At first I knee-jerk disagreed, because of my personal feelings about their crazy "it's ok to break other peoples' stuff" mentality. But looking at it from a HW mfr perspective, you're absolutely right.

I know that my supplier is tough on counterfeits, check. They're already top in quality, check. And also, I will never incur support costs in dealing with angry end-users complaining about bricked chips. My competitors might, if they're cheapos, and that's a competitive advantage. The aggregate cost to cleanup their mess could even outweigh the few cents they saved going with a counterfeit.

Mod parent funny! I thought I had a spare mod point stashed somewhere, but it's nowhere to be found.

The lawyery answer is always "it depends", and this kind of case would be very complex and nuanced, with lots of very expensive experts.

In terms of actual-duke-it-out-in-court liability, my gut says there's a pretty good chance they could be on the hook if something catastrophic happened.

In terms of whats-my-exposure liability, it's pretty unlikely that bricking/temp-fubaring a bunch of usb to serial devices would lead to something catastrophic in the first place. Maybe I'm off on this, depends on what these are most often used for ("Oh Jesus my insulin!!! I'm fading fast, someone get me a printer cable!")

But in terms of oh-god-it-actually-happened-what-do-I-do liability, I'd tell FTDI to settle in a heartbeat. "Grandma died because we decided to get cute with the guts of a device you own" is going to play very poorly for a jury. Could be winnable, but it's toxic.

Pushing this out to unsuspecting, innocent end users through WU and intentionally (by their own statements) jacking with the ID to make the device unusable... I mean the bottom line is the righteous engineer who greenlighted this definitely did not ask Legal first.

Well who can stand being around a total Maxxinista?

That is patently false (zing!). You do not have to infringe every claim, a single claim is all you need. In order to "infringe a patent" (not actually a thing), what you're really saying is that every element and limitation of a single claim is being practiced by the infringing device/activity.

If Claim 1 has elements A, B, and C, and limitation L, the competitor's device must contain at least A+B+C-L to infringe. It doesn't matter at all that Claim 2 recites A, B, C, and D with limitations L and M.

Are we a pommy?** I agree that our "ice cold" light beer stateside is far from the height of brewcraft. But there are very few liquids of any sort that I want to consume at room temperature. Even the best beers could stand to be wine-cellar temperature or a little cooler. Maybe you drink all your beer in a wine cellar, in which case carry on--"room temperature" is correct!


**No offense meant. It's just a funny term I heard from some Australian friends. You'd do just as well to call me a POGWBABOSS (Prisoner of George W Bush's and Barack Obama's Security State).

Right now I am irrationally exuberant over the HTC One M8, wetting myself with glee over the OnePlus One, and magical ponies are flying out of my ass because the PCMark app is so amazing and primetime-ready.

Am I reading too much into this? Being overly cynical?

That is, as I posted above, not correct.** Your sentence permits multiple meanings, however.

Parents are financially responsible for providing food/care/shelter/etc to (unemancipated) minor children. That may have been important in your situation. Simply moving away from home wouldn't magic away your parents' responsibility to provide for your well-being--you'd have to be self-sufficient and (probably) emancipated.

On the other hand, parents are not, in general, vicariously liable for just any old tort, crime, debt, or other shenanigan wrought by their children. It can happen, usually when a parent knew or had reason to know but failed to act to prevent the child from causing harm. In your case, living independently away from home, it would be very hard for a plaintiff to argue your parents had actual or constructive knowledge of anything, really. You didn't need to be emancipated for your parents to be legally clear of your hijinx.**

But either your folks didn't know that, or they played card #2 with their eyes on card #1.

**The general rule at common law is that acts of minor children are not imputed to parents. Various states have enacted various measures to hold parents liable for certain acts, e.g. those of which they had/should have had knowledge, negligent entrustment with a dangerous instrument, a child's willful and malicious conduct that results in grave injury or death (even then the liability is usually capped). If you grew up in Hawaii, my apologies, you are correct that your parents were liable for pretty much anything you did.

That's entirely incorrect. In both the civil and criminal realms, there are only specific circumstances in which a parent is liable for a child's actions. States say it all different kinds of ways, with different age thresholds for a child's responsibility generally, but one formulation is "A parent is only liable for the tort or violent act of the child if that parent knew or had reason to know the child [had a history of doing X]/[presented a danger to because of condition X]/[was planning to do X]/[was actually in the act of doing X]."

As is the case here, the parent's initial defense was "We didn't have reason to know until it had already happened!" and the appeals court said "Yeah but you had actual knowledge of the ongoing defamatory act and a jury might find you had a duty to stop it."

