I rethought that statement after making it. It was kind of a silly statement.
The spirit it was made in was more along the lines of, DARPA is interested in fundamental research that has objectives outside of the military. So, if autonomous vehicle research frequently has military ties, it's more the tie to the funding at work coloring this view than the research objectives. Autonomous vehicle work has obvious non-military applications.
When I said this, I was thinking very specifically in terms of, "we make extractors," so there's the Message Understanding Confererence, funded by DARPA. Research that would have been done anyway now has big DARPA funding. So on and so forth.
My view was also colored a bit by the government funding source from my last research assistantship.
Certainly cocaine is a powerful stimulant that might keep him alive to some extent, but, come on, he's just standing there on the balcony enjoying being ripped apart by bullets like he's taking a shower or something.
I think that the best one on this was Scarface, not only because of the inaccuracy, but because of how well it highlighted the disparity between how hard it was to kill the main characters, vs killing the other folks.
Granted, Scarface is still a masterpiece, and a lot of this was done for artistic license.
Still, the main characters go around shooting people in the heart, who instantly fall unconscious and dead. In the end scene, however, Pacino is being gunned down by a group of people firing automatic weapons at him. He has time to shoot into the crowd and hit them with a grenade launcher, bear in mind, he just walks out onto his balcony and takes the bullet wounds at this point. Despite this, he guns them all down, only to be shot in his midsection from behind by a character who is supposedly a top assasin sort, with a shotgun, to be killed. Not at close range. Not a headshot. Also, none of the people hitting him with their machine guns manage a headshot either in a firefight that seems to take 5 minutes despite drastically outnumbering him and consistently hitting him otherwise.
DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a gigantic agency that funds a large proportion of academic research. The political hot button of child pornography, on the other hand, has no large funding source to offer universities. That's why so many academic projects have ties to defense.
Also, yes, usually research is, "do whatever you were going to do, but tie it to defense somehow." That's the way it goes, you need the cash. However, usually you can tie fundamental research to defense in some way. One of the PhD students who was at Cornell while I was there used movie reviews for related research... however, the simple mark "positive" or "negative" is certainly enough to help the DoD filter Internet documents if they chose to do so, so there is a tie to defense. The technology had a reason for existing without the DoD, but funding might have been another story. The same goes for cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots, and distributed computing (though distributed computing has nice corporate interests through companies like Amazon and Google that have to maintain mega-networks for their operations).
1) A book that I thought was awesome when I was in high school was "The Robot Builder's Bonanza." You can check it out. The material has held up quite solidly. You'll learn all about building robots to pick up cans of soda. 2) Hobby robot clubs. They're sprining up quite similarly to the computer clubs of old. 3) As already suggested, lots of people like mindstorms, but I've no personal experience with these. 4) Kits. You can purchase kits for a number of robots, including robot sumo competition kits. 5) Pyrobot. You might want to check it out. It's a software simulation kit (I think that it can drive some robots too) that was being pushed at AAAI-2005 for teaching robotics at the undergraduate and perhaps high school levels. It comes on a Linux LiveCD. It's mostly about writing software in python.
One thing to kick around. If a project that you want to do out of one of the older books asks for a computer... check out a less-expensive alternative. Most of these projects were written for hardware that is positively old and inexpesive by modern standards (it's been 10 years since I read The Robot Builder's Bonanza, first). If you have the cash and patience to learn about PICs, you might consider it time well spent later in life.
So, now you're looking at college perhaps? Major in computer science, mechanical engineering, or electrical engineering. Each focus on different facets that can be of use in robotics. If you're into cognitive science, psychology isn't a bad bet... I have no personal experience with that one though. I went computer science, which is also a fairly good route to cog sci if you go artificial intelligence.
The breakdown looks like this though: Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence Mechanical Engineering - Design & Control Electrical Engineering - Control
If you want to go straight out into industry building robots, mechanical engineering isn't a bad bet. If you want to do research with humanoid robots and the like, computer science is your best bet. Mechanical engineering also has lots of good research in robotics, and you'll have more opportunities to fiddle with them as an undergrad. If you're in college, check out your school's Mechatronics course, they're becoming far more common.
Research will certainly require a PhD. I'm currently in a PhD program working in a robotics lab with a humanoid robot. It's very very very cool.
