lol--and then the window makers can buy bread from the baker who can buy shoes from the shoemaker who can buy copyrighted textbooks for his child in high school. :)

I always thought those studies put piracy on the wrong side of the balance sheet: that's 56 billions dollars saved; not a 56 billion dollar cost. 373,000 jobs lost? That's over 15 millions hours each week of free time to spend with children

i'm currently wrapping up a PDP-11 emulator on FPGA. I'm writing this post while waiting for the simulator to run test code that was written before I was born.... our contract also has us replacing a fixed-head disk with magneto-RAM.

A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a fundamentally different type of architecture than what you think of as "modern processors." Instead of serial instruction stream execution engines you are provided with an array of programmable logic blocks in a sea of programmable routing. The programming model is akin to programming a spreadsheet in which each cell updates in parallel. Traditionally we think of this as "reconfigurable hardware" since the languages we use for designing physical hardware and FPGA emulations are the same (VHDL/Verilog). For most tasks that exhibit any sort of parallelism, an FPGA can grossly outperform a CPU of similar transistor count and cost both in terms of throughput and power consumption. The major barriers preventing the FPGA architecture from pushing serial instruction stream executers aside is the learning curve of the programming model and the economic barrier-to-entry: FPGAs are historically expensive VHDL/Verilog simulators and good design tools aren't cheap either. FPGA emulations of legacy systems can replace computing components that can no longer be purchased. This is what I do professionally.

what are you talking about? with 44 billion dollars we could put 44 of those $100 units every square kilometer. the issue to increasing the amount of bandwidth per transceiver to anything higher than 100Mbps was that we need to be able to LEGALLY USE more of the spectrum.

44 Billion Dollars / Area of US = 4,477.63 U.S. dollars per Square Kilometer

I can build a wireless transceiver for well under $1000 that can provide 100 Mbps coverage to 1 square kilometer (564 meter radius). It will cost more like $100 each if we're making 10M.

The real hurdle isn't technical, but political: we need to stop licensing bandwidth to private corporations and start sharing the entire spectrum.