incandescent bulbs rated for only 1,000 hours.
The naivety I'm talking about here is the idea that it's a technological limitation that explains why bulbs don't last long. It isn't a technological explanation at all. It's a purely economical one: there's no profit to made from bulbs that never burn out.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who honestly believes there is no contradiction between science (the application of critical thinking, the challenging of assumptions, and the use of an ever-expanding body of evidence to understand the universe) and religion (the demonization of critical thinking, the elevation of dogma and preservation of ignorance, and the use of iron-age superstition and irrationality to 'understand' the universe) is either ignorant, stupid, fucntionally schizophrenic (as I said in my first post) or all of the above.
If you've actually read anything in the Quran, you'll know that eveyrthing I said about it earlier was true: it promotes a barbaric value system that any 21st Century child can see is hopelessly flawed. It is useless as a guide to creating a civil, open and free society, and it is useless as a guide to understanding the universe. That makes it pretty darn useless. The only thing it is really good at is perpetuating delusional wish-thinking about a nonexistant afterlife, and making otherwise normal people do diabolical and insane things in order to obtain an imaginary reward after death.
Science is by definition is the domain of Seen by experiment or experimentally verifiable logical conclusions of experiments.
All religions, including Islam, make explicit claims about reality. Reality is "the Seen." That's all reality is, and all it could possibly be. That's all human beings are - by definition - capable of knowing. There is no domain outside of reality. And this is the problem: religion doesn't just make senseless claims about imaginary things; it makes pernicious claims about reality that are patently false.
The ability to compartmentalize one's mind into two entirely separate and contradictory sides is an astonishing testament to the brain's plasticity. It basically makes a person schizophrenic - they operate as if they exist in two different and incompatible realities - and of course that is a very frightening thing when you're dealing with people whose value system dictates that violence, racism, sexism, misogeny, homophobia, murder, rape and plunder are all viable methods for both conflict resolution and conquest.
If nothing else, the fact that a person can possess rational faculties sufficient to obtain a PhD while simultaneously adhering to the totally irrational and delusional tenets of religion is highly entertaining.
It is perfectly reasonable for legislation to outline the consequences of destructive behavior. It is completely unreasonable to legislate the possibility that someone will do something bad. This is the ground upon which the 2nd Amendment stands, and is the basis for the libertarian approach to every issue of freedom that gets trampled by a Big Brother style police state.
People should be free to own guns, but if they do something destructive with them then that's when they should burn for it. If someone wants to drink, that's their prerogative, but if they kill someone by driving drunk then that's when they should burn for it. Same with drugs. And for Pete's sake, if someone wants to use a fucking Geiger counter they should be free to do so unless they use the information they get from it to start a panic, in which case that's when they should burn for it.
Yes, in your situation - talking to other kids on the school bus - doesn't give you much useful information about what's going on in the industry. But when you know all the guys who run the refineries, run the rigs, survey the fields and run the seismic arrays, crunch the exploration simulations, who operate the pump stations at the ports, who put out the fires, who work in the budgeting and procurement offices, who liaise with the local government to cover their payouts and graft, and of course the people who prepare all of the reports that the 'experts' on Wall Street, in Washington and at the Economist use for their bullshit analyses, well, that's quite a different kettle of fish. It may not make me an expert, but I know an awful lot of things the economists in their ivory towers have no fucking clue about, I know which numbers they read are entirely made up and which aren't, and most importantly I know why the bullshitting is all done in one direction: to push the price of oil up to a ridiculous level.
That's like asking how you know anything about the auto industry if you live in Flint Michigan. All of your friends, all of your business contacts, all of your acquaintances, all of your daily interactions are within the industry and with people who work in the industry. You are totally immersed and information pours in from ALL people from ALL directions ALL the time. After twenty years, a very, very clear picture emerges from this kind of exposure.
Does that answer your question?
This is an excellent point. As someone whole lived in the middle east for nearly 20 years, I can assure you that the crap in the media about oil production costs is complete nonsense. Production costs per barrel - not per gallon - in Saudi are under 50 cents. All they have to do is turn the taps. And there is enough oil there fore decades. Everything we hear to contrary is nonsense spewed by oil companies and governments who are making out like bandits with oil at $100/barrel.
