Imagine if your ISP had a cap (hard cap, soft cap, whatever), and Amazon paid your ISP so that all their Amazon Prime streaming offerings would not count toward that cap - but Netflix won't or can't pay to do the same.

Would you stick with Netflix knowing that you can only watch N shows before hitting your cap, or would you switch to Amazon and watch as many shows as you like?
( For sake of argument, assume they offer the same content. )

I understand you're not the same person who complained about a story no longer being in the news, but I guess that just goes to show that for some people there can never be enough coverage, and for others there can never be too little.

If you want to talk media obsession, though... at least MH370 was still this year and was a whole plane lost under weird circumstances - and not a child abducted while her well-off parents were out partying 7 years ago that still has stories running every other week, or a president that was shot 51 years ago that has complete TV specials made practically every year.

How has 'the press' stopped talking about it, if you're reading about a related story in /.?

Even if by 'press' you're thinking CNN, Fox News, WSJ, NY Times: They all have recent articles about Ebola.
CNN: Sierra Leone: Ebola burial team dumps bodies in pay protest
Fox News: US quarantine moves hurting Ebola response in Africa, experts say
WSJ: Ebola Vaccine Appears Safe in Early Test
NY Times: Sierra Leone to Eclipse Liberia in Ebola Cases

All from within the last few hours.

Maybe some others?
Reuters: Ebola vaccine from Glaxo passes early test
AP: AT 1 MONTH, US EBOLA MONITORS FINDING NO CASES
BBC: Tracing the Ebola outbreak
RT: Reported Ebola cases near 16,000 â" WHO
Al Jazeera: Ebola workers in Sierra Leone dump bodies

Just because a new story has been found to shove into your face every 5 minutes on TV and main headlines on the internet (hello Ferguson / snow), doesn't mean that 'the press has stopped talking about it'. It just means you'll have to pay better attention or actually go look for it, rather than sit on your ass passively taking it in as if you were watching Keeping up with the Kardashians.

Of course there's places where you can find it. There's even places where you can find it in proximity to the marketing name. Neither of those are necessarily marketing material, though.
Unless you know something more about application's 'About' screens suitability for marketing and communications, of course :)

You leave yourself an out with the "to do correctly" part, as any solution proposed could be deemed to not be 'done correctly'.

If they pre-render/capture a scene at, say, 2 inch intervals in a 3D grid along where the user is allowed to go (if the user is only allowed to turn/move their head, rather than walk around, this shouldn't be a whole lot of points to render/capture from), and use interpolation between those points to construct a new view (which could entirely be done in the 2D projection space in real time), the effect should be very convincing both as a regular display and in stereoscopic (may require additional correlation so both eyes get the same interpolation).

But because it's interpolate, you may have vantage points that don't match up with what you would see if you actually rendered/captured from that vantage point, so, not 'done correctly'. Still, it's about as good as it gets, given the constraints.

I don't know if it's marketing so much as it is dev support.

Most end-users certainly wouldn't see the kernel version. Computer properties doesn't report the internal version, and certainly nowhere on regular branding would it make mention of it. What marketing material has Microsoft put out in the past that made mention of the kernel version (where that version wasn't equal to the product name anyway - e.g. 3.11)

Some developers, on the other hand, would probably be quite annoyed if there's a version 7 kernel which doesn't match with Windows 7, a version 8 kernel which has nothing to do with Windows 8, and a version 9 kernel which seems awfully close to Windows 95/98.

From that point of view, Microsoft should really have started this with Windows 7 - but Windows 10 is the next major opportunity to so after having to skip Windows 9 anyway.

But for marketing - well they can call it whatever they want regardless of (kernel) version number anyway. Me / XP / Vista.

Technically this isn't FOIA, but the Public Records Act of Washington (state).

That said... just look at the shit-ton of exemptions in there already from industries with strong lobbying groups:
http://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/defa...

Anybody who defends this guy - his intentions are clearly not that as honorable as simply wishing to pray for these strippers - on grounds of "what are they going to block next?" should have a look at that list, and realize that their concerns materialized before they ever realized they had them.

Presumably sold off to multiple interested parties by a curator if it gets to that stage.

All of their coolers - and we're not just talking fans here, but their vast library of heatsink and heatpipe designs (both functional and aesthetic targets), cooling pads, etc. will be an easy target for either a competitor, or for a company to keep Zalman going and focus only on those. It's what Zalman's known for - to the point of their own website suggesting for the VGA products that "Zalman cooler is equipped with VGA card", rather than the other way around ;) - so that would make some sense.