At any rate. If you're still in high shcool, starting out in high school isn't a bad bet, just make sure you keep up with your classes and grades. If you want to go the PhD route, the best thing to do is to go to a good undergrad school, get solid grades, and, most importantly, find a professor to do some work with... preferably research. Your letters of recommendation will make or break you for admission to a PhD program. Stay on the good side of your professors, at least three of them. Also, remember, it doesn't hurt to have a famous professor in your corner, but a professor who knows you better, but is less influential, is more helpful than a professor who is quite influential but barely knows you.
If you screw up any of the above steps, that's ok too. I definitely didn't do everything perfectly on my route here, but I still got into an exceptional school with a world-class lab and work with a professor who has made quite a name for himself.
I actually addressed that in an earlier version of the reply that I did not post. You're absolutely right. Though, I wouldn't say that reddit is particularly libertarian. Honestly, they are much farther to the left than most libertarians. Usually, libertarians can be civil and discuss various ideas... and there are lots of differences inside the party. This isn't really the case at reddit. You're dead on with the European bent, but, honestly, I'd say reddit is pretty left-wing.
Reddit does essentially that. The problem with that is that you really don't have control over the genre of the site anymore. If more people want to talk politics than science and technology, then you're stuck with politics. Reddit has become better at covering diverse stories now, but it's still pretty much a political site (though, people who have no interest in science and tech complain that there is too much science and tech there).
A significant proportion of us want Slashdot to be... "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters," not "News for Politicos, Stuff that Doesn't Have a Thing to do with Science or Technology."
P.S. I know my children. You'll send me lots of replies yacking about how Slashdot has always had a political tone to some degree. This is true, but it used to at least be constrained to politics regarding technology.
P.P.S. Sorry Taco and eds. I appreciate the site... but this is just very very enabling of the sort of crowd that drives me away from Slashdot. Please don't take this the wrong way. I only bothered posting because I like Slashdot and want it to be as good as it once was.
1) Liability. Contractors want somebody to sue if something goes wrong. The DoD will blame the contractor. 2) Specs. Usually, the system is being developed is meant to replace another system that is in-place. The only things to be changed are what are specced out. This doesn't prevent things from being entirely rewritten, but it usually stays on an existing DoD platform. 3) Speaking of platforms, check out the existing specced out platforms. Lots of people go with DIICOE, or GCCS for various reasons. Some might include a desire to get something included as a DIICOE segment, which is profitable, or GCCS, because it's ubiquitous. 4) STIGs. If there isn't a STIG written for it, you're going to have a harder time getting approval to operate it on a classified network. Even if all of your major apps are covered, you'll have to get extensions regarding applications that are not covered. Extensions are not intended to be waivers... so, you're only supposed to get an extension if you intend to replace it. It is hard to justify an extension for new software. Why not just write it in a compliant fashion? Because the security audit will be more of a PITA, they avoid any step into the unknown. Some of this is just inertia. 5) Security through obscurity. It sounds asinine, but the DoD doesn't rely on security through obscurity.... they rely on anything that is considered a good practice, obscurity is just one of those many practices. It's not that they are using telnet or anything silly like that. It's just that they want as many layers as possible. 6) Common open source is embraced. Everyone runs Apache. It's as ubiquitous as IIS. It's the things that are considered more "out there" that aren't.
All of that aside, there have been open source initiatives, but contractors have been reluctant to bite. Reasons vary, but this is the essential dynamic. The DoD retains the rights to most of the source code for projects that they fund, so, they already have the source code... they give it to anybody that they please, including the next contractor to work on the project. Contractors don't want to share source with each other for competitive reasons. Since they're all bidding to produce identical products, giving other contractors the ability to develop experience with a product can only hurt their business, this experience is their primary bargaining chip when bidding (that and the ability to undercut their competitors, or qualify for special considerations, such as being a small business).
Then there is the concern of enabling foreign interests to develop commensurate technologies. Nobody wants to share code to decode IFF signals, or to build similar systems. Thinking that the government would publish code to do these things is just asinine.
You always have your crumudgeons who also will just resist open source... which is the same even outside of DoD interests, but the DoD comes with a host of other concerns. All of these in mind, I'm not sure that the DoD is necessarily stilted against open source. Some sectors of the DoD have embraced it quite readily... these are just the faster-moving sectors who adopt technologies more readily. The DoD is a very large entity, and, as such, slow adoption, when combined with very well established platforms results in this exact behavior.
Things are quite different in other academic fields, at least in computer science.
There are TONS of AI conferences. IJCA, ECAI, AAAI, then in specialties, SAT, FLOC... so forth. My understanding is that in graphics, you're in SIGGRAPH or you're not published, and that because of a shortage of conferences, only 1 or 2 papers is good enough for faculty positions. Top positions in AI will command many more than that, and we even have our own journals, even for subfields, such as the Journal of Machine Learning Research.
