Are you feeling Luckey, PUNK?

They're spoilt with lots of FPS and it bias them in favor of ignoring things like the use of apostrophes when the games pretty fun.
But, since we provided the technology they grew up on, it's probably all our fault that's all they "learnt".

"A fool and his money..."

You mean "unlike other services, ... , they don't pretend to wait for a button press or keyword." (I especially love the latter, which basically says "they wait listening for a keyword before listening to you").

Just like Lennart listens to users, I listened to Lennart...
and then backed up anything important, wiped Linux off my box, and installed FreeBSD.

Listening doesn't guarantee anything - I listen to people all the time, and then ignore them.

Yeah, lets start by letting in the top 5% of foreign executive management and see how that works out first.
We can offer them 'competitive wages'... say 60% of what current executives make, just like with H1-Bs, and see things work out. If that works ok then we can progress to letting the top 5% of foreign middle-management in...

I eagerly await ls.service, cat.service, grep.service, etc. No point in having all those separate tools around when systemd can do it all!

Yeah, the client comes in handy at times to connect to port 80 and 'handcraft' a http request to see a response, etc... but running a telnet server/service on the machine? Especially on a "security" device?!?!? C'mon... that's just ludicrous in all kinds of ways.

No question about the manufacturer being at fault, nor can Bosch be sued for the failure of something they didn't make if it fails in a collision... except if Bosch releases an update 'firmware' for the vehicles that then sees your counterfeit airbag sensor and disables it from functioning at all even though it actually did function (although perhaps not to spec) and might well have saved your life in that accident that, because it didn't function at all due to Bosch's actions, wound you up with a crushed chest, minus one lung, and unable to ever walk again. It would probably be pretty easy, in that case, to prove that while the device may not have been up to spec, it might well have prevented damage that wasn't prevented because of Bosch's actions in totally disabling the device.

Agreed, however to most users it will seem 'permanent' - and regardless, FTDI would still be potentially liable for other damages as a result of them modifying the device into an unusable (even if temporary) state. What if I'm a self-employed contractor with some critical work for a customer on two (for redundancy) external USB hard drives... that happen to have fake FTDI chips? Suddenly I update my driver and both drives stop working - even on other machines that didn't get the driver update - and on the day when I'm supposed to submit my $50K of billable work to the company, for acceptance/payment? Suddenly I've lost business, income, reputation, *and* probably future business... how much is that worth, and is FTDI liable for disabling devices that, unbeknownst to me, had fake FTDI chips, without even warning/notifying me that the devices weren't acceptable for their driver and letting me disconnect them or refuse/downgrade the driver update?

Perhaps, but if I buy a watch off a guy on the street with a long trenchcoat filled with watches, I'm not 'importing' anything, he did (or perhaps his supplier).

Regardless of whether they were permanently 'bricked' or not, your initial comment was about 'technologically ignorant users' somehow 'requiring' them to support the fake product - the driver can simply refuse to work with the device.

Now, however, you take that 'technically ignorant user' who went out and bought say 3 x 4GB USB dongles that happened to have fake FTDI chips in them, unaware of that fact of course, who then copies his business critical data, say 3 years worth of work, onto all 3 of them (for safe keeping)... then his machine auto-updates his driver (because, again, he's a technically ignorant user) and suddenly he can't get to his data... in fact, again, technically ignorant, he tries all 3 dongles (if the first one fails, try the backup(s) right?).

Now, he can't even take them to another machine that maybe didn't get the driver update, or a Linux machine without the proprietary FTDI driver... sure, it's 'fixable' by him say paying an IT geek (a non-technically-ignorant person) to reprogram the USB ID, but that's a cost he is incurring because of what FTDI did to his devices. And that isn't to mention that perhaps he needed that data to bid on a potential $million contract with someone, on a deadline that he's now missed because of what FTDI did to 'damage' his devices.

He most certainly, if it can be proven that FTDI is *deliberately* breaking (even temporarily) the devices in question, has a good case for damages from FTDI.

Agreed. I'd have no problem if their driver reported it as unusable/illegal hardware and refused to work with it. Bricking my hardware is just being vicious to me, the customer, that possibly unwittingly purchased the device - and that kind of policy would make me want to avoid FTDI products in anything I own, real or 'fake'.

That was my question too... how did it get there? I mean, kernel modules don't just magically appear and install themselves... :-P

Your owners don't want it to change, the need more surveillance lest the slaves get restless and think of uprising.

The American Dream