Yes I know, but throttling users who set poor limits is generally frowned upon and tends to hurt your fingers after a while.

Writing a program that demands admin rights when it does not need them (eg. to put a lock file in the root of the system drive instead of elsewhere for a purely arbitrary reason) is even lazier.

Sometimes it's better to go after the root cause of the problem and get the developers that have been left behind to understand that it's the 21st century and their desktop software is likely to be running in a multi-user, networked, multi-core, 64 bit environment. There are far too many that can't even get ONE of those things in the list right which is a major part of why so many MS Windows systems are drowning in a malware swamp. We need to get away from the "we've always done it this way" culture of being acceptable when the way it's "always been done" only makes sense on single user systems with no network connection.

grant a specific whitelist of additional privileges to the users who need to use said application

So what do you suggest when that is all of them? Apart from of course trying various methods to convince the developer to learn how to do his job properly?

However when you have inhouse software that only runs as admin because your VB jockeys haven't worked out that it's no longer 1995 then you are fucked - frequently - when each new wave of malware hits.
MS Windows is no longer the problem. Losers who treat it like MSDOS and write software are the problem.

Name dropping? Hasn't everyone and their dog at least read Heart of Darkness? I'll bet it's still a set school text in a lot of places. Conrad was a popular writer in his time with contemporary technology and politics featuring in his novels so I think it's fair to compare him with a popular hard SF writer. He had some science in his fiction.
Of course it would make far more sense to compare Conrad's two spy novels and Tom Clancy, but that would be cruel.

Now it appears, that we must change

It's just the people that are utterly feral about the situation that need to change. One medical example is a city where all the orthopedic surgeons had played Rugby and for some reason nobody who hadn't passed the requirements for the medical specialty. Even the woman that thought she could get around the unspoken qualification by being a match doctor at state level games didn't pass despite high scores. So no girls or weedy nerds allowed.
We've got similar shit festering in IT and it's dragging us down by creating monocultures where it manifests.
So it's not about change unless there's counterproductive unwritten rules that probably need to be changed.

Actually CS classes were what engineering boys in the 1980s enrolled in if they wanted to meet girls (also they very easy subjects for the first two years). In 1987 the introductory CS subject at the university I attended was just over 50% female. Less than 1% in engineering.
I don't know how many of that 50% ended up finding a job related to CS. I suspect it was very few of them.

Or maybe he just wrote about what he knew. Many of his settings were either like New York or a little Russian village after all. It could be argued that since most of the stuff was about ideas the setting and characterisation didn't matter so much.
While most of his writing is good stuff he wasn't exactly Joseph Conrad so there's not so much focus on the people in the stories.

The legacy of "Charlie Wilson's War" means anyone who cares about the future is going to spend a bit of time checking details.
If we'd asked our "allies" the Saudis for advice they would have recommended doing the same as them and giving ISIS money and guns. The real answer to the stability of the region is stop buying oil from the Saudis so that they can't fund terrorists. You'd think we would have worked that out in 9/11 considering where Bin Laden got his funding.

I suspect the reality was that as wages in the sector grew the women were squeezed out.
As late as 1987 I was in a CS class with just over 50% women. Today I see more women in mining and heavy industry jobs, literally at the coalface instead of just in the office, than in IT. Pretty weird isn't it for something that was dismissed as "women's work" to the extent where I couldn't even do a class in typing at high school because that was strictly girls only.

With respect, an anti-gun viewpoint should not matter at all in a role like that since guns are not part of the job.

Of course this was never actually about guns though, as with most of the US "gun debate" it's about being on the "right team", which in one case happens to contain a dysfunctional sporting club with far too much political power - and in the other case fill in whatever partisan insults you want to use. By being "anti-gun", or more likely just anti-NRA rant of the week, he's shown he's not "on the right team" so it's not really about guns is it?

There has been a bit of work on three approaches with at least one completing animal testing. It may not be in the news but some people have cared enough to put more than a decade of work in.

It would have helped if he'd used that time to actually come up with a plan........

What plan then - help ISIS, help other groups backed by Iran or help Assad?

I'm not sure time would have helped. A major worry now is ISIS went for deliberate provocation and seem to want us to drop bombs on the area and we are doing exactly what they want. Why they want it is a bit of a mystery, but those video nasties were designed for that purpose.

Effectively been done in a small way by sending a team and troops to isolate it at the source before it spreads to millions. More of the same is the sane way to do it (according to some medical professionals that call themselves experts in tropical diseases). Attempting to cut it off at the border didn't work with Spanish Flu after the WWI and would be far more difficult to attempt today. Cancel all flights in and out of the USA for a month and it may still come in via Canada or Mexico.

There never where smart people here, just technicians and wannabe technicians with an inflated sense of self importance.

Not true, when this site started I was a professional engineer - it's only now that I'm a wannabe technician with an inflated sense of self importance.