It's still under development AFAIK and so to say that it failed seems to be the incorrect analysis as best I can tell. It's unclear if it will ever reach a state where it's ready for prime time or whatever, but I wouldn't count it out just yet.
As other people have pointed out, not all of the fake chips have those markings—or any markings, for that matter. This tells me that some company special-ordered batches of chips that were silk screened with those markings, but that the part normally comes blank.
And who would want a 9" pianist figurine anyway?
Is that seriously a federal law now? "Real-time traffic information" has been available on the radio since my grandfather was driving. Waze, Google Maps, and virtually every other software-based GPS provides traffic information. Can we all agree that this is allowed to be filed under "completely useless legislation"?
To get to that point, one has to:
1.) buy airplane tickets, most likely by credit card (I'm sure there's some way to use cash to pay for airplane tickets, but I don't know a single person who's done that in a decade). These tickets give a very good probability as to where you are going to be, when.
2.) check in - in other words, directly inform the airline that you are at the airport.
3.) get onto a line whose exit involves partial undress (shoes, belts, jackets), placing your personal effects on a conveyor belt to be searched, and an X-Ray of your body.
You could stay with Win 7 until they stop doing security updates, and then hide it from the scary internet inside a virtual machine that has gpu passthrough (nvidia vgx or amd vdi) and is defined not to have a network adapter. Windows will run your games and never know that the world outside has moved on.
...and exactly how many games run without an internet connection these days?
First, there's no such thing as "illegal access to software". The customer may be violating a licensing agreement, but as a rule, that's not a criminal offense.
Second, I'm pretty sure there are third-party FTDI drivers out there. So you really can't make the argument that the clone chip vendors don't have an alternate driver. The best you can do is state that if a clone gets bricked, it means that the commercial FTDI driver was loaded at least once by the customer for some reason (possibly with the intent to use it with the clone hardware, but possibly to use it with some other device), and that it matched the clone because it was attached while that driver was loaded.
Besides, they aren't FTDI's chips, so FTDI's statement about what uses their chips are certified for is irrelevant.
Actually, if you sell it as a "USB/Serial converter", then you are, because the USB mark is trademarked.
Only if they use the USB trident mark. The letters "USB" are likely to be held as descriptive.
If some medical device manufacturer uses a consumer-grade FTDI chip - counterfeit or not - in a medical appliance, then that manufacturer is the one who would be liable, as FTDI has already made it clear that these chips are not certified for such uses.
Liability is not binary. If the failure were accidental, you'd be correct. Because it is deliberate, at best, both companies would be held liable—the medical device vendor for choosing an unsuitable part and FTDI for deliberately breaking it, and at worst, FTDI would be held solely liable for deliberately breaking it.
No, I haven't solved any of the hard problems, because determining whether a colored ball or arrow is meaningful really isn't one of them. The hard problems are things like:
Traffic lights are relatively straightforward by comparison, so long as they are working.
No, that's the next generation, when they add backscatter and/or millimeter-wave scanners.
Describe for me, programmatically, the difference between a stoplight and a taillight.
That's easy. The stoplight is above you. Two cameras at different angle provide sufficient parallax to tell the difference between something far away on a hill and something nearby above the car. And you're done.
and a police light
Same answer.
and a neon sign
Same answer, plus the stoplight is not on the side of the road, as computed based on distance to the edge of the road when looking forward.
and also, please include all the many shapes and sizes of the various stoplights all over the country.
No need. Humans can't see the shape of the fixture when driving at night, but that limitation has never been a problem. You just need to know the color and to be able to figure out which colored light corresponds with which lane.
its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal.
So can people. One possible solution would be radio signals in every traffic light to indicate the light's state. No signal and can't see the light? Stop the car and tell the driver to take over. This would be useful for eliminating confusion when you have multiple lights as well, so it might be worth pursuing.
That said, the simpler fix is to use a higher quality camera with better lens coatings. I can't remember the last time I saw lens flare that blew out a picture to the point that it was truly unusable except when using old camera gear with uncoated lenses. For additional robustness, put more than one camera on the front, pointed in different directions. That way, lens flare should never be a problem, in practice. (Lens flare tends to be angle-specific, and the sun is in one spot, so if a lens at one angle is in a position to flare badly, a second lens at a different angle probably won't be, assuming your lenses aren't old, uncoated nightmares.)
it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crumbled-up piece of newspaper
Neither can people, reliably, unless it is blowing. Whatever you see in the road, it is best to avoid it.
Really, the problem is that "when children are present" is kind of ambiguous. What if there's only one child? And is the concern really all children, or just unaccompanied children? Are high school students children? Do kids in strollers count? And so on.
Most drivers would assume that the intended purpose is to increase safety around the time when kids are arriving at school or leaving school en masse. So they would interpret it to mean "Speed Limit [X] on Monday through Friday, from 7:15–8:00 and from 2:30–3:15". If the signs just said that instead of "when children are present", then automated cars could easily do the right thing every time. Also, by being more concrete, the signs would eliminate the selective blindness that causes many human drivers to ignore the lower speed limit.
"It's time to deal with radical Islamist extremists."
That sentence could be simplified to:
"It's time to deal with extremists."
Simplicity is beauty. And tends to get at the core of the problem.
Simplicity can be beauty when you haven't gone too far in simplifying the object of considertaion, removing so much that essential information is lost. That is what you did. You obscured the actual problem rather than clarifying it.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
