If you cannot find workers who are worth something as workers who will work for the wage that you're paying, then you're not paying enough. You don't need to pay less, you need to pay more.

HAHAHAHAHA

It's not socialism, it's oligarchy. Socialism is where the wealth is redistributed to serve the people. The wealth is being redistributed upward in this system, there's nothing socialist about that.

Why? A fully aware human being can also be aware while the car is driving. But most people drive in a state of at least partial distraction. You're setting the bar awfully high.

So what? they already mandate that the maps be correct, but roads are often shown going through (or not going through) when they don't (or do.)

I live in the sticks. I have a shitty ISP that shits on my interactive sessions in favor of long-running connections like Netflix, and then tells me they don't do any shaping. But obviously they do shaping, because we have bandwidth limits. And it looks like shit. The traffic chart looks like a row of fenceposts because they flood me with packets, then send none, then flood me with more of them in order to limit my rate. This of course means that I can't do any meaningful queueing on my end, because the rate is totally inconstant.

But atop that, they offer me only an "up to 6Mbps" connection. That's not even enough to watch HD video reliably. A page full of images takes ages to load, especially since most people are still just spewing the images onto the page and they all load at once. And if that weren't enough, the connection goes down regularly, I often have to power cycle the CPE...

FTTH is not going to create a new digital divide. We already have one, and the only content lurking in the wings waiting to eat up all the bandwidth is 4k video. Most of us don't have a 4k set, so it's irrelevant.

Every troll dies, children. Not every troll truly lives.

This article is a troll. Trolling will remain alive and well unless we ban it. But if we eliminate anonymous speech (as wags like David Brin suggest) then we will harm free speech. The only way to solve this problem utterly is to change the way we feel about women, and if that could happen overnight, it probably would have done so already.

There's evidence presented in this thread, by people familiar with reimplementing their interface. I see you didn't bother to read the thread.

But in this case you're celebrating denial of service to a user who may have acted in good faith. That's a shitty thing to be happy about. Why do you like taking advantage of people?

Only due to ignorance. The decent job was done by the people who make clone chips who implemented their interface. If they had written the driver to support disparate chips, that would have been a significant accomplishment. Writing a driver for their chip was not. In addition, software is expecting to see that driver.

Ironically, writing drivers, and packaging them for versions of Windows with driver signing. It was literally years after the release of Windows 7 before they had a decent package of Windows 7 drivers that would reliably work with their hardware. But because applications expect to see their driver, the only option would be to write a driver which supported their driver interface. Microsoft proved in the past that chasing a software interface is a fool's game, because it can be updated periodically solely for the purpose of decreasing interoperability.

Nobody is expecting anyone to contact FTDI for support, but now that they've done this to their driver, they will be contacted. So in fact, if their goal was to avoid support contacts, this was a staggeringly stupid move.

Necessary for meaningful interoperability.

FTDI became a de facto standard, and they are reaping the results now. They are using copyright (AFAICT, no patents are involved, this is deeply old technology) as a bludgeon in a way that will harm users and achieve none of your stated goals. As the only thing they will accomplish is harm to users and the generation of ill will, the fact that you are pleased by these actions is unsurprising, at least to me. You seem to revel in such abuse.

The problem is not solved, and merely claiming that is is doesn't make it so. All the customer knows is that they bought a device and something FTDI did broke it. If they actually manage to contact FTDI, FTDI will probably lie to them and tell them that the device doesn't work because it is a fake, but in truth the device doesn't work because FTDI broke it. (It's broken from the user's point of view.) And the main reason the problem is not solved is that a user can be trying to do the right thing, and actually specifying an FTDI chip when buying, but they can still wind up with a fake and FDTI can still disable their product. It's not their fault, they tried to do the right thing, it's not their job to track down copyright or trademark violations. They only need to act in good faith. Since the final price of a product is only loosely coupled to its production cost (it must be greater, but depending on how close you are to the supplier, it need not be much greater to show a profit) the user has no reliable way to know that they're getting what they're paying for.

FTDI is abusing customers who attempted to purchase their product in good faith, and that's why this is both a criminal act and also a very stupid idea.

No, the intent of a stalker infatuated with someone is to insinuate themselves into their life, and being super-nice is a tactic they use to do that. But there are other reasons why you might be very nice, and what you are suggesting is that nice equals creepy. Congratulations, you're part of the problem.

It impacts the value of your comment. You don't care enough to educate yourself, so people waste time reading your ignorance.

This has the potential though to backfire quite badly on FTDI. The vast majority of users don't know that the thing they bought is fake, all they know is that it's FTDI branded and all of a sudden it doesn't work, and they blame FTDI, and FTDI gets a bad reputation for unreliable crap (even though the hardware was counterfeit).

So by what metric are Neanderthals extinct, if there are Neanderthals who have living descendants with a measurable amount of their genetic makeup?

There is no living population, large enough to produce additional generations of viable offspring, with a full, or substantial, Neanderthal genome.

Nope. Legal protections for intellectual property include patents, trademarks, and copyright. However, all these have limited lifetimes. Having a trade secret means you forgo any legal protection, and you take on defending your secret through your own security systems. That means you can retain a trade secret for as long as you can keep it secret, but once the genie's out of the bottle, too bad. The courts can't help you directly, but you could sue a disgruntled employee if he published the 11 secret herbs and spices in breach of his employment contract.

On the one hand, there is the philosophy that "locks only keep honest people out." If someone is using a hack to bypass their door security, the current legal framework could be used to charge them with trespassing, breaking and entering, illegal use of lock-picking equipment, possession of burglary tools, or some other charge. If a prosecutor wants to file charges against you for using such a device, he will. To that end, HID may feel they have to try to defend their system through the legal system, or the courts may not take their products seriously as a security system.

On the other hand, anyone who has such a system protecting their buildings and grounds is now at Pucker-Factor One. These SLAPP lawsuits are just confirmation that HID acknowledges the threat to their systems is real, and the attack code is already in the hands of vandals and bad guys. If building security was my job I'd be on the phone to HID today, and googling the competition while their account manager lied in my ear about how it's not a crisis.

You have just described the crime of barratry, or of a SLAPP. Neither will get you disbarred.

Remember, the bar is populated by other lawyers, and they like to practice freely. They're won't disbar someone for defending their client through vigorous means - to defend someone in any other way would be unethical to their client. A SLAPP has to be really, really egregious before it sinks to that level.