Why would it ever be even close to that high. Every decent system I have ever encountered raised some serious flags after 3-5 wrong guesses. If you flag an account after 10 wrong guesses, start requiring a CAPTCHA after the first one, and ban ip addresses when you detect massive multiple account attempts, you can offer security fool proof security, with, lets say, around 100 guesses.
If it only takes 100 guesses, then an attacker can slowly try passwords stretched out over time, depending on his victim's routine behavior of logging in a couple times per day to reset the fail count. Or maybe he can try 1 guess (with 1/100th odds) on each account in the target system. If there are hundreds of accounts... well, you get the idea.
IP-based banning can make this harder (forcing the attacker to find/use multiple victim PC's), but it's not widespread yet (for instance, I don't think Active Directory or slapd support it).
[Coupons are] there to get people to make decisions that they otherwise wouldn't make, usually bad ones.
In addition, they serve as a form of price discrimination: you can save a nice chunk of change on groceries by taking an hour each week to clip your way thru the Sunday paper, but once you have enough disposable income (and perhaps less leisure time) it's no longer worth it.
Don't get me wrong: safer programming languages and runtimes definitely help, especially with buffer overflows (thanks C++!), but it's one aspect of many that impact security.
it won't prevent devs from concatenating SQL with user input
You can't do this in, say Haskell, unless you write your own SQL interface library that builds solely on strings.
Granted, I lost interest in Haskell somewhere around hitting the Functor/Monad point, but if devs can send raw SQL to the database, they will do so.
misusing threading primitives
You can't do this in concurrent safe languages, like Concurrent ML, Rust and Haskell.
Yes, you can.
So basically, safety properties have importance on par with domain requirements, and must be subject to the same rigour that domain features get, ie. testing, verification, etc.
Good luck spreading that attitude. Makers of device drivers, SCADA, etc., dearly need it.
Basically, the safer the language, in the sense that the more properties can be assured at compile-time, the more features and safety properties you can verify, and the fewer security vulnerabilities.
That helps get us closer, certainty. The language and runtime can help catch/eliminate common, elementary mistakes. It's not the silver bullet though: wherever creative work is being done, therein lies the potential for new vulnerabilities.
an actual coordinated attack within a 'safe' democratic
It's a single fool with a gun, not a group.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