Eventually, we'll probably all be running hypervisors (such as VMWare) hosting multiple operating systems, so such battles will seem a little silly.
That's just a guess, and perhaps not a great one, but I imagine that the flexibility that such a solution offers will be too appealing to pass up once it's gained more acceptance in industry. This seems like it will almost certainly be the case in server rooms, where an easily configurable grid could reduce the headaches of managing enterprise computing applications significantly. Then, imagine this and related technologies being used to manage workstations at the office. "We don't push applications to our servers in this office! Pre-configured images are downloaded from our server." Sooner or later, it seems as though this will reach the home, just as other technologies have.
That was the first thought that I had when I read this... of course... why would they patent it?
One possibility is that nobody would go with a standard that Sony put out for this sort of thing, since the standards body would see right through it. However, if Sony offered a product like this, and you don't care much for their copyrights to begin with, why would you mind writing a clone into your P2P client?
It all starts to sound like hokey conspiracy theories at that point, but, eh, it was my first thought too.
I don't remember if I did or didn't. Right now, I'm running a copy that came with my laptop. I haven't set up VPN to campus on my new laptop yet, and didn't retain the CD last time I installed it (I think that I just mounted the ISO or something like that). I had to activate the disk that came with the laptop, which, I agree, is a little lame.
Part of the point of the post was that a user could use Linux for free. Most of my research at the moment is run on a 26 node beowulf cluster, so, it's far easier for me to work under Linux. In the Fall, some of the machines that I will be working with (a cluster powering a robot) will be running Windows, so, I'll need Windows for development under Visual Studio. My setup allows me to write academic papers using LaTeX (easiest way to do it, honestly), use the Linux tools that make my life easier (gnuplot, ssh, so forth), and still have the Windows setup that I need. I think that it will be a good balance, but, since I haven't started up at the new lab yet (I'm an RA now, and a first year PhD student at a different university starting Monday), I don't know if this setup will work or not.
So far, there have been a few hickups with ESX that could prove inconvenient, but no apparent showstoppers, and they seem to be related to bugs in how Xgl/Compiz (Quinnstorm, because Quinnstorm rocks) interacts with the VMWare Console, since they have never come up under XOrg without Xgl. The Quinnstorm branch gets updated religiously... there are some very hard-working hackers on that project, so, I imagine that these bugs will be gone before they become a terrible issue. On the other hand, many of the features that this setup offers me are real time-savers.
Another amazing but true fact... That doesn't negate the GPs point. If you want to use their services and use them by their rules, you can, on the other hand, you can opt out of using them. I'm fairly sure that that was covered by the original statement.
I get XP Pro gratis under MSDNAA. You might point out that, since I'm a student, MSDNAA is paid out of my fees, but, again, you'd be wrong, since I'm a PhD student and it comes out of a fellowship that the university gave to me in the first place.
Of course, it runs beautifully under VMWare ESX Server, which anybody can get gratis, and under Ubuntu Linux, which, again, anybody can get Gratis.
Apple's Leopard Strategy to Kill Microsoft and Dell?
Yeah, that's their strategy. I was talking about it with Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa over breakfast from the alien spaceship this morning. The next thing I knew, the cow had jumped over the moon and Mao Zedong was trumping up capitalism.
Then I woke up and swore never to eat pizza before bed again.
Wow. You know what's amazing? You can criticize Christians for being foolish and closed-minded and for killing people, and in the same breath call for their annihilation.
There is the distinct possibility that the method used to produce the "music" is significantly different from the art installation, and I'm sure that the artist was not solving any regression problems.
And it is also environmentally friendly because it can use traditional fossil fuels as well as biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen and releases only small amounts of pollutants.
People say that that's "friendly," but, really, it's friendlier. You have to get the hydrogen, which generally means investing energy into its production, so, hydrogen is only as friendly as the means of production. Biomass is probably biodiesel in this case, which also releases pollutants, but makes less CO2 when burned.
Even so, it sounds like a rather nice unit, and, yes, it is friendlier.
Slashdot Mirror
I rethought that statement after making it. It was kind of a silly statement.
The spirit it was made in was more along the lines of, DARPA is interested in fundamental research that has objectives outside of the military. So, if autonomous vehicle research frequently has military ties, it's more the tie to the funding at work coloring this view than the research objectives. Autonomous vehicle work has obvious non-military applications.