As for being able to afford it, Google is bigger than Verizon and nipping on the heels of AT&T. Even if they bid an absurdly high amount in order to win - say $30 billion - when they do win, they will make that up the next day on stock gains, mark my words. All my money is on Google playing down the likelihood of bidding to win, and then wolloping the other bidders at the eleventh hour. Definitely what I would do. How could it possibly not be worth it to own the airwaves?
One thing in particular that bugs me as when service providers sell a variety of packages, none of which actually perform as claimed. Comcast and AT&T provide broadband in my area, but having seen a variety of the different packages first hand it's clear that none of them live up to their billing. More typically, you can rely on getting service equal to the quality level in the bracket below the one you're actually paying for.
False advertising, which is flagrant in these markets, is an unfortunately common side effect of market failure due to monopolies, oligopolies and cartels.
I know it's petty, but my biggest beef with Vista is the 2D graphics rendering. I knew none of the other hundreds of issues wouldn't get fixed. But with all the hype about the Aero Glass thingy, I was at least hoping the new GUI would be rendered without flickering, window-tearing and slow, stuttery drags and moves. And? No joy. Same problems that 3.11 had. Truly pathetic.
With Gmail. It's intelligent filters screen out the quoted text, and by displaying email as threads (aka conversations) instead of just chronologically it makes dealing with a large volume of correspondence much easier. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than any other email system I've used.
The Greeks and Romans voted with black and white stones. It wouldn't be that hard to implement something similar. Picture vending machines that recognize different coins - they are pretty close to foolproof in as far as not mistaking a quarter for a dime goes. Get to the polling station, get a 'coin' (or stone or ball or disc or bill or whatever). From there, how hard is it to only allow one vote per person? Easy - with a time limit (no more than one vote per 60 seconds) and two (or more) synced counters (think of turnstyles synced with the coinslots). So no cheating by dumping more 'quarters' in the machine.
With a simple system like this you can not only count the votes electronically, but you can count the 'coins' too. And just as with real money, you can screen for and discard counterfeit coins.
Of course the real way to have accurate elections is to throw out the secret ballot, but that's another argument entirely.
Maybe, but the thing is that the number of users who needs these two functions from their computers outnumber command-liners like yourself 100,000,000:1. In this case, the value is in the numbers.
A good journalist reports the facts accurately and objectively, even if it means going back to get something you missed or muddied during the interview. And the only thing controlling the story should be the truth. If you believe anything else, you're nothing but a hack whose willing to peddle any old dogshit for a moment in the limelight - the world doesn't need any more of those kinds of people.
I'm all for a 'modified' Olympics. There was a funny SNL skit years ago that featured the 'All-Steroid Olympics'. I actually think it's a great idea, and not just with drugs but with any body modification people can imagine. You could have simple rules, like banning wheels for certain 'foot' races, etc, but I'd love to see what people come up with. Hell, major league sports are exciting because of the incredible feats these guys perform. If they need steroids or plastic legs to do it, so what? Given the steroid situation in MLB in the news recently, I think the verdict from the public is already pretty much in on this: if it means they hit more home runs, let these animals juice themselves into oblivion if they want to. They're adults; it's their choice.
Faith is belief in the absence of evidence. A religion is a group of people who institutionalize their irrational beliefs and call it a 'religious faith'. Is it possible to have 'faith' without the institution of religion? Sure. Does that make it one iota more rational or defensible? Absolutely not. There is no way to make a rational argument for this behavior - your goose is cooked before you even get into the kitchen.
No, it is you, I'm afraid, who are doing the conflating: between 'faith' and 'belief' when you say that "we all believe in something". Believing, say, evolutionary theory or gravity to be true based on the overwhelming evidence has nothing whatsoever to do with 'faith'.
I think you will find secularism has killed and oppressed many many times more people then religion ever has.
