Actually, this could be interesting, as long as we can get reliable statistics... if gun-related violent crime rates stay the same, that'll answer the question once and for all, and everyone trying to disarm citizens in other countries won't have a leg to stand on. If it DOES work, then maybe its time for people to think more creatively about weaponry, and possibly move away from firearms to weapons that are either more generic, or more specialized.

I can see the next step after this being shoot-to-kill directives for enforcement witnessing a crime in progress with any non-regulated participants brandishing firearms.

Draconian: I don't think that word means what you think it means.

MS Windows licensing is draconian: MS hoards access. Apple licensing is NOT draconian. They tell you what they want you to do, and leave it up to you to behave yourself. Comparing third party driver support of the OS to intentional crippling of the OS is a false comparison.

Look at it this way: you could compare Apple's stance to Harley Davidson not offering support for choppers built with HD bikes as the base, nor Honda cycles with HD parts jury-rigged onto them.

Whereas with MS, it's that every time you want to modify your Harley, you must first get permission from MS. The situation we're discussing here is the equivalent of saying that from now on, engines will be locked to the controlling system first installed on them -- so you won't be able to take an engine out of a Harley and drop it in a Honda.

(yes, I was tired of car analogies)

Actually, preloading keys prior to sale without a big disclaimer on the box will open MS to massive lawsuits. People will be buying a "Windows box" while under the false impression they're buying a personal computer with Windows bundled.

I think this would actually shake itself out pretty quickly. My guess is that the end result would be that the MS key gets installed during the "first use" process, and not as part of the build and ship process. The lawsuit will still happen, but it will take longer.

The next step of course will be either a) the MS key being leaked, or b) UEFI being jailbroken. Goodbye bootkit protection.

That's a big assumption -- but this is likely the scenario for discount desktop PCs. It'll basically mean that low-end desktop PCs will be cheaper with Win 8 on them than without. Netbooks on the other hand will likely be just fine, as will tablets, servers, high-end PCs, PCs using other architectures, etc.

Really? Even hardware manufacturers like, say, Apple? Even for hardware that doesn't use UEFI? Or does that sentence really mean that consumers will have the option to purchase machines that are locked down to the OS bundled on them?

This train of thought seems to make a whole bunch of leaps of faith to come to dire conclusions. I can't really see people running racks of servers with OSes on the hypervisor binding all EFI loaders to Windows 8.

I think the real story here is that "Common discount consumer-grade desktop PCs will be locked to the bundled OEM OS, unless third party access is granted a la MS/Red Hat."

In other words, it's not really that big of a story, and will be excellent news for potential bootkit victims everywhere (at home and in an office deployment).

While at a gut level, I think I agree with you, your logic is flawed.

Morality has something to do with it when YOU have morality. Saying "I'm throwing my moral code out the window because others don't abide by it" doesn't fly.

If you're really saying "I see that those who don't have a moral code have the life I want, so I'm going to abandon my moral code too and become like them" then your argument is perfectly correct.

Some people value their morals more than their privilege to entertainment though, and for them, your argument doesn't work. Instead of shelling out $100/month to be entertained by TV shows, they choose to shell out $30/month to gain access to Project Gutenberg and Youtube (and other free offeringx) and add to this entertainment by going for walks, hanging out with friends, spending even MORE money to make and eat tasty food, etc.

Oh, and you're wrong about HBO: they care about you. You're an untapped revenue stream. You care about them too: they're a tapped luxury entertainment stream.

Actually, this could probably be done without recording anything... just have a needle trigger hooked up to an audio compressor tube. If the needle jiggles too much, it trips the recording device.

Of course, in this case it would be impossible to tell if it was really a gunshot that set it off, as you'd never record the gunshot (or other loud noise) itself.

Indeed... make a thicker lexan composite, and someone will just make a custom bullet designed to go through it, or hit it with regular ammunition often enough to cause it to crumble. To me, the biggest part of real security is not the part that directly stops the attacks, but the part that returns things to normal operation after the attack. Targeted obscurity is what you put on the other side -- if you have fewer people who know where the attack surface is, you will have fewer hits in the first place.

Remember: obscurity is no substitute for security, but it IS the first line of defence. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to mislead you.

The answer to the first one anyway is "yes" -- assuming that it's not your country who's working on it. While all the security companies have a US presence, most are global in scope, and a sizeable portion of their customers are not in the US.

The whole idea is that it only has to be done once, and only one assembler algorithm has to be produced. You wouldn't store a literal representation of the molecule and resulting substances, only a much lighter-weight symbolic representation, as is done with bmpmapping currently on advanced videogames.

And as I implied in my original post, you'd definitely not be able to get much more advanced than a single celled object (which, as you point out, is plenty advanced already). Creating an entire block of wood, atom by atom or molecule by molecule would run into significant limits, not the least of which would be that you'd need at least one atom on the storage medium to represent every atom or molecule in the object being built.