Did I read the article in the Gazette correctly?  The government held a $10 million contest to create a state of the art light bulb and the winner (Phillips) was the
ONLY entrant?  Why even call it a contest?  

STUPID waste....why did they bother?

Have any of you ever tried a LED light bulb? I bought on for around 15 bucks. No UV radiation, no infra red, just a piercing white bulb that you can't even look at. When you turn the bulb off, the image of the white light seems to be burned into your retina for a few moments. The Philips bulb is an LED bulb. They are in fact safer than the mercury vapor filled compact fluorescent spiral bulbs. They just are really crappy. For outdoor use they are good, since they work in temperatures where the spiral bulbs fail miserably, the same as regular fluorescents do. The cost of a Compact fluorescent to energy savings is worth the investment. The LEDs don't offer very much savings over the compact fluorescents, though. And the cost is much greater.

So, if mercury is good enough to eat in our fish, it certainly is good enough to light my home.(not recommended for unheated areas)

I've had one of the compact spiral mercury bulbs in my outdoor light post for 2 years now and it still lights fine.

Quoted from Shadow

I've had one of the compact spiral mercury bulbs in my outdoor light post for 2 years now and it still lights fine.

After getting up to temperature they do work fine. If you turn it on in the winter doesn't it take a while to come up to brightness?

The type of light I have comes on as soon as the power is turned on and is as bright as it ever gets. I have round mercury vapor in my bathroom that take a few seconds to get to full brightness.