I'll say. I was 23 when in seventh grade.

It's even more likely they'll just ignore you. If it's an overseas vendor that used the parts on their design, there's little to no benefit for them to even acknowledge you.

The unclean hands happen several transactions back in the chain and belong to someone who doesn't suffer in the slightest for this.

This. The overseas chip manufacturer sells their current stock, then perhaps makes whatever changes are needed to make the chips work with the drivers, or providing altered drivers, with practically no financial burden placed on them for their actions. There's really not much in the way of legal pressure that can be exerted on them, and the end customer has no leverage to force them to make things right. In the meantime, the customer is out the $30 or so to buy a device that hopefully uses legitimate parts.

At the same time, just modifying the PID is far from "destroying" the device. If FTDI's driver did something that actually did damage to the hardware, I might be more sympathetic.

Let's say you take your car into a dealership and they flash the ECU so that the car won't start. No physical damage was done, so it's all good.

It's a mistake in my opinion to dump this problem onto the consumer; it's not realistic for them to police all the parts of gizmos they buy.

Not only that, but the odds are better than even that there's not any recourse through the manufacturer/vendor - they can't seriously think that a Chinese vendor is going to do anything at all to rectify the problem for the customer beyond possibly sending a replacement device that will have exactly the same issue. FTDI, with all their money, can't stop the bogus chips from being sold in the U.S. They know for a fact the consumer is screwed, and will end up having to buy another device, *hopefully* with a real FTDI part in it. They're laying the entire cost of this little exercise squarely on the consumer.

Probably a closer analogy would be if you brought your car in to be serviced, but had flashed the ECU with any one of the number of available devices to do that. The dealership sees it's non-standard firmware, and clears the flash, rendering the car inoperable and forcing you to either buy a new ECU or pay the dealership to reflash it with the stock firmware.

Since the manufacturer should be doing quality assurance testing. That should include plugging devices in and checking that they work.

Up to this point, they *did* work. What about the thousands of devices already sold?

" Do you know how many terrorists that wanted to kill me I have come face to face with? 0.

Remove the "I have come face to face with" and that answer will certainly not be zero.

The goal of any security measure is to make it easier for someone to break into someone else's property; thus securing yours.

It's like an implementation of the punchline, "I don't have to run faster than the bear. I just have to run faster than you."

And many fruit juices are quite acidic as well.

The only good news is that they *finally* updated the mini ... which means we'll finally be getting new hardware to replace our xserves.

Unfortunately, they also determined that unless you have a SMT rework kit, you're not installing more RAM in it. You're also not going to be able to put a bigger disk in it without voiding the warranty.

They're making guesses about the future just like everyone else.

While throwing millions of dollars of marketing horsepower at it to make it as likely as possible that people will clamor what they sell, regardless of the engineering and other deficits present in the product. If Microsoft's marketing people were half as good as Apple's, there might not be an Apple anymore.

At least you had grass. Do you know how hard it is to get anything done when all you have to work with is a primordial subatomic particle soup?

it has various problems with similar-looking glyphs that are easily mistaken for one another

Boy, isn't that the truth. Helvetica looks pretty good to me, but it's annoying (especially in technical documentation) when you can't distinguish a lower case 'L' from an upper case "I".

Still not fixed, four and a half hours later...