When I said this, I was thinking very specifically in terms of, "we make extractors," so there's the Message Understanding Confererence, funded by DARPA. Research that would have been done anyway now has big DARPA funding. So on and so forth.
My view was also colored a bit by the government funding source from my last research assistantship.
Certainly cocaine is a powerful stimulant that might keep him alive to some extent, but, come on, he's just standing there on the balcony enjoying being ripped apart by bullets like he's taking a shower or something.
I think that the best one on this was Scarface, not only because of the inaccuracy, but because of how well it highlighted the disparity between how hard it was to kill the main characters, vs killing the other folks.
Granted, Scarface is still a masterpiece, and a lot of this was done for artistic license.
Still, the main characters go around shooting people in the heart, who instantly fall unconscious and dead. In the end scene, however, Pacino is being gunned down by a group of people firing automatic weapons at him. He has time to shoot into the crowd and hit them with a grenade launcher, bear in mind, he just walks out onto his balcony and takes the bullet wounds at this point. Despite this, he guns them all down, only to be shot in his midsection from behind by a character who is supposedly a top assasin sort, with a shotgun, to be killed. Not at close range. Not a headshot. Also, none of the people hitting him with their machine guns manage a headshot either in a firefight that seems to take 5 minutes despite drastically outnumbering him and consistently hitting him otherwise.
I should caveat that above I meant "DARPA related research."
With all due respect, that is inaccurate.
DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a gigantic agency that funds a large proportion of academic research. The political hot button of child pornography, on the other hand, has no large funding source to offer universities. That's why so many academic projects have ties to defense.
Also, yes, usually research is, "do whatever you were going to do, but tie it to defense somehow." That's the way it goes, you need the cash. However, usually you can tie fundamental research to defense in some way. One of the PhD students who was at Cornell while I was there used movie reviews for related research... however, the simple mark "positive" or "negative" is certainly enough to help the DoD filter Internet documents if they chose to do so, so there is a tie to defense. The technology had a reason for existing without the DoD, but funding might have been another story. The same goes for cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots, and distributed computing (though distributed computing has nice corporate interests through companies like Amazon and Google that have to maintain mega-networks for their operations).
1) A book that I thought was awesome when I was in high school was "The Robot Builder's Bonanza." You can check it out. The material has held up quite solidly. You'll learn all about building robots to pick up cans of soda.
2 63d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html If you're the reading sort, you might also enjoy the article that it accompanies. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/d6a1884322 63d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html (It's by Ray Kurzweil)
2) Hobby robot clubs. They're sprining up quite similarly to the computer clubs of old.
3) As already suggested, lots of people like mindstorms, but I've no personal experience with these.
4) Kits. You can purchase kits for a number of robots, including robot sumo competition kits.
5) Pyrobot. You might want to check it out. It's a software simulation kit (I think that it can drive some robots too) that was being pushed at AAAI-2005 for teaching robotics at the undergraduate and perhaps high school levels. It comes on a Linux LiveCD. It's mostly about writing software in python.
One thing to kick around. If a project that you want to do out of one of the older books asks for a computer... check out a less-expensive alternative. Most of these projects were written for hardware that is positively old and inexpesive by modern standards (it's been 10 years since I read The Robot Builder's Bonanza, first). If you have the cash and patience to learn about PICs, you might consider it time well spent later in life.
So, now you're looking at college perhaps? Major in computer science, mechanical engineering, or electrical engineering. Each focus on different facets that can be of use in robotics. If you're into cognitive science, psychology isn't a bad bet... I have no personal experience with that one though. I went computer science, which is also a fairly good route to cog sci if you go artificial intelligence.
The breakdown looks like this though:
Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence
Mechanical Engineering - Design & Control
Electrical Engineering - Control
If you want to go straight out into industry building robots, mechanical engineering isn't a bad bet. If you want to do research with humanoid robots and the like, computer science is your best bet. Mechanical engineering also has lots of good research in robotics, and you'll have more opportunities to fiddle with them as an undergrad. If you're in college, check out your school's Mechatronics course, they're becoming far more common.
Research will certainly require a PhD. I'm currently in a PhD program working in a robotics lab with a humanoid robot. It's very very very cool.
At any rate. If you're still in high shcool, starting out in high school isn't a bad bet, just make sure you keep up with your classes and grades. If you want to go the PhD route, the best thing to do is to go to a good undergrad school, get solid grades, and, most importantly, find a professor to do some work with... preferably research. Your letters of recommendation will make or break you for admission to a PhD program. Stay on the good side of your professors, at least three of them. Also, remember, it doesn't hurt to have a famous professor in your corner, but a professor who knows you better, but is less influential, is more helpful than a professor who is quite influential but barely knows you.
