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.

It's not so much getting "caught," but I have realized that I have done myself no favors by just sitting through meetings quietly for years and thinking, "Yeah, no kidding! I could have said that, why does everybody listen to them!" Staying engaged in meetings doesn't come naturally to me but it is a form of valuable work and leads to other things.

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?

Yeah, there's one guy I always tease about pants because once he stood up and was only wearing shorts. Scared me for a second.

Anyways, that's just it... there's no social pressure without eye contact. It is too tempting to websurf during a teleconference.

So I want to have stable, low-latency, 20-way video conferencing before I hear anybody claim more bandwidth wouldn't be useful.

(Of course even then telecommuters have to download big files often enough).

I have been surprised in just the last few years how many full-time telecommuters I suddenly know, and equally surprised by how useful video-conferencing is in making my interactions with them more engaging, as opposed to just talking on the phone. So far, the experience is sub-optimal because there are frequent glitches and disconnects (whether it is the person's Internet connection, or our VPN, or Lync, I am not entirely sure). But the digital divide is no longer a notional idea for me, because I work daily with people who can't earn their living without a good connection.

And all the unions can do is stab him

Of course they are. What else can you do when someone is trying to murder you?

As far as Illinois' fiscal problems, they started under Thompson (R), who wanted to both cut taxes and increase spending (sound familiar?). Edgar (R) followed his footsteps, as did Ryan (R). The screaming didn't start until Blago (D) and it's still a terrible problem, but is slowly improving.

Ryan and Blago both went to prison for bribery. Thompson (R) unsuccessfully defended Blago in his bribery trial (note that even Johnny Cochran and F. Lee Baily together wouldn't have been able to keep him out of the slammer).

The current Republican candidate, who "earns" a thousand times the median income, wants to tax my pensions, my social security, haircuts, food, medicine, while slashing both his own taxes and school funding.

No way in hell could I vote for that guy.

Florian, I was anything but wrong about you! Look at all of that self-justifying blather!

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

I'm really not interested in hearing from you any longer. It's very clear that we'll never agree on anything, and the fact is I don't consider you someone whose opinion I value or who is worthy of any of my time.

That should be "SCO and MS arguments".

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 they need to spend thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a situation that crops up ... virtually never? And you want to talk about "government waste"?

Nope. That's exactly the problem solved by a cloud. Pooling server resources between a large number of content providers averages the demand between all of them, so each content provider can pay for their average demand while also supporting their maximum demand.

Let's not overcomplicate this - it just means hosting your service on Amazon Web Service or somesuch.