I'll be reading this for the rest of the day as it got burned on my retinas. Never use brilliant type on a black background.
I agree, though. The contrast is a strain on the eyes.
As a child I remember piping the video out through our vcr to the tv and being quite disappointed by the fringe-tastic picture quality. Ahh, the bad old days. :)
Contrast flattens the total range, brightness shifts the range up or down, and gamma changes the shape of the curve to be more or less steep (accentuating relative shading differences at different levels of brightness).
When you're looking at a photo of a sunlit scene, the bright parts should be bright; there should be sufficient contrast to see into the shaded areas, which should be dark; and the photo shouldn't look murky or washed out. To get that effect, the contrast needs to be pretty high but evenly spread, with the brightest white being bright enough to shine out.
I run my own (Dell) monitors at 15/100 brightness - which happens to be pretty damn bright compared to the brightest laptop screen - but I still don't use white as the window background colour in my UI preferences - I use a sky blue with RGB:207,207,239.
Editing code is a completely different application from editing images, watching video, or playing games. On my work box, I'm simply not concerned with "evenly discernible relative shading differences at all levels of brightness", so I run a a pair of ViewSonics at 70% contrast and 75% brightness in a well-lit room. I don't experience any level of discomfort from white editor windows; the only problem I ever experience is shifting back and forth between dark-on-light and light-on-dark windows.
Or readability for that matter.