Writers and translators for the European Union even have a name for this affliction of the electronic age: the Cupertino effect. Some older spellcheckers had wordlists containing co-operation but not cooperation without the hyphen. So when a user typed in unhyphenated cooperation, the spellchecker would flag it as an error. The first suggestion thrown up was not co-operation, however, but Cupertino, the name of a city in northern California.

Cohen says that they're giving hardcore fans no excuse to wait for the airing on Comedy Central next year. "We're producing it in HD with 5.1 surround sound, and we're filling up every bit of available space on the disc," he says. There'll be a few minutes of material that won't appear on the TV versions of each episode, an in-depth lecture on the role of mathematics in the show, and a full episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad, the most popular show in the 31st century. It consists of a shot of the titular amphibian, who fixes viewers with his trance-inducing gaze. (Diehards who watch the motionless toad for half an hour will discover hilarious fake commercial breaks and a few other surprises.)

Morris insists there wasn't a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. "There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn't an option. "We didn't know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me." Morris' almost willful cluelessness is telling. "He wasn't prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology," says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. "He just doesn't have that kind of mind."

The writers' strike, and the studios' response to the strike, may radically accelerate a structural shift in the media industry -- a shift of power from studios and conglomerates towards creators and talent.

The limited modifications made to the AutoMARK’s hardware were extremely minor [...]

California law doesn't ask the manufacturer to decide whether the changes are small or large or medium-size.

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

The basic idea I took away form this is if you test, make sure you're testing the right thing. UI success may come from efficiency, but it may also come from a longer-running or more awkward task (by scientific definition) which is subjectively more pleasant to perform.

While I am not suggesting that counter-intuitiveness is the only reason people reject evolution, I would instead suggest that the two factors -- fundamentalist religion on the one hand, and the conceptual difficulty of evolution on the other -- are propping each other up. If one were to fall, so might the other. But removing the influence of religion is nearly impossible. It is deep in the culture, so short of physically moving someone to a different environment, it can't simply be removed, and it can't easily be argued away.

Removing the conceptual difficulty of evolution-like concepts, though, might be a much lower hanging fruit that has been largely ignored.