So, you prefer functionality over security, _BUT_ you do not want to see the user blamed. I take it you think that you are pretty incompetent?

Hence my estimate that even 50% of Linux users would get caught....

Yup. But the fossil record tends to be rather sketchy, and has little concern for what we consider our "needs".

Well, I don't think that quite matches the scientific concept of "species". By your definition, almost all species who were alive 50,000 years ago would be considered extinct, but hardly any biologists would agree with that. It's true that no humans alive today have 100% Neanderthal genes, but it's also nearly certain that there are no living humans with 100% Cro-Magnon genes, either. What happened would be considered a mixing of several human sub-species after migrations of one or more African groups into Eurasia. The Cro-Magnon sub-species disappeared, too, and modern human Caucasian and Asian sub-species are the results of that mixing. This sort of thing happens in species all the time, when conditions allow such genetic mixing, and the result is rarely considered a new species.

The fact is that modern humans are all one species. We can and do interbreed when groups mingle, and there are no groups of modern humans that are genetically incompatible. If sub-species "disappear" by genetic mixing, that is usually not called an extinction event. It's just the routine and normal mingling of subspecies.

An interesting contrast is that most North American duck species are known to hybridize occasionally, and the offspring are usually fertile. Does this mean they're really all one species? No, because they all mingle a lot, but interbreeding is rare. They have "behavioral" species-separation features, mostly based on female mate choice. The females are mostly all mottled brown (protective coloring), and the males often approach females of other species (because they can't tell them apart either ;-). But the females usually only accept males that have the "right" color markings; the others are ugly to them. This suffices to keep the species separate, though there is probably a very low level of genetic interchange between many of the species.

But humans aren't like this. Even if we do generally prefer mates in our own subspecies, most of us do find many members of other subspecies physically attractive, and we'll mate with them given the opportunity. This means that we really are all the same species. We now have good evidence that the Neandertals were merely another subspecies, because when they had the opportunity, they did interbreed with those slender, dark-skinned folks who migrated into their territory. They did so often enough to produce a new subspecies that's physically distinct from either of the earlier two (or three or more).

I'm going to bet that even some of the most jihad-obsessed radicals, fresh from what passes for school Taliban-land, are better at math than you are.

If there are 6 billion Muslims, and they make up 23% of the world population, that means the world as a population of over 26 billion people.

Do you know some secret place on the planet where we're hiding almost 20 billion extra, previously unknown people?

Depends where you look. Many major topics have moderated groups. misc.legal.moderated has lots of interesting information in it. rec.arts.drwho.moderated also has some insteresting discussions. Surprisingly, misc.phone.mobile.iphone has lots of posts and barely any spam; one wouldn't normally think of iPhone users as usenet users, but apparently there's plenty. alt.os.linux.* has some great discussions in it; .mint and .ubuntu are both pretty active. There's plenty of spam to be found, don't worry - but most of it ends up in inactive groups and is generally recognizable. Conversely, much of the spamming seems to have subsided - with the relatively small number of people using it in comparison to Facebook or Kik messenger, and those that do being the kinds of people who are going to be able to download and configure Pan or Agent and find a Usenet provider, the 'intelligence floor' for getting in is generally higher than the 'gullibility ceiling' required for a spam campaign to be terribly useful.

OOPS, 1968. Fat fingers strike again.

And you must not be thinking of the Russians famously defecating in the hallways of the Czechoslovak National Museum after ransacking it and destroying what they could not steal in 1967.

Tell me about reverence by the Russians for anything other than vodka.

Saudi's blow up WTC - bomb Iraq.

Quebec guy snipes Ottara - bomb Iraq.

Hysterical.

"This is because if you accidentally get a bad shipment of clone chips, and put them into your devices, your devices will be subject to bricking, creating returns and bad PR."

Not if you actually test your product before you ship it.

Not if you perform ANY sort of inspection/testing of incoming components.

Yup. And now they've got a surefire test for genuine chips.

Seriously - these people using counterfeit chips have to be testing the final product. If that final product dies with an official FTDI driver, they can sue the crap out of their supplier for selling them counterfeits.

Have you considered starting a company around the OSS Project? It's typical for a project in your position to spawn a commercial support entity to satisfy support needs, the $$ for which is also used to develop/support the project.

Um, it's not 5 products out of several thousand. These are all screwups by a single division that refuses to learn from their mistakes and repeatedly makes the same kinds of mistakes over and over again.

They KNEW that the VYL00M/MAG4FA/KYL00M fwrev 0x19 was faulty, and they kept on shipping it for MONTHS in devices even though they had a newer fwrev (0x25) that didn't cause these problems.

They KNEW they had a track record of secure erase issues, and a year after becoming aware of a device-bricking bug, they were STILL shipping products vulnerable to that bug (the 840 Pro secure erase mess).

You simply don't see this sort of crap occur with eMMC chips from other manufacturers like Toshiba. Yeah, some of them have quirks, but none of them have such severe bugs that they render the device they're installed in unrepairable without a motherboard replacement.