give up.

There are people out there who will NEVER be convinced; because they'd rather sit on their high-horse and morally judge people for being fat. The simplistic worldview that fat people simply overeat, and that there's nothing else going on, is too compelling, even if it is wrong.

Not even within a VM? OS X hosts those just fine...

I've had my Samsung S5 (Verizon) complain that TowelRoot was malware.

Also, after rooting, the update process seemed to fail from that point onwards; I can't install any vendor-provided update successfully.

If they want to arrange their own blackjack and hookers, they're free to do so. It's Open Source.

I really doubt that that's it. I think you've let the tinfoil slip over your eyes a bit too far, and you've lost sight of reality there.

That's not special to the USA. I have some numbers set to auto-block with very good reason. It's significantly less annoying in Europe though, as the caller pays the cost of the call (except in exceptional circumstances, which robocalls don't count as).

That's what the FCC needs to crack down on. The easiest way would probably to have a rule change that makes the phone companies part liable for any court-imposed liabilities arising from private actions over robocalls where those robocalls come from a spoofed number. That'll encourage the phone companies to sort out the problem very rapidly indeed, perhaps by making it significantly more difficult for phone users to supply the phone number in the first place. I know this will be inconvenient for some PBX operators, but mechanisms that are too easy to abuse need revision anyway.

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.

Honestly, I'm far more afraid of DUMB programs, set loose by psychopathic human operators. Humans will do almost anything to fuck over other people, and make a buck. An antelope thighbone is a simple tool. One that can be misused. A program is just a much more sophisticated tool.

Why are we afraid of the moment when a tool decides to use other tools, when any human can do horrible things.

Again, it's really annoying that the bad actors screw things up for everybody.

Tragedy of the Commons, eh?

even in the nuclear industry, we regulate, and monitor - - obsessively. Yet, accidents happen.

In the drilling industry - we're FAR less strict. I think it's almost guaranteed that accidents in fracking are more the rule than the exception.

The Win16 thing is hilarious given that you can run Win16 under WINE on 64-bit Linux. The processors are perfectly compatible with 16-bit protected mode code in 64-bit mode, it's just Windows that isn't.

There are a lot of those on the Internet, but they're not always a good sight to behold.

Hopefully we'll find out eventually.

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.

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.