Yeah, I wish I could recommend WordPress to people because it's really nice at what it does, but the security flaws are too serious.The fact that it takes months for them to fix serious vulns reported to them only makes it worse.
Seriously, there are youtube tutorials about 'How to Hack Wordpress.' It can't get much worse than that:
Yeap, you're right, I misread. Here is a quote from the paper: "15% of these exploits were created before the disclosure of the corresponding vulnerability." So there's a lower bound.
"The End of Physics" is a good one. You may also re-think your desire to learn physics. If you get through the book and still want to learn, then you will do it completely without illusions.
It hasn't stopped working, for an example close-to-home, look at the corruption in SF, that has been there for over a century. As long as voters don't pay attention, we'll have lousy government. Voters are the watchdogs.
The article itself addresses your point, saying, "modern writers have tried to show that the Spanish conquistadors exaggerated the human sacrifice; archaeology has shown that, if anything, they lowballed it."
So......do you understand what they were doing with all those human sacrifices? Because I sure don't. I can make guesses, just as the article does, but I sure don't understand it.
At DefCon, someone did a talk investigating the wireless security of some drones. Some of them had a TELNET port open for anyone to log in. The problem here isn't a lack of formal verification, it's a lack of people caring.