She's a former reporter who went off the rails and now only gets attention because of Glenn Beck and friends. This isn't Slashdot material.

Nope, not for a long time. Revised gravity theories still require some amount of dark matter to explain current observations, which makes them the by far worse option.

DRM currently works without being part of the HTML standard. (See, e.g., Netflix.) Why would not including it in a newer version of the HTML standard suddenly make it stop working?

She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government.

Yup. It's almost like there's a reason she's a former CBS reporter. But on the bright side, maybe she can get a job working for Alex Jones or Orly Taitz.

No. But it turns out they did. Because they actually spent quite a bit of effort to write code that permanently breaks counterfeit chips and not their own. They did lots of testing on everyone else's chips.

Of course the liability is with FTDI, they intentionally modified the chip to make it stop working!

They are well within their rights to make their driver detect counterfeit chips and refuse to use them.

That is nowhere near the same as actually maliciously writing invalid configuration settings to the chip.

It's not that they didn't ensure that. It's that they ensured it did break them, very intentionally.

The NSA kills people now, does it.

And it's just in time for the end of net neutrality, so you can be sure your ISP will charge you a premium plan to access HBO online.

A: Yes. It's called "evaporation." Next question, please.

The key difference between non-corporate open source projects and Microsoft or Apple is that companies have HR departments. Problem employees can be dealt with or even fired.

There isn't really an analog in your typical open source community. In fact, smaller open source projects tend to be so grateful for any help that asshole behavior is tolerated -- or even considered the norm. It's a sad state of affairs for the majority of us who want to contribute, but have no interest in dealing with a cesspool of assholes.

Saying that MS "simply bundled IE" is like saying that John Dillinger "simply withdrew money from a bank".

Only in the sense that I'm behaving in exactly the same way as John Dillinger when I withdraw money from my bank. :)

(The difference, in case it's not obvious, is that when I withdraw money from my bank, I don't do it in a way that violates any laws.)

Android is open source and can be forked to work however you like. Windows, not so much.

Actually, it's the newer cards that are reported to have better performance with the latest OSS drivers.

This is a pretty recent development, though. A little over a year ago, everything I'd heard was in line with what you're saying. But when I heard about all the improvements in the recent OSS drivers, I took a chance and bought a box with ATI, just a couple of months ago, and I must say that it's been absolutely smooth, effortless, and 100% hassle free. With a 3.12 kernel (now upgraded to 3.14). And no catalyst.

If your experience is older than that, then I think your information may be out of date.

Not that I'm saying you should switch or anything. No skin off my nose. Just saying your data may be out of date.

Are you sure? You may need a more up-to-date kernel than your favorite distro provides to support the latest cards, but I certainly had the impression that AMD is actively pushing code into the mainstream kernel. Southern Island and Sea Island chipsets are both supported in 3.16 (and possibly earlier).

3D performance on many ATI/AMD cards is actually better with the open source kernel drivers than with the proprietary drivers if you have a recent enough kernel, according to some reports I've heard.