Wouldn't it be more accurate to measure output per capita rather than per country? From a rough estimate that puts the US and Canada neck and neck at about 2.5x the per capita output of China.

Yes you can, it's called packet radio and at higher frequencies you can get decent bandwidth. However, FCC requirements are that all data be sent in the clear, you can't do encrypted traffic.

Another cost is wastage. As trace and space get toward the manufacturer's minimum recommended numbers their yield goes down and therefore their price goes up.

And asking for answers from Broadcom if you're not buying millions of their chips is likely to get you shot for treason.

Generally if the small caps are close to the package and tied to planes (I'm assuming there are planes) with short thick ties to reduce inductance you can get by with it just fine. The bulk caps can be quite a ways away as long as they are also tied directly to the planes. We're running some very high speed stuff this way without problems. Xilinx has some good info on bypass caps and how they can be placed in their Spartan 6 docs.

If there's no planes then you have to have the relatively thick tracks already for current carrying capability, but the inherent inductance could possible give you an edge in filtering as long as you're not yanking the individual pin levels out of tolerance.

Actually looks pretty slack with lots of space. However to make it inexpensive requires much more care in the design rules and routing. Placing and routing a board with tight component clearances and tight trace and space is easy and expensive. Taking the same components on a small board from 0.1/0.1mm trace and space to 0.15/0.15mm trace and space takes a lot of work, but can significantly reduce the cost to manufacture.

From an initial view, the biggest cost adder I see is components on the solder side. There don't seem to be too many on the bottom side and with a bit more work it could probably be made into a single sided board. I'm working on a cost sensitive board right now, and one of the big things we've done to cut cost is make sure all components are on the top side. (Low cost is relative, this BOM is many many times the projected price of the R-Pi.)

Many Steam games will run on Mac.

SecureFX looks interesting, but I like Expandrive for both Mac and Windows.

You mean CSI lied to me?!

Oddly enough the worst flight I've ever been on was a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Seattle. It was booked as a United or some other US carrier, but provided by Lufthansa. Service was horrible, the beer was American swill, only a few of the bathrooms worked.

Probably my favourite carrier would be KLM, but it's been 20+ years and I don't know how they are now. The best recent carrier I've been on was Air China, the plane was a bit older, but the service was outstanding.

2 Chronicles 4:2

Three weeks ago, and there was too much traffic. It was much better once I got to US 18 and then 44. Driving through stretches of Montana and Wyoming as the GP is talking about especially at night is much "lonelier". I ran out of gas out there one night and as I was coasting down hill without power and lights I ran over the remains of a deer and punctured a tire on it's antlers. It was a very long walk into town for gas, and the rest of the trip the car smelt like burning deer.

Back on topic, I loved both my RX7s, but the 600cc sport bike was so much more fun.

That's not always true. I worked for a small company through some of the worst times that industry experienced. Our sales went below 50% of previous years and our net income went negative. Instead of laying people off the managers took cuts. When things got a little better, the managers went without raises so the rest of us could have small raises and larger bonuses (bonuses are cheaper in the long run). I would have never left if I didn't want to leave that part of the country.

I know Skype isn't open source, but I also know that Skype is good at getting through all sorts of blocks, and I know that Skype works in Iran. Since Skype text chats can be automated with their development API couldn't you Base 64 encode packets and send them via Skype to an endpoint outside the country?

I guess this would work with pretty much any text based chat application that is successful at getting out of , even SMS.