There's no good reason for them to do that. Their chip implements the same interface as the FTDI chip, and applications are expecting to talk to the FTDI driver. That's a battle they can never win. But they can see what the hardware interface looks like.

FTDI's deliberate intent is to damage people's equipment. How is that not illegal? I'd bet that it is.

I'm going to be pissed off at both, and I hope FTDI dies and someone else takes over for them. They're not very good at their job anyway.

Actually, I'd like to see better methods of processing/digesting email, but not for personal email.

My work email is flooded with all kinds of junk, and I wouldn't mind someone trying to improve that. I get a bunch of ads that I wouldn't necessarily call "spam", but their ads. I actually want to get some of them (they're sometimes relevant to my job), but it's always super-low priority. I also get copied on a bunch of stuff that I might want to look at, often don't really need to, but that I do want to keep a record of the exchange in my email.

I also get automated notifications for certain kinds of things which could stand to have automated intelligent processing. For example, I might have an automated alert set to email me when a server isn't responding to a ping, and I *do* want to see that. However, if the server's internet connection goes flaky overnight, I might end up with 80 messages saying, "Error: server.domain.com is offline", and then a little while later, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online". It'd be nice to have all of those rolled up into a email digest that says, "You received a flood of messages with similar subjects. Here is a list of them, in order." I don't know practically how you'd do that, but I wouldn't mind if someone were to figure that out. Considering how much spam still gets through my spam filters, I don't expect a solution anytime soon.

Anyway, my only point here is that there are improvements that could be made.

Presumably the whitebox device would include as core components all of the FCC-approved hardware necessary to use said frequencies. Upgrading the GPU, the amount of RAM, or the battery shouldn't have anything to do with this.

When you build your own PC from separate components, you don't have to worry about whether it can be powered by 60hz AC. The power supplies sold in this country are built to handle the electric supply found in this country and come with all of the UL (etc.) approvals.

The idea is that open source and the freedoms that come with it facilitate and ensure that you can continue to do cool and interesting things, often things the original designers didn't think of. It's certainly easier to be creative when you have the full specifications, source code, and documentation. It's easier to share your creativity with others when you can legally redistribute your derived works without violating someone else's copyright.

Obsession with anything is not good; on that I agree. However I haven't seen that in this thread. To cry "obsession" merely because someone points out a controversy isn't helpful (and ironically raises the question of whether you have an obsession with the perceived obsessions of others). All I saw was someone stating that they wish to avoid certain Broadcom hardware because it does not provide the degree of open source access that he or she desired. That people have their own criteria and express a desire to choose products that best suit their own needs is a good thing. Your own priorities being different is not surprising and doesn't indicate fault with anyone else.

I doubt anyone has been killed by gamergate. But it's disingenuous to pretend that no one is harmed by the death threats.

Not all homosexuals have buttsex, although the logic there escapes me completely. I'm pretty sure that if I were gay, I'd still want to fuck. In any case, the ancient greeks didn't believe (overall) that women and men could have equitable relationships of any kind, so women mostly hung out with women and men with men. They wrote a lot more about male-male sex than female-female because it was mostly men doing the writing, and they were extremely self-centered, but apparently there was a lot of female homo sex going on too.

I think they should return the Olympics to its original condition, though permitting females to participate. That would really liven things up...

I can't speak for anyone else, but my fantasy women were all invented by Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, or Piers Anthony. I'll readily admit that's still quite sophomoric, but at least it's beyond infantile.

I also can't speak for anyone else, but part of the attraction to computing for me was that it is a solitary activity. Not necessarily because I want to be solitary, but because I don't have as many social skills as many other people. My mother was depressive and my father was depressive and absentee, so they had nothing valuable or positive to teach me. I was moved away from my peer group right at the end of elementary school and never recovered socially. So that supports your theory, if not your vitriol.

Intent is always relevant.

Yeah, and those people were the tools, since today supercomputers are built out of PCs — but even then it was a true computing revolution, and PCs were used to solve serious problems. I always think about Autocad when this comes up. That kind of software used to have to run on a workstation.

Also Weird Science, and Wargames. But it's a short list.

Minecraft has more female players than many games, but it still has vastly more male players than female. As for the Java side, or either side for that matter, have you seen the way Minecraft players behave? Playing on public servers is often nauseating. Kids are naming their sword stuff like "FUCK HER RIGHT IN THE PUSSY" and then definitely primarily targeting females when they PvP, or naming sticks "dildo", throwing them at girls, and telling them they're ugly. And these are just children. Imagine what the weed-dicks responsible for the death threats around gamergate are like to women. It would be surprising if the ratio of female programmers involved with modding minecraft weren't lower than the average ratio of females involved in programming.

Sorry, here comes some more. I think more women are interested in parenting than men. One of my favorite examples is a picture someone posted to the internets of how their daughter handled her toy cars. She drove them around "like a boy would", with screeching tires and so on. Then when she was done she put them to bed in a crib, lying on their backs, and covered them with a blanket. And today, the teacher has to spend more time parenting, because less is going on at home.

Interestingly, we all descend from just one woman, but not from just one man.

Uh what? That's illegal. It's both trespassing and creating a public nuisance. And if you do normal things that people do when they live, then it's a lot of other things besides, some of which are actually legal at home but not under a bridge.

Amen. And I don't even use the term SJW. But it's the truth that men aren't really encouraged to go into computer programming, either. Society sees programmers as nerds and dorks, and the only way it cares about them is if they are also successful businessmen. Men are simply more likely to get sufficiently involved in programming to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous assholes.

I don't think there's any question that some women suffer in the workplace due to the actions of some men, though. Whether women overall should earn the same money per career for less days worked per career is another argument, and one I don't care to have. Still, misogyny would be unlikely not to be part of the reason why women don't want go into tech. They know it's a men's world, and they know what it's like working in those environments. Cause, effect, vicious circle, still true.