Here's the link I think you're referring to: Verizon doesn't know dollars from cents

Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) wrote a legendary check to Verizon afterwards in response to this incident. "What now, bitches?"

One has to wonder if a DOJ-imposed breakup might not have been a gift to shareholders.

If you want a good price, you generally have to work for it, which means looking around, and waiting. Little tricks like deleting your cookies will never make a dent - how do you know they didn't decide last night to start charging "nobodies" more?

Markets keep getting more and more efficient, and that means there are fewer and fewer "tricks," by which I mean consistently getting a better price without working at it.

None of which is to say you "ought" to work for lower prices - how much is your time worth? You could almost always save another dime by waiting and looking more. Just check a few different products at a few different sites, and you will do OK. Don't settle into a rut, like "oh I have Amazon Prime so I just get everything from them," unless the convenience is worth getting milked.

At the very least I'm glad they closed this potential loophole before it opened, otherwise the vast majority of US workers would be fired and re-hired by wholly-owned foreign subsidiaries within weeks. "Sorry suckers, you're in Cambodia now! For legal purposes at least! Hahahahahah!!!"

It is very premature to excoriate Microsoft for discontinuing research. Yes they closed the Bay Area site, but Microsoft Research is headquartered in Redmond, along with Microsoft Corporate HQ. If anything, Microsoft has been knocked for pouring money into MS Research with little to show for it (although their patent portfolio may be the most profitable thing they have going in the mobile arena).

If Microsoft is flagging, I actually don't think it's lack of research, in their case. They are way out in front of every movement in industry (hence the patent fees), what they lack is the design and marketing to capitalize on it themselves.

Yes, Intel is a great American company. But are its fortunes rising or sinking? I see very minimal long-term growth (if at all) in that chart, which is scary given than the worldwide market for semiconductors is growing fast. Compare to Samsung.

Granted we are just comparing individual companies. Apple is an American company and has done amazingly well. But, personal opinion here, Apple's magic is not very substantive, and people are very fickle in what is considered cool. (Not that Apple's products aren't good, but their success in recent years has been way out of proportion to how good they are - the quality created a fad - and that won't last).

Yeah, sort of, except it's a mutual give-and-take, and "forced" is a big exaggeration.

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).