While there are former U.Wisc. Condor staffers at Redhat now, and Redhat is a major contributor to the Condor project and has much invested in it, it is most definitely owned and operated by Miron Livny and the U.Wisc. computer science department. There's a large group of staff and students there that run the project and add the bulk of the new features to Condor. Anyhow, Condor is definitely an academia project with huge success that comes to my mind.

I work for an FPGA company. Both languages are going strong. You'd do well to learn both. My experience says if you want to work in government, especially military, it's pretty much dominated by VHDL. And Verilog is the prevalent language in telco and video design.

How long before, no matter how neat the gadget, the masses decide that Apple simply isn't worth the trouble?

If Sony's any indication, roughly never (or at least until the gadgets themselves stop impressing).

crichton took on a number of popular culture myths (the effects of global warming, rising ocean levels, receeding icebergs, and the "noble savage") in this book and kudos to him for trying. i did check up on a number of his references and there are, like lindzen's says in the article at the top of this post, commonly accepted truths but that the outcome of what's accepted has no consensus or emperical support for any theory at this point. whether or not we can control climate on a global scale certainly has no emperical evidence. good book. i still get the creeps thinking about that end scene with the actor...on the island...the "noble savage" supporter...ugh...he got what he deserved.