If you screw up any of the above steps, that's ok too. I definitely didn't do everything perfectly on my route here, but I still got into an exceptional school with a world-class lab and work with a professor who has made quite a name for himself.
Also, check out these cool pictures, featured in this month's issue of popular science http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/b67188432
There is that. Technically most of these folks operate as LLC, and the just don't want it to fall on them.
I actually addressed that in an earlier version of the reply that I did not post. You're absolutely right. Though, I wouldn't say that reddit is particularly libertarian. Honestly, they are much farther to the left than most libertarians. Usually, libertarians can be civil and discuss various ideas... and there are lots of differences inside the party. This isn't really the case at reddit. You're dead on with the European bent, but, honestly, I'd say reddit is pretty left-wing.
Reddit does essentially that. The problem with that is that you really don't have control over the genre of the site anymore. If more people want to talk politics than science and technology, then you're stuck with politics. Reddit has become better at covering diverse stories now, but it's still pretty much a political site (though, people who have no interest in science and tech complain that there is too much science and tech there).
Mod parent up.
A significant proportion of us want Slashdot to be... "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters," not "News for Politicos, Stuff that Doesn't Have a Thing to do with Science or Technology."
P.S. I know my children. You'll send me lots of replies yacking about how Slashdot has always had a political tone to some degree. This is true, but it used to at least be constrained to politics regarding technology.
P.P.S. Sorry Taco and eds. I appreciate the site... but this is just very very enabling of the sort of crowd that drives me away from Slashdot. Please don't take this the wrong way. I only bothered posting because I like Slashdot and want it to be as good as it once was.
1) Liability. Contractors want somebody to sue if something goes wrong. The DoD will blame the contractor.
2) Specs. Usually, the system is being developed is meant to replace another system that is in-place. The only things to be changed are what are specced out. This doesn't prevent things from being entirely rewritten, but it usually stays on an existing DoD platform.
3) Speaking of platforms, check out the existing specced out platforms. Lots of people go with DIICOE, or GCCS for various reasons. Some might include a desire to get something included as a DIICOE segment, which is profitable, or GCCS, because it's ubiquitous.
4) STIGs. If there isn't a STIG written for it, you're going to have a harder time getting approval to operate it on a classified network. Even if all of your major apps are covered, you'll have to get extensions regarding applications that are not covered. Extensions are not intended to be waivers... so, you're only supposed to get an extension if you intend to replace it. It is hard to justify an extension for new software. Why not just write it in a compliant fashion? Because the security audit will be more of a PITA, they avoid any step into the unknown. Some of this is just inertia.
5) Security through obscurity. It sounds asinine, but the DoD doesn't rely on security through obscurity.... they rely on anything that is considered a good practice, obscurity is just one of those many practices. It's not that they are using telnet or anything silly like that. It's just that they want as many layers as possible.
6) Common open source is embraced. Everyone runs Apache. It's as ubiquitous as IIS. It's the things that are considered more "out there" that aren't.
All of that aside, there have been open source initiatives, but contractors have been reluctant to bite. Reasons vary, but this is the essential dynamic. The DoD retains the rights to most of the source code for projects that they fund, so, they already have the source code... they give it to anybody that they please, including the next contractor to work on the project. Contractors don't want to share source with each other for competitive reasons. Since they're all bidding to produce identical products, giving other contractors the ability to develop experience with a product can only hurt their business, this experience is their primary bargaining chip when bidding (that and the ability to undercut their competitors, or qualify for special considerations, such as being a small business).
Then there is the concern of enabling foreign interests to develop commensurate technologies. Nobody wants to share code to decode IFF signals, or to build similar systems. Thinking that the government would publish code to do these things is just asinine.
You always have your crumudgeons who also will just resist open source... which is the same even outside of DoD interests, but the DoD comes with a host of other concerns. All of these in mind, I'm not sure that the DoD is necessarily stilted against open source. Some sectors of the DoD have embraced it quite readily... these are just the faster-moving sectors who adopt technologies more readily. The DoD is a very large entity, and, as such, slow adoption, when combined with very well established platforms results in this exact behavior.
Things are quite different in other academic fields, at least in computer science.
