However, letting people know when the "coast is clear" and they can speed or (worse in my opinion) use a mobile phone will only increase roadside accidents and fatalities

If they were going to speed or text while driving, they are going to regardless if they have a radio detector or not. Same goes for speeding with radar detectors.

Right. The orbit is 36,000 km from the surface, or a radius of 42,000 km, a difference of...6,000km

MIR isn't that high currently since it was deorbited in March of 2001. Prior to that, it was at an altitude 364 km +/- 10km depending on where it was at in orbit.

Geostationary orbit is ~36,000 km from earth (radius ~42,164km). The moon is 384,000 km (+/- 21000 miles)

But in the mean time, your product looks bad, which makes your company look bad. You may suffer far more than what your vendor will, or their vendor, or however far up it goes in the supply chain.

Another thing is that FTDI may hurt their actual customers that inadvertently received the fake chips. If I'm a manufacturer I wouldn't be happy that somehow my supplier got the fake chips, and I'd understand the actual company not supporting the fakes, but I would rethink whether I want to use a company that harmed me in the process of protecting themselves.

They didn't disable it though, they simply moved the PID off their allocated range.

Was it their chip? No? Then they shouldn't touch it, regardless if it was a counterfeit chip or not. Two wrongs don't make a right. Turn the other cheek. Blah blah blah.

The chip still works, just not with FTDI's drivers.[/blockquote>This is the correct solution. I don't think anyone would have an issue if the FTDI driver just didn't work with the fake chip.

Nothing was broken.

Depends on your point of view. From the consumer/end user's point of view, I think they would disagree whether something was broken or not if one day it worked with one driver, one day it didn't with the newer driver, and rolling back the driver didn't fix it.

Why would FTDI have to ensure their driver doesn't break chips that aren't theirs? There's no agreement, licensing, or goodwill.

FTDI doesn't have to ensure that their driver doesn't break chips. It sounds however that FTDI went out of their way to detect whether the chip was a counterfeit or not, and if it was, specifically write to it to disable it when it could have just as easily done nothing (as disabling the driver from functioning).

This stuff wouldn't be allowed in warfare, why is it allowed in use by civilian agencies?

Because the Chemical Weapons Convention explicitly allows it:

9. "Purposes Not Prohibited Under this Convention" means
...
(d) Law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes.

My guess is that countries wanted to prohibit an opponent from using it on them (in case TPTB weren't prepared) but wanted to reserve the right to use it on citizens (when TPTB are prepared).

I believe that was just an IIS 6 (and maybe before) "feature". IIS 7.5 running on my Windows 7 dev machine sorts them alphabetically by site name.

What about them?

With your example, it happens all the time. A few years ago when the Super Bowl was being held in Indianapolis, the FBI raided multiple stores that were selling counterfeit merchandise on behalf of the NFL. The merchandise that was confiscated was either ultimately destroyed or given to the NFL which donates it to some 3rd world location. So while the NFL itself didn't destroy the car, ultimately in the end the store was left hanging as it didn't have it's money, nor it's apparel it was suppose to be selling.

All kidding aside, when I read that line I wondered what type of software error isn't preventable. There's things that are easily preventable and should be thought of, but ANYTHING is "entirely preventable".

The same way that you're suppose to run their DOS executable on a Linux?

Shouldn't you ask Dell that? Welcome to buying OEM-ed manufactured equipment. You (possibly) saved as you're now Dell's customer, not Samsung's.

Obviously the reason why crime is down is because they are equipped like tank battalions. We must equip them with more in order to keep lowering the crime rates. You don't want to see crime rates increase, do you? And if rates do happen to go up, obviously we didn't equip them well enough so they deserve EVEN MORE!

They will not remove DRM, because the studios they license films from demand it.

So how's that mandatory DRM working out for them these days?