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?

Let's play a game, you name a 80s geek hero movie for every 80s action hero movie I name, ok?

Do we have to start or do you agree that I win?

Yes, there were a few "geeky" movies. But claiming that they have anything to do with women avoiding computer science is ridiculous. If anything, the 80s movies were misogynic in general. Women were stereotypically abused as either the love interest for the hero, the dumb idiot that gets the hero in trouble or needs to be rescued by him or the inefficient example of how women just can't do what the hero later has to fix.

Women in anything but romance/love stories were basically the same as geeks in 80s movies: The bumbling idiot that makes the hero look so much better.

Nobody could complain if they simply went and made their driver incompatible with the forged chips. If there is no working driver, then the customer would have to complain with the original maker of the hardware and demand a working driver. That's quite within FTDI's rights.

The point is that they attack the firmware of the device involved, which is by no accounts ok anymore. This isn't locking out a competitor, it's destruction of a competitor's hardware. Yes, that competitor didn't act correctly by trying to get a free ride. No doubt about that. By that logic, though, it's just a-ok for any printer maker to trash the printer (e.g. by hosing it with printer ink) should they detect that you use anything but their overpriced original stuff.

From the article:

The new driver for the FT232 exploits these differences, reprogramming it so it won’t work with existing drivers.
(emphasis mine)

So, yes, something is destroyed. Sure, you can undo the damage by writing new firmware to the chip... if you can somehow access it, that is. Have fun looking for the JTAG pins on it and I hope you enjoy soldering under a microscope.

Great idea. Will do. Just ... umm... how do I find out just WHICH controller chip is used in the USB stick I plan to buy?

I may not be the best example, considering that I have rather intimate knowledge of USB controller chips due to the nature of my work. I may actually be able to find out what controller chip is used in USB sticks. But because of this I can inform you that it is anything but trivial to find out just what controller is being used in a stick. Let's put it that way: Quite often finding it out involves ordering one and a good magnifying glass...

Even assuming that an average consumer knows what a controller chip is (quite unlikely), that one is used in an USB stick (it gets more unlikely) and he knows where to look for it and what to look for on it (now we're getting into the land of fairy tales), it's nearly impossible for him to even know whether he buys something with a "good" or forged chip. And the only way to find out involves disassembling the USB stick in a way that voids the warranty.

The real kicker is that I, someone who could actually find out whether he buys good or forged sticks, i.e. someone who might be at least somehow blamed for using forged goods, could actually maybe even recover the stick from its "bricked" status. Whereas someone who buys a stick in good faith because he has no other option would really now lose his data.

That's fair, eh?

With the PHB somehow becoming a judge?

EBay is no more a monopoly than Google is in search.

Western media lost no time to put the blame on burying it squarely on Russia, with RT wasting no time declaring how the temple was originally built by Russian forces and how they will gladly provide archaeological aid to examine it. A convoy is already en route, of course it consists mostly of military material to ensure that any kind of necessary heavy duty equipment will be available. The west immediately complained and sent a contingent of a few thousand observers and advisers, just in case anything needs to be observed or anyone needs any kind of advice. After a few days of heated threats and accusations the only agreement is that nobody gets closer than 2 miles to the ruins until some sort of agreement can be achieved.

Ruins? Oh, right, a stray artillery strike hit the temple. In a rare case of unity both sides immediately agreed on who is to blame: THE OTHER SIDE!

Because they destroy a device of someone who doesn't even know about the bickering behind the scenes. If I have a restaurant and the customers of my competitor park on my parking lot I can tell them to get lost because it's my parking lot and I can decide who may and who may not use it. I may NOT, though, simply go there and trash their cars because, hey, they were parked on my ground.

Intentional and willful destruction of another person's property for the base reason that he didn't buy with you but with your competitor? I don't know about your country, but over here in socialist Europe we have consumer protection laws that deserve that name.

BTW, since we are talking about a virus from Africa, why not mention the obvious one:
AIDS. We can delay it for a long long time but we can't cure it yet. 100% death (although it doesn't directly kill you does it??)

At least with this one you get a fever and it doesn't incubate for many years while you spread around your bodily fluids...

Swine flu was weaker but more contagious; it probably will kill more people in the USA. How deadly is not just death odds but how many people can be infected. We have plenty of incurable unsurvivable diseases which thankfully are RARE. On the other side we have the common flu kills plenty of older weaker people every year...

Don't forget about Hepatitis... B has a vaccine but it still kills millions per year... (likely to go up due to anti-vaccination people) C has no cure but is the cause for liver transplants-- it's slow which is why like a quarter billion people have it already.

OK
I hinted to antibiotic immune bacteria when I alluded to how we are creating new diseases with industrialized farming we are not allowed to criticize, regulate, etc (it's even against the law to criticize it, remember Oprah? she only got off on a technicality.) If you are unaware of the problem, I suggest you educate yourself about it. There is not just 1 kind of bacteria and as we continue what we are doing there will be new kinds (because evolution is real and it works.) I knew a nurse at a hospital which routinely found such bacteria and as a result they greatly increased their procedures. I myself was almost killed by a common bacterial infection where some new drug was the only thing we had time to try out... obviously it worked, but conventional drugs did not and luckily they knew this beforehand because I'd be dead by the time we ran thru all of those.

I was infected simply by walking around outside barefoot... not near a factory farm either. No foreigners required.

I should rant about cancer... but I won't other than to say in the USA you have a 50% chance of getting it and we DO NOT KNOW clear cut causes for it! No sick foreigners; simply owning a Chinese made product where they dumped radioactive waste into the plastic vat... (that has happened, but i can't disclose the details.) Or it could be many things which impact industries bottom lines so they'll keep it under FUD for decades just like easier problems like LEAD poisoning, tobacco, global warming etc. Plus you don't beat cancer-- you mitigate it; the numbers are quite bad when it comes to getting it back again... you "win" if you don't get it back in 5 years but the odds for your lifespan are so much worse than the baselines they commonly refer to that you'll probably get it back and die eventually--- unless you mitigate it until something else kills you 1st. (a friend who died last year got a new kind of terminal cancer as a result of the "safe" treatment of the 1st cancer she "beat." That isn't winning, it is mitigation; at best.)

I was trying to recall that German town which needed approx 50MW more power which was going to result in the building of a coal generator out of town. The size of the thing didn't matter; their demands were leveled off by installing an industrial sized battery as a power station which cut their whole town's demand to 1/10 or 5MW which was going to probably eliminate the construction because they can import that amount of power from the existing grid. It might not stop it; however, it cuts down on demand for the construction of such things and their town illustrates how little actual base load power we actually require.

We should be moving move over a better designed grid -- more like how the internet functions -- instead of investing in more water boilers which have to constant boil water just in case we need it hot at any given moment (but likely during daylight hours... and if solar takes up that then we have a relatively miniscule demand for baseload at night.)