You're looking at it wrong. You're looking at things from an ideological perspective.

Most voters are looking at things from an economic perspective. If keeping these people in power are going to keep them their jobs, they're going to vote that way. Even if they end up losing their job ten years later due to a collapse in their entire industry, money in the pocket now trumps any imaginary gains ten years in the future.

Sorry, that's just how the world works.

The URL text contains the title of the story it's pointing to. Just hovering over the link, or pasting the URL in between the double quotes of <a href=""></a> will tell you where the link is going.

There's incompetence, and then there's gross incompetence. Guess which one this falls into.

As another reply has already stated, the counterfeit chips are marked with FTDI, so the chips counterfeiters are infringing on FTDI's trademark.

But your larger question is if the counterfeit chips are (otherwise) legal. Since they're using FTDI VIDs, and misreporting themselves to the host as FTDI chips, they may be violating some standard body's rules. But other than the blatant trademark infringement, there may be no legal violation. Not that it matters, because the counterfeiting is done in China, and such behavior is not illegal there.

The IBM-PC clones pretty much did the same thing in the 80's. Except they did a proveable clean room implementation and marketed themselves as "compatible." The proveable part was important against IBM's lawyers looking for copyright infringement, and by marketing themselves as merely compatible, they were not infringing on any trademarks either. It's quite possible if these chips called themselves FTDI-compatible and not FTDI chips, they may very well be legal.

Device manufacturing companies may just avoid FTDI chips outright. This is especially true if some suppliers are mixing the real chips with the counterfeit chips.

Worse, since it's coming through Windows Update, the engineers working on Windows Update might outright blacklist FTDI. And Microsoft would be at least partially liable for any bricked device, which would make their lawyers a bit uncomfortable. I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft release a patch in the future to automatically unbrick the affected devices.

A device which slows mice down enough to be pointed at is indeed a technical marvel to be venerated.

Even power users get the UAC prompt for certain things. But if they don't have local admin, the point is still moot.

"Look at that star! It's so bright, like it's pointed straight at us! That can't be ri--"

You're more easily tracked via BitTorrent than any other medium.

Well, it's technically tracking downloads and uploads, not necessarily viewing behavior, so maybe that's an advantage.

The Obamacare site had the same problems.

Oh, you mean for Slashdot to put out a shitty beta and randomly throw people into it, thereby driving visitors away. That might work.

Wait, you're not?

I've found one major distro that still avoids systemd (for now anyway): PCLinuxOS.

It's listed on DistroWatch among the top 20 Linux distros, for whatever that's worth.

Otherwise, every other major Linux distro uses systemd.

I know you're being tongue in cheek, but most people don't pick Windows; it's picked for them.

Yes, but sometimes, colorful language accents a point. And sometimes, it makes people laugh. Linus uses it to do both, often at the same time.

Linus is a fairly eloquent writer. The imagery his descriptions evoke are always sharp and to the point. If he uses colorful language, it's often warranted in the context of the discussion. Said language only appears egregious when taken out of context.

Well, there's what's written on paper. And then there's what's reality.

And reality is often very different from what's written on paper.

Specifically for Michigan, it's a Michigan (Detroit) thing. Big auto you know?

Specifically for the link in question, there's a strong correlation between blue states and allowing Tesla sales.

To be fair, neither really say that Republicans are for banning Tesla.