you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

But I was under the mistaken impression that one could only burn an FPGA once. Thanks for clarifying that they can be reused.

You burn an EEPROM so I was using the same terminology. It's still usually called "burning" even though you can re-burn the same device with different code.

...cannot build it into silicon.

Isn't the whole point of an FPGA being able to "burn" a design into a chip rather than "building" it? Are they saying you can only run your modifications through a simulator instead of burning an FPGA to test it?

If so, what's the point of the exercise? Wouldn't it make more sense to have students play with an open sourced or freeware design that they can actually implement and test?

I'm stunned at how many sports channels I had to block even with basic IPTV from SaskTel here in Saskatchewan, Canada. I have ZERO interest in sports, and I'm kind of pissed off that some of the money I pay is going to support that crap, which I do not and will never watch.

I'd much rather have something like BBC News or BBC1 than a bazillion sports channels.

Given a choice, more is always better.

Even though my Lenovo Z580 has four USB ports, I often find myself wishing I had a couple more so I wouldn't have to swap devices. In particular, I'd appreciate another USB 3.0 port for an SSD (seeing as the "second" hard drive tray slot is occupied by the DVD drive, which I *do* use.) Sure USB 3.0 isn't as fast as I'd get with SATA, but it'd be a darned sight faster than the 5400RPM drive that's built in to the unit.

Normally I have the printer, mouse, and external HDD plugged in. That leaves one slot for a keyboard (I have no room for another one on my desk, though, so I rely on the built-in keyboard), camera, MP3 player, and charging the ole' eCig.

It's very common these days for companies to allow universities to use their technology at the cost of tying the company into the university's patent revenue. And of course this is often publicly-funded research, so not only is the taxpayer paying for the development of patents used to sue that same taxpayer, the patents go directly to a company from academia.

The net effect is to feed intellectual property centered companies at the expense of the technology sector in general and small technology companies in particular.

It also happens to give me a wicked case of the shits.

Seriously, WTF is an article about energy vectors doing on /. without even a hint of how these guys achieved radical breakthrough advances in energy efficiency for both hydrogen-from-water and CO2-from-air?