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Participants are not as interesting as DARPA most of them are small robots not full sized cars...

Although I would like to watch how those robots will pass the mine field

Every computer I have has a windows sticker, except for one that I "threw together" myself. I still put Windows in it, because I use that sometimes (offline, of course), and have desktop icons for Debian 2.2 and Mandrake 8 linux. (Double click on one, and loadlin takes you there..)
The Vista computers are supposed to be powerhouses, and I would like to someday run Kanotix linux on one, and see how that goes.
I understand that the manufacturers are charged about $40.00 for windows, so that is all that is added to the cost. Nobody hardly wants to make PC's without Windows preinstalled, anyway. There are some, but they tend to be low priced, (and out-of-date) boxes, aimed at buyers that only want to spend a small sum for their PC. Would like to note here that the PC Walmart offers in the stores comes with 512 MB of RAM now, apparently needed to run XP at a decent pace. So, we get the Windows boxes, our only problem is getting all the hardware to work in Linux. It's a waste of time keeping a Windows box updated, there is no end to it. Run Linux, especially a livecd linux, and be done with it.

(I am assuming here that Windows as such would not exist today if it were not for Bill Gates.)
Here goes:
So you want a world without MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, XP, with all their admitted faults?
Without those as a benchmark, would KDE be here today?
How about Loadlin?
Go check 'em out if you want to see how they might be related in some way to the products Microsoft has brought out.

We, of the open-source world, would not have the PC's around in such great numbers to install our distros on, if it were not for Windows.

The one thing that Windows does is bring a PC to market that Boots to X, Soundcard Works, everything else works, and is engineered to do just that before the box shows up at the store.

Sure, I get a thrill when a Linux Distro boots to a decent X configuration. I loved Mandrake 8. You could go back and forth till you got it just right.
Windows users don't know what we are talking about there. They just turn the box on, and the GUI appears. With XP, it is fairly fast, too.
Because of the requirements of Windows Longhorn, we have the new dual core processors coming on the scene just this week from Intel and AMD.
Soon, computers with these processors will be available.
Dell already has their Model 9100 with the Dual Core Intel model D, for $100 extra. (they have 3 more, for extra $$)
Would Intel and AMD have spent the money, and brought them to market in a world without Windows?
Didn't Bill Gates say he wanted lots of processing power, memory, and other advanced features for Longhorn? Because of that, we have these new machines available.

We'll all benefit in the long run because Windows is around.

I doubt I would be able to run this version of XP here, or afford it if I could buy a copy legally. My idea is to run as good an OS as one can on older hardware, and to run several on each box.
It can be a challenge to set each OS up, but gives me an idea of what can be expected.
Also not sure if installing this form of XP, (if it would) could foul up what I already have. I'm using a 500 MB MSDOS primary HDD, and a 2 GB Caviar secondary HDD (with SuSE). The MSDOS drive has a menu, and SuSE is selected from that using Loadlin. The MSDOS drive has the personal configs for both LiveCD Linux's.

I've got RUNT booting from my USB key. Actually, I formatted the USB key under Windows 98, SYS'ed it to make it boot to DOS, and then I set up a menu in config.sys/autoexec.bat to give me the choice of booting RUNT via loadlin or a DOS prompt. You could load pretty much any kernel you need via loadlin from DOS.

Anyone know of a way to format/SYS a USB key with FreeDOS? Please share.

Also, the company's web site says "is developing", not "has developed". So it doesn't work yet.

There's no fundamental reason this can't work, but it might take a big active antenna array to do it. Beam steering takes space, and fine beam steering takes lots of active antenna elements. Phased arrays won't work for ultrawideband (think about it), so you probably have to emit a nondirectional signal and do all the processing on the receive side. Or you can move the sensor around and build up a picture, an approach used for prototypes of land mine detection systems. There's considerable interest in ground-penetrating radar of this type.

The last time I looked at a Novell System was 4 years ago. But it ran a modified version of MS DOS.

So what, Linux is the same way. ; )

Here are some links I found: DARPA research, Canadian project (they're pretty tight -lipped about this), and German work is ongoing too.

It seems to have been used in astonomy for counting meteors & observing auroras.