The chips don't work at all with any driver under Windows 7/8, because those operating systems correctly enforce the "no PID 0" rule of the USB standard. Linux and Windows XP don't.

Or maybe in this instance it's just a better way to serve food.

They have had these machines in Japan for decades. It's basically a ticket vending machine, you choose what you want and pay for it, then hand the tickets to the staff. They prepare and serve your food, without handling dirty money that has been through FSM knows how many hands and pockets. The line for the machine is usually very short too, because you get the ticket immediately and can sit down while waiting for food.

Also, now you know that FTDI will admit when it has made a mistake and reverse course. The other guys might just silently make their driver BSOD with fake chips and blame it on bad hardware *cough* Prolific *cough*

The driver writes a value into EEPROM that sets the device's PID to zero, after which it doesn't work. The write fails on real hardware because the EEPROM doesn't accept writes to even addresses, only odd ones. Fake hardware accepts the write.

On the surface it looks malicious. FTDI's statement was all about the merits of genuine ICs, not "oops we bricked some fake devices, sorry".

Modern Android devices do this too, and I wonder if it is responsible for the system not working at Heathrow Terminal 5 last time I was there. They have signs up showing how busy different lines are, but the signs were completely inaccurate. Could be explained by a few phones pumping out hundreds of randomized MAC addresses and the system thinking there were hundreds of people there.

You are paying for the product. You paid to park, you paid to fly. "Free" wifi is actually a paid for service provided when you pay to visit the airport and pay to fly.

Check out Smarter Wifi Manager. It keeps wifi turned off when you are not near a known access point. Saves battery life, protects privacy on older devices that don't randomize your MAC address.

I remember when a "social network" as a mailing list for people with similar interests, who maybe got together at the pub every other month for a chat. That kind of social network I do like.

No. I never claimed that. Go and re-read the thread.

I said that it wasn't victim-subjective, it is actually subjectively determined by (ultimately) a jury. Juries are the way we decide subjective points of law.

You then responded that such a system is not satisfactory because the accused tends to suffer because their employer will react as if they were guilty before there has been any determination. I asked what your proposed solution was, and finally you have proposed one:

Which is unfortunately impossible, since there are so many possible situations and so many things a person could say or do. If rules could be created to cover everything they would be so complex as to be impossible for anyone to follow. It would be like a game of D&D, where the players are always looking for technicalities in the rules to get ahead, except that the DM would have no power to simply overrule them.

The current situation is fine. It is how many, many laws work. For example, the laws on pornography in the UK state that material must not be considered obscene by a jury. Every few years a publisher tests the limits of obscenity, and over the years juries have reflected changes in society and allowed every more to be shown. It isn't perfect but it's better than trying to blacklist every possible situation that might be considered obscene, since as we know blacklists tend to be both incomplete and over-broad.

They aren't in jail, and it remains to be seen if they launder the money successfully. Also, not all Bitcoin transactions are public. If you put a Bitcoin wallet on a USB flash drive and hand it to someone the transaction is not recorded anywhere. There is no way to know how many people the wallet passed through before the coins resurface in public transactions again.

Actually the summary does miss a few things out. This was covered in Japanese TV and they said that it wouldn't restore the woman's sight. It is just a test to prove that the cells can develop the right way and won't be rejected or otherwise fail somehow. Once that is proven actually making them work to restore sight is the next step.

Freedom of speech allows people to say things we don't like. That's a good thing. However, it doesn't mean we should just accept what they say and not react to it.

Like it or not, psychology is a thing and the things people do and post online can harm people. The victims are not to blame for the harm. These women are clearly quite resilient, or they wouldn't carry on speaking out in the face of death threats and a seemingly endless campaign against them. That doesn't mean our answer should just be "ignore the trolls", we should openly and strongly condemn them.

That's why my girlfriend said, but then she tried 6" and found that it was fine, felt great in fact.

Here is a very short but accurate summary for you. Feel free to repost it.

Some guy broke up with a girl and posted some unverifiable and irrelevant stuff about her on his blog. This started a campaign against her, with increasingly outrageous lies. It was said she slept with a journalist in exchange for a favourable review of her game, but the review doesn't exist and the journalist in question didn't write anything about her after they got together. The GamerGate keeps trying to claim it is interested in journalistic integrity, while repeating this lie over and over again.

Another women, Anita Sarkeesian, made some videos about how games tend to have fairly poor portrayals of women. She was careful to point out that most of it was due to laziness on the part of the developers, even calling the series Tropes vs. Women to emphasize the fact. Even so, this sparked a campaign against her by self-described "gamers" who thought she was attacking games and gaming culture. GamerGate supporters have tried to distance themselves from some of the worst of it (doxing, rape and murder threats, and recently a bomb threat against a university she was due to speak at), while posting conspiracy theories about she sent all these threats to herself... in order to lose money by not being paid to speak or something.

Other female developers who dared to speak out have received similar treatment, such as Brianna Wu. GameGate supporters have also organized somewhat successful campaigns to get advertisers to stop supporting web sites which condemned the treatment of these women. The label "gamer" has come to mean a misogynistic, unpleasant fanboy who masturbates over pixelated tits and nude patches, and should be abandoned by normal people who like games, half of whom are women.

I agree, but what is your point? We should ignore sexual harassment because the police and society are bad at dealing with it? Shouldn't we try to fix that?