We can start by stating the obvious: It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone's gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion

They can start by taking religion out of that list. You can choose your religion. You don't choose any of those other things, at least not without life-changing surgery.

No kidding. Imagine what would happen if I asked their pastor if I could deliver a biology lecture on Sunday.

These things are seldom as black-and-white as they appear at first. From what I've seen in the US, courts often apportion the blame across multiple parties in a civil lawsuit. Let's say that on the way home from the bar, I drive over a curb and kill someone walking on the sidewalk. If the victim's family files a wrongful death suit, the court might decide that I'm 95% responsible, the pedestrian is 2% responsible for wearing dark clothing at 2 AM, and the city is 3% responsible for failing to follow regulations on curb height. The resulting damage award will be split accordingly.

So it's very believable that a court might find FTDI partially responsible for any damages that occur as a result of their deliberate attack against other peoples' hardware. Even a 1% share of the blame for a serious-enough malfunction could be enough to bankrupt the company. They may be morally right, they may be legally right from a criminal-law standpoint, but nevertheless, under US law, they may have cut their own throats if any innocent parties were harmed by their actions.

This was an incredibly stupid move on FTDI's part.

Because some people understand that the election of Reagan, like everything else in politics, was a reaction to something else. In Reagan's case, his success was a reaction to confiscatory taxation, disastrous economic policies, and out-of-control growth of Federal bureaucracies under Carter and earlier administrations.

In the context of the times, Reagan was not wrong when he said that the scariest words in the English language were "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Where he went wrong was when he climbed into bed with religious fruitcakes, giving them more power over ordinary Americans' lives than even the Democrats had tried to assert.

Other people, including the most vocal on Slashdot (DURR HURR DON'T LIKE TEH GOVERNMENT? MOVE TO SOMALIA!!!11!!) don't understand the action-reaction nature of politics. They assume that things will somehow work out differently the next time their own visions of maximal statism are implemented. The neoliberal statists and Moral Majority Reaganites are just two halves of the same coin, really.

As soon as they figure out whether or not salt is bad for you, I'll be interested in their opinion on soda.

most of the time there is only one way to do something in electronics...

Wow, that's a new one on me. What would be an example?

And, personally, I can''t think of anything more important that my wife does than be the awesome mother she is to our children

That's fine, but I don't want to hear a lot of whining from your household about women getting paid $0.70 for every dollar men make, or whatever. Being likely to bail out of the workforce for years at a time has a downside, and that is it.

If the standards do not respect the users, the users will not respect the standards.

Troops are being sent because unprotected aid workers are being butchered to death

I wonder how true this is. I've heard a lot about massacred aid workers. Raids on hospitals. "Natives" deliberately exposing themselves to bloody corpses and generally acting like superstitious chimpanzees.

I heard about all of these things from the mainstream American and British news media, just as you probably did.

In fact, I heard about them on the same news programs that told me that you can only catch Ebola by fellating a corpse or doing something equally ridiculous.

Except now we're starting to hear about victims who had only passing exposure to an infected patient. Funny, I remember being told that was more or less impossible.

HBO can only be a significant streaming service if they ditch the cable/sat subscription requirement for access to HBO Go.

Cue someone calling you an idiot because you "just don't understand HBO's business model."

I'm sure they'd be along already if this story were still on the front page. They probably won't go away entirely until HBO is in bankruptcy court and/or ends up being purchased by Netflix. Denial is strong in these people.

As long as I can't stream any movie I want, the market for streaming isn't even remotely saturated in any sense of the term.

You don't know what the founder's expressed intention was

(Shrug) All we know is what they what they wrote down.

And what they wrote doesn't bear much resemblance to what you wrote.

When services like Google+ are shoved down my throat, I just treat them like a role-playing game's character creation process. You want me to join your half-baked nth-tier social network? Meet J. Pierpoint Flathead III, billionaire transsexual CEO and astronaut.

Whatever. Here's an idea, either respect the Constitution and its underlying values, or focus on repealing the Second Amendment using the process provided for doing so.

Legislative end runs around the founders' clearly expressed intents are not acceptable. Why not? Because they'll come for your favorite amendment next.

In eel-infested waters.