The peripherals.. well, most of them can probably die off. Not too many people seem to care about Zalman mice, keyboards, USB sticks, headsets, etc. - they're either a dime a dozen or too fancy for their own worth, and only a few get to be big brand names in that arena.

There's some niche products like their virtual device storage options that would make a good complementary offering in WD's lineup.

Given their financial numberfiddling, I can't help but imagine that some divisions were used to prop up others to help make things look good - so selling it all together seems, to me, unlikely; except for purposes of selling it on again
(yes, the IP vultures, whose day job is to make up ways in which popular products violate their IP in the hopes of landing settlements because that's cheaper than bothering with the court case even if you think they're on extremely shaky ground)

Far too few people are going to be interested in it.

Until, of course, paying with CurrentC gets you a 2% discount, 10% on select items during an introductory offer*.

( * with regular prices actually gradually going up )

Yes, I think I covered that in my last run-on parasentencegraph :)

I highly doubt there would be any court case as a result of this (especially since it's now pulled, anybody who cares enough to un'brick' their device can follow steps readily provided, etc.) Which is a bit of a shame, as I think it would make for interesting arguments from both sides.

In terms of positive PR, they could have gone with:

1) Put up a warning that the device is counterfeit and will only work for another N times (after which, simply refuse to work with it - don't modify it outright, though given the technique a temporary modification may be required).
2) Ask users to take a picture and name the vendor and product in a tweet using hashtag #fakechip (or whatever marketing comes up with)
3) Every first tweet of the vendor/product combination is rewarded with a free genuine FTDI replacement chip.
4) Sit back, collect the list of naughty companies (pass on to legal if bored), watch the build of goodwill, the discussion of fake vs genuine swell.

Instead, the discussion is now much less about counterfeit vs genuine chips, but about FTDI doing something that apparently is hugely polarizing (some people supporting the practice, most others wondering wtf FTDI was thinking) to electronics enthusiasts/integrators, security experts, and even legal eagles who aren't sure whether FTDI did something clearly illegal any more than whether they did something that was clearly legal, and a secondary discussion on what to replace FTDI parts with. All rather more negative bits of PR for FTDI, even if further out into the future I think this will have been seen as a good move.

Except they're only doing this to their USB VID/PID - which IS THEIRS.

That may be a matter of interpretation.

They are changing a number which is theirs (not sure if they'd have IP law on their side, or only the USB association's 'hear, hear!').

However, this change occurs by actually modifying EPROM states, said EPROM most not being theirs.

Of course then there's the bit about them not knowing that because it identifies itself as being theirs, thus it being the counterfeiters' fault for not counterfeiting it well enough to match the genuine article when sent this particular set of instructions, and the counter-issue that there doesn't appear to be any good reason to use those instructions except for targeting counterfeits, but that plain warnings don't seem to stem the tide of counterfeits, and whether counterfeits really are as big of an issue in the markets where they get most actively used anyway, and you've got a bit of a clusterfornication.

So we shouldn't just blame the users for buying products with counterfeit chips - which they may very well not even have known about - but we should also blame them for not digging up the automatic driver update mechanism that they may very well not even have known about?

Is there anything else we could blame on the user - the party most immediately affected - in this situation?

I'm quite certain that most people wouldn't even know that they invited anybody into their house - as it is, they're technically already in the house (FTDI's drivers come with Windows). The invitation would be with the update - but as the occupant, I'm even unaware of this invitation. In this analogy, I trust my landlord, and my landlord trusts the maintenance people. The maintenance people broke that trust, no matter how well-intentioned their actions.

As far as the winding gear bit - FTDI merely cause a re-write of the USB PID to 0000. Nothing that can't be restored, just as a winding gear can be put back into place. It's not so much destruction as it is disabling.

When Rolex sneaks into your house because somewhere in your apartment lease you agreed that trusted maintenance people could do so to make sure that everything is on the up and up, finds your Rolex to be a fake, and takes a winding gear out... would you consider that to also be functionally no different?

Because that's more akin to what has happened.

Windows users allow Windows (by default) to let WHQL drivers to be updated silently. FTDI made use of this mechanism to update their driver. Their driver, when called upon to communicate with the device, then sends it some data which either does nothing (genuine) or reversibly disables it (if counterfeit).