There are TONS of AI conferences. IJCA, ECAI, AAAI, then in specialties, SAT, FLOC... so forth. My understanding is that in graphics, you're in SIGGRAPH or you're not published, and that because of a shortage of conferences, only 1 or 2 papers is good enough for faculty positions. Top positions in AI will command many more than that, and we even have our own journals, even for subfields, such as the Journal of Machine Learning Research.
Having only one conference would suck.
Eventually, we'll probably all be running hypervisors (such as VMWare) hosting multiple operating systems, so such battles will seem a little silly.
That's just a guess, and perhaps not a great one, but I imagine that the flexibility that such a solution offers will be too appealing to pass up once it's gained more acceptance in industry. This seems like it will almost certainly be the case in server rooms, where an easily configurable grid could reduce the headaches of managing enterprise computing applications significantly. Then, imagine this and related technologies being used to manage workstations at the office. "We don't push applications to our servers in this office! Pre-configured images are downloaded from our server." Sooner or later, it seems as though this will reach the home, just as other technologies have.
That was the first thought that I had when I read this... of course... why would they patent it?
One possibility is that nobody would go with a standard that Sony put out for this sort of thing, since the standards body would see right through it. However, if Sony offered a product like this, and you don't care much for their copyrights to begin with, why would you mind writing a clone into your P2P client?
It all starts to sound like hokey conspiracy theories at that point, but, eh, it was my first thought too.
I don't remember if I did or didn't. Right now, I'm running a copy that came with my laptop. I haven't set up VPN to campus on my new laptop yet, and didn't retain the CD last time I installed it (I think that I just mounted the ISO or something like that). I had to activate the disk that came with the laptop, which, I agree, is a little lame.
Part of the point of the post was that a user could use Linux for free. Most of my research at the moment is run on a 26 node beowulf cluster, so, it's far easier for me to work under Linux. In the Fall, some of the machines that I will be working with (a cluster powering a robot) will be running Windows, so, I'll need Windows for development under Visual Studio. My setup allows me to write academic papers using LaTeX (easiest way to do it, honestly), use the Linux tools that make my life easier (gnuplot, ssh, so forth), and still have the Windows setup that I need. I think that it will be a good balance, but, since I haven't started up at the new lab yet (I'm an RA now, and a first year PhD student at a different university starting Monday), I don't know if this setup will work or not.
So far, there have been a few hickups with ESX that could prove inconvenient, but no apparent showstoppers, and they seem to be related to bugs in how Xgl/Compiz (Quinnstorm, because Quinnstorm rocks) interacts with the VMWare Console, since they have never come up under XOrg without Xgl. The Quinnstorm branch gets updated religiously... there are some very hard-working hackers on that project, so, I imagine that these bugs will be gone before they become a terrible issue. On the other hand, many of the features that this setup offers me are real time-savers.
Another amazing but true fact... That doesn't negate the GPs point. If you want to use their services and use them by their rules, you can, on the other hand, you can opt out of using them. I'm fairly sure that that was covered by the original statement.
I get XP Pro gratis under MSDNAA. You might point out that, since I'm a student, MSDNAA is paid out of my fees, but, again, you'd be wrong, since I'm a PhD student and it comes out of a fellowship that the university gave to me in the first place.
Of course, it runs beautifully under VMWare ESX Server, which anybody can get gratis, and under Ubuntu Linux, which, again, anybody can get Gratis.
Apple's Leopard Strategy to Kill Microsoft and Dell?
Yeah, that's their strategy. I was talking about it with Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa over breakfast from the alien spaceship this morning. The next thing I knew, the cow had jumped over the moon and Mao Zedong was trumping up capitalism.
Then I woke up and swore never to eat pizza before bed again.
Wow. You know what's amazing? You can criticize Christians for being foolish and closed-minded and for killing people, and in the same breath call for their annihilation.
Not exactly, she likes to break in men who are at least 1 generation younger.
There is the distinct possibility that the method used to produce the "music" is significantly different from the art installation, and I'm sure that the artist was not solving any regression problems.
I know a very attractive older woman who is into younger men who said something similar.
Well yes, but so was the stuff in fossil fuels.
And it is also environmentally friendly because it can use traditional fossil fuels as well as biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen and releases only small amounts of pollutants.
People say that that's "friendly," but, really, it's friendlier. You have to get the hydrogen, which generally means investing energy into its production, so, hydrogen is only as friendly as the means of production. Biomass is probably biodiesel in this case, which also releases pollutants, but makes less CO2 when burned.
Even so, it sounds like a rather nice unit, and, yes, it is friendlier.
I realize that the end of a story is not nearly as sexy as the beginning
Yeah, it always sucks with things turn out right.