Nonsense. Comcast figured this out ages ago. For each TCP stream, you set the first 64k to be high priority and everything after that to be low priority. You declare UDP packets with the same (source, dest) to be a stream and do the same with those.

If you want to be more clever than that, you can favor constant rate low-bandwidth streams. This makes VoIP and gamering users happy.

Finally, you also track per user usage. The first X megs in an hour is default priority, and anything after that is progressively lower priority or even throttled. For airplane internet, I'd make X like 50.

Absolutely, because everyone paid the the same for the same service.

It's perfectly possible to do per-user load balancing. If you advertised "up to 100 Mbps, speeds may be lower at peak times" and then oversold a 1 gig link to 100 people, then prioritize the first 10Mbps of each user's packets. Everyone's online games, VoIP traffic, streaming music, web browsing, and email will work perfectly. That one guy who's streaming 5 HD Netflix movies will have to suck it up. The guy who's torrenting will get 50Mbps of low priority traffic and probably not even notice

Chris and I would like to do an Open gate array as our next project. Sufficient patents have expired, etc.

If you ever write a means of describing digital logic designs in Lua we can compare it. Just describing data structures is not sufficient, you need to describe parallel boolean algebraic operations and macrocells such as multiply. At the moment no such thing exists and it would take a long time to duplicate the work of the MyHDL project.

Not sure you understand. The OO model is useful for representing a 4-input device with a logical output determined by a look-up table, which is the fundamental logical element. At least it's useful to do it elegantly. Lua is a small embedded language, but the purpose of MyHDL in this case is not to execute Python at runtime but to generate VHDL or Verilog describing an inherently parallel implementation of an algorithm.

Chris can explain this much better than I, but we are definitely conscious of the gate-array resource use. Currently we are running within the space of the least expensive SmartFusion II chip, which I think you can get for $18 in quantity. Smartfusion 1 was more of a problem as it didn't have any multiplier macrocells and we had to make those out of gates. SmartFusion II provides 11 multipliers in the lowest end chip, and thus the fixed-point multiply performance of a modern desktop chip for a lot less power.

We are also aware of algorithmic costs. For example we were using Weaver's third method and will probably go to something else, maybe a version of Hartley.

I beat you to first post. Nyahh! Booyah!

HackRF is designed to be test equipment rather than a legal radio transceiver. It doesn't meet the FCC specifications for spectral purity, especially when amplified. You could probably make filters to help it produce a legal output.

Whitebox is meant to meet FCC specifications for spurious signals that are required when amplification of 25 watts or higher is used. Amplifiers also contribute spurious signals and will usually incorporate their own filters.

HackRF is something that sticks on your laptop via USB. Whitebox is meant to be a stand-alone system or one that is controlled from your Smartphone via a WiFi or Bluetooth link.

Whitebox is optimized for battery power. Using a FLASH-based gate-array rather than the conventional SRAM one makes a big difference.

HackRF is designed to be test equipment rather than a legal radio transceiver. It doesn't meet the FCC specifications for spectral purity, especially when amplified. You could probably make filters to help it produce a legal output.

Whitebox is meant to meet FCC specifications for spurious signals that are required when amplification of 25 watts or higher is used. Amplifiers also contribute spurious signals and will usually incorporate their own filters.

HackRF is something that sticks on your laptop via USB. Whitebox is meant to be a stand-alone system or one that is controlled from your Smartphone via a WiFi or Bluetooth link.

Whitebox is optimized for battery power. Using a FLASH-based gate-array rather than the conventional SRAM one makes a big difference.

In most of the world, clean fresh water simply isn't a rare resource. Globally, the stuff is so abundant that humanity really couldn't "waste" it if we actively tried.

The problem is that moving water is expensive, and in some specific places water is *locally* rare. In those places water conservation makes sense, because the alternatives are really expensive. But that doesn't mean anyone should be worrying about water supplies in, say, the eastern US.

Oh sure. And I could solder with Mercury, and that has a really low melting point :-). I imagine the application for a solder with a 160F melting point is very specialized. I don't ever want to specify a transportation temperature limit for consumer electronics of 160F, a freight container can exceed that.

Drilling holes in a multi-layer board is liable to nail a trace you can't see. If you are lucky you can shine a really bright light through it and see all of the traces. If you can't, don't try drilling.

Eutetic solder (the old non-RoHS stuff with lead in it) melts at 361 F, everything else in common use melts at a higher temperature.

Normally, I'd recommend Scratch, but in this case, I recommend: MMF2, by François Lionet and Yves Lamoureux. They really get it, and your son will learn a ton about programming, without deviating from working on games themselves.