You honestly believe this, and you think I need to get out more? At least you qualify this ridiculous statement with a passing comment about religion being "their chief tool" - who is the "they" bogeyman you refer to here? Evil Atheists like Stalin and Mao, no doubt - the perfect paragons of secular society, not - ahem - totalitarian dictators, heavens no...
The day you can point to a secular society that self-destructed as a result of too much rational thinking based of evidence within a framework of free discourse will be the day you can condemn secularism as a destructive force. Until then, well, I hope you like pate de fois gras.
If you want religion to take credit for the good it does - like the Red Cross - then religion must also take credit for the bad it does. The bad outweighs the good by orders of magnitude. I will get by just fine with nonprofit, secular healthcare from my local hospitals and service-providers as well as with secular international aid via Doctors Without Borders and the UN, thanks very much.
I agree with you completely completely. But of course, what you are saying is basically, "if religion were demonstrably true, it would be rational to believe in it." Um. Forgive me, but that merits a BIG no duh.
I cannot agree in principle with that presumption. Faith in God (zero evidence, zero logical consistency, negative social utility) "well-founded" but 'faith' in evolution (overwhelming evidence, extraordinary cross-discipline consistency, staggering social utility vis-a-vis the natural sciences) "no so well-founded"? Perhaps you're not living on the same planet is me?
As an aside, I find it absolutely fascinating that there is one non-scientific explanation of the Universe for which there is actual merit: the notion that all of our reality is a computer simulation a la The Matrix. That merit, of course, is that - unlike most other religious explanations of the universe - we at least know The Matrix explanation to be possible.
I'd be very interested to hear people's thoughts on this because I'm guessing it will bring out all sorts of interesting suggestions for improvements that have never occurred me.
2.1)In order to 'just work' the UI must function exactly as expected. Expected by who? NOT by you, the coder, but by the user. Which user? The least experienced user you can find. Their expectations will be pure, unfiltered, unbiased, uninformed, and will lay every flaw in your UI design bare. Want to know how the UI menus should work on your cell phone? Give it to grandpa and ask him. Why? Because he won't put up with clicking 18 buttons through a menu tree to get to the second most commonly used feature of the device.
Ah, but why bother to test if you have good design principles like those in your list - KISS, form-follows-funtion, eliminate as many steps/clicks/motions/decisions as possible in any function or process, etc? Because sometimes it just isn't possible to KISS it or make it 'just work'.
90% of your UI will be made of up things you can apply good design principles to. That 90% will utilize 1% of the user's time and effort and cause 0.01% of their frustrations with the device. The 10% of the UI you can't apply your principles to will consume ALL the rest of the user's time and effort and be the source of ALL of their frustrations. THIS is what you need testing for: as long as something works perfectly intuitively - or exactly how you would expect it to work - then it will seem effortless and cause zero frustration, even if it isn't simple or doesn't just work automatically.
Since this project would seem to depend on the participation and good-will of users in order to work, my guess is that a nonprofit version will follow shortly afterwards, paralleling the open-source model. I also predict that without the benefit of a massive Microsoft-esque head start, the for-profit version will be put of business in short order.
I haven't seen a side-by-side of regular DVD vs HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet, but I HAVE seen Star Wars on HD TV, and compared to the regular DVD the image quality difference is night and day. Mind you, this was on my uncle's 60" Panasonic HD plasma TV, so quality differences might be more apparent than on a smaller screen. I was really surprised at the difference myself, as I'd heard the usual "most people can't tell the difference" rhetoric. It was pretty obvious to me. Now maybe the HD broadcast was better than an HD DVD or Blu Ray recording would be, I don't know. And maybe it was just because it was a high definition remastering of Star Wars. But it was by far the best image I've ever seen outside of a movie theater.
You're right, you'd need to do a complete lifecycle analysis for all of these products to in order to properly evaluate them. I'm guessing current incandescent bulbs would fare poorly in any such comparative analysis, but I'm also guessing that the policy makers looking at this bill have done (or rather seen) no such analysis...
The naivety I'm talking about here is the idea that it's a technological limitation that explains why bulbs don't last long. It isn't a technological explanation at all. It's a purely economical one: there's no profit to made from bulbs that never burn out.
VERY good point.