> It is going to get to the point where the only viable solution is a trusted sandbox. It will be something along the lines of a TPM chip to make sure that the OS image / boot loader has not been compromised, combined with a white listed set of applications and trusted content sources.

Maybe .. But seriously, it's not clear that this point that a trusted sandbox is actually achievable even in concept, much less in practice. Nor is it clear that anyone other than some classes of users who are forced by law or employer dictate to use a trusted system actually would do so. No or very restricted email, social networking, etc.

I think that the fact that banks and merchants appear to be unable to secure their transaction flows despite having strong financial incentives to do so ought to give one pause about the securability of anything -- or, at least, anything networked.

But you can do so much more sloppy programming with a more capable computer.

OTOH why does twice as much capability mean twice as much malware? Why not four times as much ? Or nine? or sixteen? Or maybe the malware to capability ratio is logarithmic

I'm sorry. This is Slashdot so we'll be needing a car analogy.

Demolition Derby?

The Greeks won that particular arms race.

Yes, but they had to resort to social engineering.

Barring some sort of radical change in priorities that causes the market to accept zero new features for, oh, a (human) generation or more, while vendors put out bugfix releases, 'winning' certainly isn't going to happen by doing conventional stuff; but harder.

Pretty much says it all. The population of exploitable software, design, and hardware bugs is clearly quite large, and is unlikely to decrease much as long as "capabilites" grow and grow and grow.

We live in a world dominated by wishful thinking then wonder why it is insecure.

but don't use it much out of fear of malware

Actually, I think that they don't use their PC much because it's slow, clunky, and doesn't work very well. The number one complaint I hear from those forced to use Windows is that it takes forever to boot.

Not that malware might not be number one if users had a clearer understanding of what it is.

I just happen to have a drawer full of Compaq Conturae. Neat little machines for their time. Haven't done anything with them for years except run automobile OBD diagnostics every year or two to find out why the Check Engine light is lit THIS time. And even that was superceded a few years ago by a USB OBD2 reader on a netbook. I pulled one of the Compaqs out and find that if has a Linksys EC2T Ethernet card in its' PCMCIA slot. I'm sure that WFWG 3.11 will do ethrnet file transfers given an appropriate driver. Maybe such a card can be found on eBay or some such. I think I recall that I had an early version of Slakware running on one of them at one point. No X windows -- too slow to be useful, but the console was OK.

Another possibility is to remove the hard drive and connect it to another machine. It's been a loooooong time, but ISTR that it's just a bog standard 2.5 inch IDE drive and I think they still make adapters that should work with it.. I seem to recall that access to the drive was not all that difficult, just removing a few screws and separating the case. But It's been 15 years or so and it might be harder than I remember.

I looked into the reliability of CDs a decade or two ago. The consensus back then was that the lifetime of writable CDs (as opposed to the plastic disks with mechanically stamped pits) was unknown, but probably somewhere in range of a few years to a few decades. Worse, to avoid royalty issues, every CD maker used a different proprietary dye layer with different characteristics. Back then, it was far from a sure thing that a CD written on one drive could be read back reliably on a different drive even before the disk aged for a few years.

I'm not saying that CDs aren't suitable for storage, just that one probably ought to do some research about longevity before committing to their use as an archiving medium.

Really, same's probably true of any media other than punched cards.

> I wouldn't call ethanol "a mediocre fuel".

Ethanol has low energy density and doesn't burn efficiently in a conventional engine. It's true that it burns slowly and thus can be used in a high compression engine. But then you can't burn gasoline or gases like methane, propane, etc in that tengine. As produced and used in the US it's pretty much a fiasco.

(But it's OK to drink in moderation if you're so inclined).

"Take cars, for example. Fixing a modern car aside from trivial cases is not easy"

Actually, that's not as true as most folks think. Fortunately, thanks mostly to the Japanese and no thanks whatsoever to "Detroit", modern cars are quite reliable despite having an awful lot of parts, The few things that actually require maintenance -- brakes, oil filters, light bulbs, timing belts, spark plug wires, exhaust parts, and the occasional broken sensor -- can be replaced by a shade tree mechanic with a few hundred dollars worth of tools, and a place to work on the car.

I've maintained my own cars for three decades, and it's not that hard once you find a copy of the service documentation and get to know the car. Only hobby I've ever had that showed a profit.

I'm not so sure about the current crop of electronic wonders. They seem to me to have an awful lot of dubious features and rather a dearth of useful documentation about what all those little CPUs are up to. I suspect that they may not age well.

"What do you use now? Shells? Toilets and faucets haven't advanced in the USA. Why don't we have two faucet controls, one for temperature and one for stream force?"

A pet peeve of mine actually. When I was a kid in the 1940s and 1950s, showers and baths had two controls -- one for hot water and one for cold. Possible, if not especially easy, to get the temperature and flow you desired. Since then, that system has been replaced by four dozen variants of single knob controls. All of which suck and none of which work as well as the ancient two control system. Your idea would probably be even better and seemingly would not be hard to implement.

> I'm sorry you don't care about energy efficiency and renewable power.

Get back to us when you have renewable energy that works. Corn ethanol is, for the most part, an expensive, agricultural support program that converts hydrocarbons like petroleum and natural gas into a mediocre fuel. Wind and Solar for the most part require hugely expensive (and probably environmentally destructive) buffering -- think hundreds of billions of dollars -- to interface their intermittent output to a reliable power grid. Hydro power is actually OK technically, but it's environmentally destructive, and simply isn't available on the scale needed to support even the most energy efficient modern society -- not enough precipitation. Not enough suitable sites. Nuclear is fine on paper. But the evidence that nuclear plants will be managed at times by nitwits is pretty strong and we do not have a fullproof design for nuclear plants that can safely be run by nitwits.

Energy efficiency is fine. Seriously. And the US and Canada in particular could do substantially better than they do. But in my experience, few advocates of energy efficiency have realistic ideas of how to achieve it or even of what can realistically be achieved.

> Networks run by professionals can't keep the hackers out, and I want my home to have an operating system?

Exactly. For the most part, the ideal operating system for the home is probably the human brain augmented by some switches and simple (repairable) MECHANICAL timers like those on dishwashers.and washing machines. For the most part, the digital hardware in my house sucks. The interfaces are, for the most part, poorly designed, non-intuitive and not especially reliable. There is entirely too much of it. It has, on average, not brought me joy and/or happiness. I do not expect that situation to change.

That said, there is a case for limited automation of some homes for purposes of allowing the temporarily or permanently handicapped to survive without live-in helpers. But for the general public. It's a bad idea that will be probably be badly implemented.

HINT: If some semblence of security is desired, do NOT connect the home electronics to the internet. Things like home entertainment, "phone" and perhaps fire/intrusion alarms that need a connection to the outside world should be separated from any home network by a healthy air gap.

A system that can deliver Molotov Cocktails for less than the cost of a soft drink? What could possibly go wrong? This concept is almost as inherently safe and harmless as hooking every traffic light in the country to the internet.

And furthermore we're going to need it to deliver food and medicine when some bored teenager in Budapest switches every traffic light in Western Europe, Australia, and North America to a permanent red.

> All the user can do is complain that bootup is slower...yeah, y'reckon?

At least one can evict most stuff from the system tray if one works hard enough at it. And it is handy to have a volume control and possibly a few other things there. What, can be done about whackjobs who believe, almost always incorrectly, that javascript is essential to their user's "website experience?"