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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

But isn't Lloyd's famous for insuring what most other companies won't insure?

Yes. But from what I understand, this is because Lloyd's is a marketplace and not a traditional insurance company. They put wealthy entities in contact with people with peculiar insurance needs and let them work it out.

That's the classic move: outsource the risk to other people's money, and pocket some fees. Lloyd's seems a little like a bookie.

In the Eastern Bloc, in the '80s there was a new small fab being built to produce PROMs, PLDs and clone CPUs. Although the country in question was never charged with computing (as opposed to, say DDR, Bulgaria) it actually was onto FPGAs in stealth.

Obviously, it was burnt to ashes the next day, and Lloyd's paid out. One wonders, if somebody was funding Lloyd's, because this was practically guaranteed to happen given the circumstances. Today in the free market, you can freely choose between Altera (San Jose, California, U.S.) and Xilinx (San Jose, CA, USA).

Any links to the full story, or maybe just some keywords I can use to search the google?

I too was intrigued. Googling for UNITRA-CEMI, I found a reference to a fire in a east block factory in Hungary in 1985.

> Hungary had even less success with integrated circuits in the Soviet Era. Hungarian IC production was initiated in > 1985 under licenses from the Soviet Union and East Germany, > but the factory burned down the following year, destroying all the equipment.

http://brie.berkeley.edu/publications/WP126.pdf

I'm not sure, but if that's the case I wonder why Karpeles didn't go there (again presuming this attempt was made before the theorized 2011 theft).

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