I view it as more like one of life's mysteries than a blackhole. The criteria are somewhat opaque.
Perhaps a "glass is half full" view of the life is important to being selected. Wendell ended up buying 4 new machines, essentially because he was using a beta. Others (including me) might be yelling and screaming. His attitude is basically "I got 4 new computers out of the deal".
Chris, you weren't around for the prescription writer craze. Everyone was going nuts, buying new graphics cards, upgrading to Windows 7 Pro after an "official" V6 release. I would personally test it in a non-production environment, but a lot of people like to run the betas in a production environment which is a bad idea.
If I were to beta test, I'd probably load my database in a virtual machine and run it in a test environment before going live.
.png "ACUF Donor I")
