I put my daughter in front of StarCraft 2 when she was about 5 or 6 years old, and the first thing she did was have the Marines hold a birthday party.

Think of it as evolution in action. You can stay on one planet while some disaster takes it out. We have lots of choices of disaster, don't we? The human race can continue via those "space nutters".

Sure, we should try to avoid the disaster, etc., but planets are not forever.

How else would regulators and lawmakers get input on policy?

If you're going to pass a law that effects, say, orange juice production then it's important to consult with Dole Food Company to find out what the impact of the proposed law will actually be. Nobody else knows, and you can't just guess.

Now, you know they're going to give you biased testimony. If you're trying to decide what drinks to subsidize for low-income school lunches, the (completely legitimate) scientist from Dole is going to tell you that sugar isn't the greatest for kids, but that the sugar in orange juice isn't as bad as that in Coca Cola because it's from oranges not corn. And the other nutrients in orange juice totally make up for the disadvantages of fruit sugar - you wouldn't want those disadvantaged kids getting scurvy.

The guy from Coke is going to tell you that all sugar is the same. It's just a carbohydrate, and in fact it raises blood sugar less by weight than the hot dog rolls the kids are drinking it with.

And there's no real way to get an unbiased voice. You could use government funds to fly a scientist out to the hearing, but then you have to pick who to fly out. You're a lawmaker, and you're not going to be able to pick a sugar metabolism scientist. That's not your field. All you can do is try to find a stakeholder to suggest someone. Who are you going to call? The American Medical Association now finally might send someone who says "kids shouldn't be drinking sugar", but how do you balance that against the orange juice guys and chocolate milk guys saying that the sugar isn't a big deal compared to the other nutrients in the drinks?

If you create a government science board, it'll have to hire established scientists. They got funding somewhere for their previous research. Unless you want to fund someone to find out why sugar is bad, you won't find someone who will say it. And then all you've got is the thing you asked for - it's obviously not worth anything.

Commercial regulations are an interesting beast.

Ostensibly, they exist to improve the functioning of the market. For example, in the US packaged food is required to have nutrition information labels so that customers can distinguish different products nutritionally. And this can be very valuable. If you're on a low salt diet, it's important to be able to find the canned green beans that actually have less salt in them.

Unfortunately, they have a bunch of other effects as well. They create barriers to market entry. If you want to sell packaged food, you have to make sure every package has identical contents and then have those contents lab tested to determine the exact nutritional ratios. This means very tight manufacturing tolerances, and mean that any packaged food that says "homemade" on it is lying - unless someone has a food production factory in their house. Packaged food that isn't manufactured on a very precise assembly line is illegal. This may not be a bad thing - we expect packaged food to be consistent - but it's a thing.

And, as we see in the Tesla situation, it locks in established business models. There's no specific benefit to the consumer from the exact model of car sales we have compared to any of the other possibilities. But everyone used that model, so it became mandated by regulation in some places.

The problem comes when you take into account the way regulations get made. Regulations (and laws) are proposed by people who want some new policy enforced. Then they're evaluated based on the input of experts and stakeholders. In practice, "experts and stakeholders" means paid lobbyists, because nobody else has the time to show up for a hearing on how cars are sold, how food is packaged, or whether there should be a tariff on sugar.

The study of how this works is a branch of economics called public choice theory. Spoiler: The public interest is not the primary driver of regulation. Regulations where the benefit to existing producers from locked in business models or barriers to entry are greater than the costs are what gets enacted. Any benefit to the public is frequently a side effect, and is very carefully tuned to optimize cost vs. market advantage for the regulated industry.

There are several concrete basic income proposals that would potentially decrease the cost of welfare while providing a basic income to everyone.

e.g. This Newsweek Article

Hopefully we'll find out eventually.

The community college I went to had transfer programs and transfer agreements with several local 4-year schools. Every credit I took transferred (although a couple courses transferred as "generic electives" rather than to similar courses, since the 4-year school wasn't convinced by their course descriptions).

I had no trouble doing a 5-year masters in CS at a reasonable state school starting from community college.

I think you are missing the application for an Open gate array.

It is not really for you and your company. You don't have any particular interest in the open part, and thus you and your company don't fit the demographic of the sort of user we would want. We don't need your money. I can do the first runs of this using Mosis and its ilk for chump change, and go from there.

It simply doesn't matter if it's 32 nm or 15 nm or 50 nm. What matters is that the user can completely understand the bitstream and produce their own tools for it. We have no shortage of users who want that.

It doesn't matter if it is on the leading edge in terms of cost, speed, power, thermal efficiency, or size. It matters that it's open.

And maybe we can do something that you can't do with any integrated circuit available to you, which is verify from first principles that the manufactured device is without deliberately hidden security back-doors. Because we don't have intellectual property to hide and thus we don't mind producing it in a way that would make it capable of being examined.

So, I am not particularly worried about what foundry I'll use and whether I can compete on the same playing field as Xylinx and Altera. I have my own playing field, with radically different rules from the ones they are using. I have my own customers to satisfy.

You're underestimating how big 3 x 10^14 is.

Your "here" is in a specific game state. That's current game state. It probably won't come up again unless you play another 3 x 10^14 games.

One well-known market would be immediately available and very eager to embrace an open FPGA, namely EE education.

Yes. EE education and academic research.

There is also the security problem. How can you determine from first principles that the chip really contains what it says it does? Insoluble with any commercial component. Maybe we could make ours sufficiently visible.

So, my feeling is that we could get a grant for this.

There's a partial list of fabs at Wikipedia. There are more than just those three.

Sure, process optimization per fab is an issue. We would probably need to start on the very conservative side.

A lot of the time, building a custom ASIC rather than using an FPGA just isn't an option. Most of the products I'm concerned with need to be programmable.

David Rowe makes a point about echo cancellers and voice codecs, which he's written in Open Source, working alone. They were supposed to be magic. They were supposed to take big expensive research labs to make. When he actually got down to the work, he found there wasn't really magic there. Codec2 can get clear speech into 1200 Baud, and OSLEC (the echo canceler) is part of every Asterisk system and other digital telephony platforms.

Steve Jobs also told me this when I was leaving Pixar. He didn't believe that the Linux guys could make a decent window system, because it had taken a Billion dollar research lab at Apple. Two years later he unveiled Safari, which was derivative of KDE.

There is no question that we can make a good gate array. The technology is very well known. Can we make one that is on the absolute leading edge of the technology? We don't really have to. Making a good one that was open would be enough. But maybe we can make a great one. That depends upon what makes it great. We have a collaborative advantage as far as the software tools are concerned, the same as with compilers. Can we design a really good logic element and fabric? Probably. Can we prototype a gate-array in a gate-array? Sure! Can we use the various devices that OpenCores has developed? I don't think there would be a problem. So we could have on-chip peripherals, CPUs, etc. Once we're sure of it, can it be well-tuned to a fab? Probably, but even if we are conservative about using the fab's capabilities it would work.

Yes. And looking at the way things have gone previously in JEDEC, we would have to be very aware of manufacturers desire to embed their patents in standards.

An Open gate-array is one of those "if you build it, they will come" sort of things. Chinese fabs would compete with each other to drive the price down. It would become the standard low-end part and gate-array manufacturers would have to compete on high-end only.

So I am really interested in doing it, and so is Chris. We just can't ignore our current business in order to do it.

Yes, we feel your pain. Indeed, it's our pain. Proprietary tools, and you get told how to load the bitstream but it's an opaque blob. We would like to work on this problem next. How far off that is I can't say, if we can establish a profitable land-mobile radio business (we don't expect to make much off of hams alone) it would help to fund such an effort.