It is necessary to add some measures of infection and transmission (transmissibility). If a person is infectious for a long period
with no or difficult to detect symptoms the world has a massive problem if the end result is kin to the final week or two of a hemorrhagic
fever like Ebola.

Transmissibility i.e. the evolutions of a virus ability to infect others is missing in the original article.
A virus could become benign OR it could combine the long incubation of HIV and Ebola but acquire the
rapid transmissibility of influenza and run wild across the globe reducing the population by +80%.
The 80% is a personal SWAG that assumes the collapse of health care that today gives Ebola victims
a fighting chance.

Another risk is for a very infectious hemorrhagic fever class virus to emerge and attack livestock, poultry,
fish and swine. Oceanic fish infections scare me.... Any of these might cause global or regional famine
and global or regional conflict.

"May" and "almost harmless" not in my lifetime.

Ask any person that suffers shingles, virus populations in West Africa may evolve a less lethal
variety of Ebola... but I am not going to bet on it. Singles hides in nerve tissue and can attack
60 years after infection..... that is like three generations.

At best we might see a Cowpox/Smallpox pair but as world history shows Cowpox does
not visit a population far and wide enough to make Smallpox go away. Smallpox is still
a global risk. The fact that we have "eradicated it" means that most will not get immunized
at all today.. unlike my generation where I was immunized at least three times gives me
pause. The risk of smallpox escaping from immunization manufacturing scares the industry
so much that they are unwilling to be in the business.

The only hope for people with regard to HIV & Ebola consists of social changes
an if we are lucky immunizations. Condoms, monogamy will help with HIV.
Major religious changes that eliminate the very dangerous funeral practices combined
with better sanitation, cooking practices and aggressive health care mobilization
by a trusting population are needed for Ebola.

But not in a lifetime....

No broken is broken.
If you want to replace one that is all well and good.
I have found that the the old phone makes a handy media
player. With Chromecast and youtube, netflix or whatever a
little phone can be happy serving up music or streaming video
via WiFi.

But broken is broken... not good for anything worth doing.

Oh and BTW this second life is the biggest reason all my
phones must have a replaceable battery. AND on the sad
day that a phone goes swimming or a run through the laundry
a short visit to the phone store I can activate the old one. I
can get a prepaid SIM for travel where roaming plans or message
rates go nuts. Because it is a novel number I get little or
no "hey good buddy" expensive ill timed calls from many time zones
away.

Not an interesting project.
the MC68000 has no way to restart an instruction and no MMU.
Both of these are critical to running a Linux kernel today!
You could emulate a 68000 on a Beaglebone Black and have
it run faster.

*nix like OS have been built and run on a 68000 Idris is one
historic port of Unix. Little or no protection to keep processes
from running over memory and I/O and doing bad things but a
worthy *nix all in all for its day.

Step up a little to the MC68010 add an external TLB/MMU built
from modest size fast static RAM and Bob's yer Uncle... A
68010 does have the ability to restart instructions so you can recover
from a page fault. An external TLB/MMU is easy and designs
abound in 25+ year old paper documents.

When you are done a Raspberry-Pi or Beaglebone Black will still
run circles around it.

If you want to have fun build yourself a machine like the "magic 1"
and you will learn what all the buzz be about.

Perception dominated the knee jerk reaction.

In my experience modern computers and operating systems
are beyond any one person knowing all the answers.

I recall working with an astoundingly clever and smart network type
that was tasked with tuning the lowest nasty bits of the network
stack. However he had no experience in setting a machine up
and installing a base system and adding initial users so he could
test what he was doing.

Same is true for a lady hardware designer. A true wizard at termination
of very high speed transmission lines and world class in coding VHDL
to eliminate random TTL logic on a board... Again the random decisions
made for setting up a user could not be deduced from raw logic....

The toy company should have had an ethnic and gender mixed help desk.
But that does not give the foolish critics a free ride.

Solar charger, battery, Raspberry-Pi side loaded with compilers
extra boot memory cards..... Hunt the new RasPi with microSD slot
and improved USB power. HTML5 is new enough to study.

Haskell is high on my list as is a good lisp. Never ignore Python.

X years... and product/ language only out for Y...
So true...
In 1996 I saw a job description mandating ten years of experience with Java.

I can see the global angst now as a current US president sits down
in front of a fireplace with a handful of trusted but silent aids to reassure
the nation and the world that "gay" is not contagious if you wear
head to toe protective....

Then in less than a week he or she imports a word like tzar from Russia
to explain it all.....

Burqas for boys... seems to be the next step....

I was hoping this was a new Android wrist watch.
Sadly it was not when I looked at the original article.

Sill it is cool as heck.... Recall the palmdale bulge that might have
been a 10cm uplift of the bed rock. This could measure this...

An array of these clocks in well chosen places might tell us a lot
about this little blue ball we live on.

Since this is the first week after some of the globe flipped off Daylight Savings Time
it is obvious to me that the old WWV radio controlled clocks are so last year.
I would like to see some NTP-WiFi + WWV + GPS clock designs. Perhaps with
better displays than the current pile of fixed 7 segment type display.

Cool as heck... but I doubt I can afford one today.

Climbing Everest has become so last year that a new
expression of "stuff" is needed.

So up up and away....

BTW: Everest is lethal too.

If he wants to be forgotten then "forget him".

Invoking the right to be forgotten should not be selective.
Flush it all and let us not visit this again.

Moving back to Arizona I am...

There are a couple dirtbags here.
First the math:
Three dirtbags does not equal a scumbag.

The initial dirtbag would be the clowns that made parts that reported that
they were a different part but not also acted differently but were a lame
subset of the original. Fraud on the data sheet or marking on the part
is worthy of prosecution.

The second dirtbag is FTDI that can effectively disable a vastly more extensive and
expensive device and deny the purchaser that did nothing wrong and has no possibility
of auditing the content of the device they purchased.

The third dirtbag is the vendor that knowingly uses a less costly part or the distributor
that delivers a less costly part knowing or turning a blind eye to the fact that the
alternate part is a sad knockoff.

Counterfeiters are a real problem and in the modern age of 3D printing
are likely to find another media to abuse.

I dislike the strategy taken by FTDI it attacks the end user and risks others -- furthest from the fraud
and least likely to know or be able to know anything about the abuse of the trespassing on FTDI's
design intellectual property.