But in general, no. In the US, if your always-peaceful child spazzes out and punches someone, or does some property damage, or shoots someone (with $notYourGun), you're not generally ("vicariously") liable (as an employer might be) in either civil or criminal law. Another example: you are not liable if they somehow manage to obtain a credit card in their own name and rack up debt, and neither are they (contract is voidable at the minor's will), which is why CC companies don't give credit cards to minors without mom or dad cosigning.

In the sense that sibling AC means, yes, you are "responsible" for raising your kids to not do shitty shit, and for disciplining them when they do. And most parents of conscience would take moral responsibility and pay for the broken window, apologize (and get junior to apologize) for the rude remarks he made to his teacher, or make sure the nasty FB page was taken down.

Indeed. The GA Court of Appeals did not say that (quoting TFS) "Parents can be held liable for what their kids post on Facebook." What they did say is that the parents' 11 months of inaction, after they were given notice of their son's defamatory FB profile, could constitute negligence. A reasonable jury could possibly find that not telling your kid to take such content down was negligent, and it's a question for the jury. Thus the subject matter of this case is on the internet, but it's not really about the internet. The parents could be liable under the same theory if they knew their son was handing out flyers with this defamatory content and did nothing for 11 months.

For those less acquainted with the trial process in the US, this appeal by the plaintiff parents (of the defamed girl) was from the trial court's granting of summary judgment in favor of the defendant parents (of the defaming boy). This is type of motion usually happens before any of the actual "trial-y" kinds of things like impaneling a jury and witness testimony, and it's based only on each side's contentions and the undisputed facts that both parties have agreed on. The defendant parents essentially argued, "Based on all the facts we stipulated to, and looking at the plaintiffs' assertions in a light most favorable to them, they still can't win. Even if what they're arguing is 100% right, no reasonable jury could find against us. Judge, can you just end this thing now?"

Specifically, here, it appears they argued something like "The defamation occurred when junior posted that stuff, and we had no actual knowledge, nor reason to believe junior would do such a thing, until after the school told us--long after the defamatory act!" And the trial court judge said, roughly, "Yup, I'm not even going to let a jury hear this, no jury could find you liable for what your kid did. Parents aren't vicariously liable for their kids' torts, etc etc."

The appellate court said, in response, "Um, yeah fine, you're not on the hook for the acts that occurred before you knew. But after you knew, you did nothing to stop it or even inquire into it, and the defamation was ongoing that whole time. This is not an automatic slam dunk for you, defendants; you need to present your evidence and arguments to a jury."

Note that at the actual trial, the parents may be able to present a decent argument for why they didn't do anything (which behavior was very curious to me). Maybe the parents are luddites and they asked their son if he ripped all the bad pages out of the Facebooks and flushed them down the interweb tubes, and he said, "yeah sure." I don't know, but those are the kinds of factual arguments they'll have to make to a jury to explain why they let this go on so long after they knew.

That one got me. Laugh almost woke up the wife.

I assume MS is providing Windows for showing off mannequins in khakis, and Dockers is providing stylish shoes in a promotion to get people to walk away from the Apple store.

Meh. On a notional level, I agree: regulate to prevent monopolies and safety hazards (etc) but otherwise let the market decide, the more competition the better. But this little town council doesn't have the power to effect meaningful legislation or regulation of a behemoth like Comcast. They can't break up monopolies or rain down 3-letter agencies.

They do have a choice in not granting what they consider a malevolent hellcorp the license to service their town. That's not The Government picking winners and losers, that's a small municipality saying foff to a bad actor.

FWIW, that "picking winners and losers" line is pretty threadbare as an idiom. It should get its own heading under the Wikipedia entry for the logical fallacy "Appeal to Limbaugh."

Based on the lead inventor he name drops in the video, "Tom McGuire," I found a few recent fusion-related patent applications (filed this year). I couldn't find any issued fusion patents for Lockheed or McGuire.

20140301519
20140301518
20140301517

They are related to a raft of 2013 provisionals, which helps explain why Lockheed was talking publicly about this tech for the first time in the above 2013 YouTube video.

^This, a thousand times. Unfortunately, telecom lobbyists spin these kinds of projects---pretty much the most pro-competition thing you can do in the broadband space---as anti-competitive, socialistic destruction of private business.

"Oh noes, big bad Peoria is going to bully poor little NBComcastWarner into bankruptcy! We can't let those damn commies in Big Government provide vital services to their citizens!"