Personally I'm often annoyed that I can't //easily// get access to car systems and that I'm forced to use the system in a very specific way. I'd love it if the systems on a car are far more user settable via more simple means. Yes you can get into it but I think that auto manufactures are to (and I hate to admit it rightfully) concerned about people making mistakes and causing major fatalities and the ensuing lawsuit. Enough so that access for people who have a reasonable understanding just isn't available.

Although at the same time you start to think about people defeating aspects of the cars.
http://www.ted.com/talks/avi_rubin_all_your_devices_can_be_hacked.html

He references some of the experiments that have been done on security in cars and the papers issued by a few universities in different tests. Obviously it's different and yes nothing is secure but I think automakes have simpler concerns around this same problem with opensource cars that are user configurable.

Read Jailbroken iphone with default root pw worms.

I think to a degree you are right. But there is a great deal to physics which as much imagination and wimsey as there is evidence to support it. But when you start to take the macro view and say it's the study of everything then naming becomes important. Considering the orbiting characteristics of an electron are suspected to be unknown. As mentioned in later comments the idea that you can't know where it is until you measure it and thereby change it's path making it impossible to know where it's going to be.

I don't know that I would have used "split" in this context but in an article that's also to be understood by a more broad public I would love to get access to this article outside of the paywall. But Oh well..

But being able to understand and know the orbiting characteristics of the electrons in the cloud would be fantastic. Understanding how that possible orbit affects the interaction with other particles.

(BTW please correct me if I've miss-represented something)

I mean really, you can't drive adoption with a $60 bulb. Most people at the store going I've got 3 bulbs out are going to go "hrm $15 dollars or $180" Which do you think they are going to pick?

I'd love to know the Margins on this.

This made me laugh for probably the wrong reason.. Companies don't know the difference either. The age old Jr web admin job posting requiring a computer science degree. An office IT LAN technician requiring a Computer science degree, I think alot of people as said all through the comments jump into computer science's not realizing what exactly it is. Because they want that IT job out of school, or because they want to be the next zero-cool. Heck, most IT people now-a-days don't have any comprehension of how a CPU works.

Why is it anytime something with Apple comes up people are so quick to get into a *#*ssing match over who did what. To simply belittle and discredit the company because every aspect of their product was not 100% unique and of their own design smacks of arrogance and jealousy, perhaps because in retrospect people think "if only I had done that". The long thread on multi-touch, and the others are just more examples of this time and time again when ever apple is mentioned.

To say that apple is not innovative is simply wrong. It's equal to saying that a great author can't exist because the word "the" had been used before they didn't create it. They used the same alphabet that's been used for years! they just have a good pulisher / marketing firm!. A great composer can't happen because all the notes have been used; yes apple took things that existed and put them together in a way that gained acceptance by the masses.

Masses is a critical part of their success, the 5% of geeks need to climb off their high horse and understand that Apples success is not grown from "If your to stupid to figure it out you shouldn't have our product" but that their success is driven from "Lets make this simple for you!" it's the same approach that put AOL ontop of the ISP wars who's only downfall came from connectivity limitations causing a cascade affect.

On the subject of patents I've got nothing, the system is horrible and does quash innovation out the gate. I see patent disputes so many times a year they make my head spin. I can't stand to be forced into a patent review that reads one "line" in a patent and says "see you have phone service over a coax medium!" and insists you owe them $$. Last year I had to deal with one that was based on receiving a fax and converting it to digital medium for delivery through an ip transport system using from: to: fields for delivery between individuals. That's right! some lawfirm had an obscure patent that had a small bit about fax -> email and and felt that it applied. Your options spend $$$ to invalidate the claim or spend $$ to just make them go away.

The biggest hurdle comes from the community and the source of the systems. There is an arrogance about Linux users that (I'm better than you) that doesn't come along as strong when needing help from others as it does in other operating environments. It also comes from distributions not picking a "white horse" and sticking with it, not providing a clean migration path from to the other which is the effect of the //free// nature of the OS.

Take sound drivers as a simple example. There are several infrastructures for sound control and functions, because "linux" is made of distributions who do their own thing this causes people to have to have to many choices, there are large swaths where things "don't work" as you would expect. You take the forums to find a solution to find that the forum goes back 6 years. With out-dates posts relative to your problem but not a solution that's applicable. It might have been discussed recently but burried, you get the response "Search!" or RTFM!. Sorry, I wanted to use my microphone, not invest 4 hours into getting my microphone to work. Then when I find the solution I have to edit asound files, maybe recompile a module, maybe update dependencies, maybe change a library, This is stuff that all truly makes it a really tough sell.
When you find a problem, that truly kills a function, the solution to //fix it yourself// is good for some but certainly not all. Consumers want it to work, they don't want to learn to write code to fix something or get it usable. And at the same time even among those of us who //can fix it// we simply may not have the time to backtrack a very large program to add that much needed feature / function because it's not a project we are on. We have to learn that code tree from scratch and start working in the change. This makes it impossible.

Ubuntu has done good with their LTS version's in my opinion, but I think the question is going to be what //breaks// or stops working when the next release comes out. Knowing today that if I leave LTS to the normal current version I lost features and found bugs that broke atleast 25 *KEY* features for me. This is not something I can willfully recommend to anyone who isn't wanting to be involved in every aspect of their computer.

Take sound, I want a voip client, ok this one uses pulse, this one uses asound, do I have them them both? Do I have one and not the other, does the program conflict when I have both of them installed... again, not consumer friendly, Linux is a popularity contest, who does it //better// right now... and if you aren't willing to wipe and upgrade to the next greatest thing you quickly may find that your desired application is left in the dust.

Just jumping in here... I think the org poster had it write. Yes there are ways around Yes they can do it you can split the hairs of "well you *should* be able to do that" if you want. But this example and the large number of respondents as said is what really holds linux back. People in the linux community like to have a holier than thow attitude that's comparable to the mac users. Talk OS's and the guy who responds "I run linux" may have a smugness about them that you won't find with most windows users. It should be out of the gate right click "mount" that's it, no setup, no coding, no command line. That's a user experience. Sorry as a old school developer and linux user for a very long time I'm still urked at the smugness and the attitude that "if you don't know how to do it this way then you have no business doing it!". Just a thought