I don't know if it has been said however cscape you have been a boon for this community with your open ability to share your experiences and suggested support. This also applies to most that have posted in this thread.

To all you lurkers out there. Take a page out of his book and share with us your success and failures.

"Those days when hardware meant hardware
and software wasn't even a word..."

I guess you're referring to this one:

I'm watching for updates on that too ... I hope they keep up that promise and do finally announce the pricing.
I really hope they won't ruin their so far pretty good reputation and take the Avalon/BFL route with everything happening "in two weeks"

I feel the same way - I bit the bite ($20/chip) and I invested a lot of effort in developing a miner. Then they took the bite away. Now I'm being told that chips won't be available at that price anymore, and even more - if they'll be available at some sensible price at all. So, all of my time went to waste. What a lesson

Given that it takes $10-$20 per chip to produce a finished product, and it would take optimistically speaking a few weeks from ordering of the chips to getting them making money - the last moment when it makes any sense to look at them is early October.
Chips delivered in early October (and start hashing on Nov/1) will make between $20 and $30 in their entire life! (source)
And that's if you have absolutely no expenses and if you get free electricity. And that's if difficulty jumps "only" 80-100% a month (which is becoming a wishful thinking with all of the new ASICs being released now).

If they keep postponing that announcement they may as well just throw all of those chips away. They will be useless after November even if they are free!
My advise to the bitfury team - announce the pricing a.s.a.p. and pick some sensible numbers. $15 in early October, $10 in mid-october and $5 in November. And don't waste your time offering them past that.

I don't think it would be an easy task unsoldering it. But then why would you want to do that in the first place? If you short the control signals (SCK/MOSI/MISO) then the chip will be bypassed and may use a bit of power but that's all. If you really want to cut the power - just cut all traces around it. You'll have just the ground pad left but that won't interfere with anything.

Unfortunately, unless there were solder bridges on the IO pins causing the issue, the chip is likely non-functional.

nice sentiment tho

Actually mine was an interesting case. Chip 4 was hashing fine, but was not forwarding SPI . Thus  I  had to cut the traces of Chip 5 first and jump the SPI. Still no fish.
Wish I had a scope . I graduated from the univ, so missing all the nice bench equipment.

So I have potentially 2 hashing chips that could be donated.

I desoldered some avalon chips using an electric skillet fry pan by just putting the pcb in the pan and lift the chips off when the solder melted.

Chips came today... they shipped when they said they would, it was just the radio silence that had me aflutter I guess...