How about "Here are some easy steps to avoid nasty KKK"?

No, first a police officer, then a public prosecutor and finally a jury of your peers define the conditions under which it is considered sexual harassment.

In modern parlance a troll is someone who uses the remote and/or anonymous nature of the internet to harass others. The separation of the bully and the victim seems to cause much more prolonged or extreme harassment than would happen face to face in many cases.

The meaning of troll in common language has changed I'm afraid, just like hacker and gay did.

Ignoring the sexist nature of your comment for a moment, do you think we should simply stop trying to protect anyone from harassment and bullying because clearly it's their own fault for being sensitive to their disability/skin colour/nationality/etc? You are just blaming the victim here.

Right, problem solved, or at least pushed on to to the next victim.

Probably not in the way you want to agree. It isn't possible to write down every specific behaviour and every possible situation that would be trolling. That's why we have courts to decide these things by evaluating the facts of each case, which tend to be somewhat unique.

I know that isn't very satisfactory, but that's the way the world is.

So the GP missed the key point there, which is that it has to be both unwelcome and troublesome. Merely flirting or asking someone out is fine, it's only once it starts causing them trouble (like being very persistent when she has clearly rebuffed you) that it turns into sexual harassment.

Kinda knew someone would get in early with a comment like this. First deny there is a problem, then accuse the people talking about the problem of trolling, then claim it's been solved and can we please move on. As TFA says, it's what happened before and what will happen again.

So it boils down to them not specifically having said "it will work at launch"?

The registry is there to allow user's profiles to move from machine to machine easily, and be part of Active Directory. If you set up Word the way you like on one machine the settings should go with you if you log in at a different office on a different PC. Admins can also make network wide configuration changes easily this way, to the OS and applications.

Vista actually cleaned up the config file mess quite a bit. Applications now get a virtualized filesystem. Attempting to write config files into their down directory, or worse still the Windows directory, has them diverted to %APPDATA%.

Applications and also choose to use the Local, LocalLow and Roaming directories. Local is for stuff local to the current machine, like a web browser cache. LocalLow is similar to Local but has reduced permissions, so is more secure than Local. Roaming is for things which follow your profile from machine to machine, such as the web browser's settings. It's quite sensible and well thought out really.

It's even better in the UK, it varies from car to car.

My car is one way, my mother's the opposite. Mine is a Mitsubishi, her's is a Toyota. Seems like the newer Japanese cars are European style, while the older ones are Japanese style.

Height above ground.

Humans already have the same problem in low light conditions, and we already solved it. Still, occasionally people mistake other random red lights in the sky or on buildings for stop lights.

Releasing hacked drivers won't be easy. On all versions of Windows you get scary warnings if the drivers are not signed, and since Vista you can't install non-signed drivers on a 64 bit system at all without hacks. As of Windows 8 even the hack only lasts until you reboot.

These days ripping off drivers is not really an option, unless you have your own certificate to sign them with. Certs are not hard to get, but they also tend to get cancelled once FTDI fine out about them.

There is a standard, and FTDI devices support it. It's called CDC, or Communication Device Class. It's been part of the USB spec since the early days. It supports RS232 serial and parallel printer ports.

Most operating systems include a generic driver for USB serial converters that uses the CDC standard, including Windows. The reason FTDI provide a driver is that their chips have more features than the basic spec allows. They have some GPIOs, better support for surprise disconnects, better interrupt emulation and a firmware update mechanism that allows them to be reprogrammed or customized after manufacture.

The cloners like the benefits of the FTDI driver, but they also just want to sell their crap as a well respected brand. Most USB to serial converters are fairly crap, but FTDI ones have a reputation for being robust and reliable.

The more I think about it the less likely I think it is that this is just a bug.

The bricking mechanism is to change the device's PID to zero. On Windows 7 and 8 the USB stack won't accept devices with a PID of zero, which is enforcing the spec. The ability to change the PID is provided so that OEMs can reprogram FTDI chips to use their own VID/PID pair.

I can't think of any reason why it would ever need to be set to zero, or could accidentally get changed. The change mechanism is likely protected in some way to prevent accidentally bricking the device, e.g. with a specific series of commands being required.