If you ignore the ability to restrict personal data to particular people, news feed with intelligent ranking that tries to guess who your real friends are so you don't have to upset people who post a lot by defriending them, the ability to tag people in photos, the lack of any need for meaningless URLs and a seamless way of organising events ...... then sure. Facebook is just like the web.

GSM (2G) encryption did not authenticate the cell tower, whereas UMTS (3G) and above do. Cell tower authentication should break devices like the Stingray and other forms of fake base station, unless/until governments start forcing cell carriers to hand over the signing keys for tower identities. But as devices like Stingray exist more or less exclusively to get around the warrant requirement and no carrier would assist in that way without a court order, that places the police in the awkward position of asking a judge to write an order than can only be for avoiding the same judges authority....

The chips are not destroyed.

Yes, the bricked chips can (allegedly) be restored to working order through the use of a utility. "Hang on. Would this utility be furnished by the very same company that wrecked my device in the first place?" Why yes; is that relevant? "Very fscking hilarious; I'll be looking elsewhere for my USB-serial adapter needs from now on..."

This is a distinction without a difference, as they say. You wouldn't cut any slack to a malware author who tried to claim, "Oh, the files aren't destroyed. They're merely encrypted, and can be restored to their previous condition through the use of this handy-dandy decryption key, available exclusively from me... for a modest fee..."

Can you tell, by merely looking at it, whether a given device is using GenuineFTDI(TM)(R)(C)(BFD) chips, or whether it's a counterfeit? Can you tell by using whatever the Windows equivalent of lsusb is? No? Then there is a random, non-trivial chance that plugging in your serial-ish device will either:

• Work (old non-destructive drivers),
• Not work (new, non-destructive drivers),
• Ruin the device (new, destructive drivers), so that it not only Not Works, but also Stops Working on every other machine on which it previously worked.

• Thus, in the mind of the user, FTDI == Flaky. And Flaky == Avoid.

  Congratulations, FTDI. Ten points for avoiding your feet, but minus several million for shooting yourself straight in the head.

Anyway, I have better uses of my time than to waste another minute with you.

We knew what was going on when you ran your anti-IBM campaign, sometimes even positioning yourself as arguing on behalf of our community. It was a way to lend credence to IBM and MS arguments during the SCO issue. To state otherwise is deceptive, perhaps even self-deceptive.

Florian, you would not be devoting all of this text to explaining yourself if you didn't feel the need to paint your actions in a positive light. That comes from guilt, whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Go write your app, and if you actually get to make any money with it you can give thanks, because it will happen despite what you worked for previously. Keep a low profile otherwise because your credibility is well and truly blown and you can only make things worse. And maybe someday you can really move past this part of your life. But I am not holding out much hope.

So Clojure is not an interesting Lisp-like language? BTW there is a smalltalk for the JVM: http://www.redline.st/discover...

So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.

Meh, it's easy to find people with skill. With values, OTOH...

You have a point.

The problem is that some factions in the non-systemd camp are pursuing systemd "emulation" by using shims and forks. That way you just get a second rate systemd, and it will remove any motivation from upstream projects to support anything else than system. Using Ubuntu's "logind" is a short term gain, but a strategic failure for the non-systemd camp. They need their own implementation of needed infrastructure, not just copying or emulating systemd.

It sounds a lot like the non-systemd camp have no idea what they are actually for, they only know what they are against. So this kind of thing is not surprising to hear.

The "UNIX philosophy" is an empty slogan that switches people's brains off. It sounds great, until you try and build a real system with the features modern users demand, and then it turns in to an exploding nightmare of combinatorial complexity as every program tries to abstract itself from every other program in the name of political correctness. As already noted elsewhere, the programs people use serverside Linux to actually run barely resemble the UNIX command line tools and that's for good reasons ...