The "there could have been anything on those CDs" is a really lame excuse and it's one that's M$ propagated. You can say the same thing about books and speech. Want to ban those in school too? Imagine, "He was handing out notes to his clasmates. I immediately assumed they contained drugs and porn and steped in to uphold the law. My suspicions were only increased when I learned this Constitution was written by adults." I ran into the same objections when I tried to hold a Free Software demonstration in my school. It's a war on sharing, they want you to trust them more than your neighbors.

Fear and ignorance are used to keep you helpless and divided. Its a lie, trust your neighbors.

Despite a lot of slippery astroturf, Zune never caught on and sales are still in the toilet. There are few bigger failures out there.

This bout of marketing hype matters less than matters of real substance. Obama, Gates talks are real cause for concern. Obama's platform had nice words about openness, let's hope the dog was wagging the tail in those talks. The conversation should have gone something like, "Gates, you are on notice." Others, worry about even larger platform shifts. It is too early to tell how things will really go.

Contracts can't violate laws, so you can't sign away your rights. They can't, for example, appropriate code you've written before and other people's code you happen to use.

That being said, Look Out! Don't sign anything you don't agree with if you can avoid it. What you have not signed can't be held against you. Talk to a real lawyer, not the mickey mouse guy representing the University against you.

Troll Zoo

Actually, Sweaty B was telling people, "Advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, baby!", but it's not fair to shift blame outside of the company. They alone made the decisions, which drove Intel out of the graphics market, removed XP driver compatibilty at the last moment and loaded Vista with enough anti-features to insure it's complete failure.

All the GPGPU people use one of the GPU programming languages. The hard core ones use assembly.

Well, yeah. That's what you have to do when you don't have a free implementation. Kind of sucks to rewrite everything when you swap hardware platforms, don't it? Tell me it would not be nicer to have a free, vendor supported framework that would at least port to different generations by the same vendor.

Also, please tell why you would waste with that kind of thing when there are lots of spare cycles at super computes on every University. Learning GPU programming languages and assembly is a nice hobby and all, but I'm not sure you should write it into your grant.

Oh, I see, I'm talking to the CEO Yoyo. I've been trolled. Nice one.