I've always been impressed by the goals of PG, and it's great to be able to contribute and give something back to the project. I once did try typing in a book for PG, but only got as far as Chapter 5 :) [didn't have a scanner or OCR at the time - and still don't].

If you are reading this, and haven't already tried it out, I urge you to go over there and give it a go. Hell, even if you only do a couple of pages, you're helping (as long as you do it properly - read the project notes and the FAQ first!

For a year or so, I had a job at Hewlett-Packard, where I was a lowly sysadmin. This was not long after I left University - about 1997 or so.

I remember one day having a conversation with one of the guys that worked there, whose name was Phil, about some sort of program he'd written in his own time. He wanted to sell it and was asking me about possible ways to prevent the program being copied.

We mulled over various methods such as registration keys, which I pointed out were easily leaked, unless he had the application check back at registration time with a central server - which requires a large investment which he couldn't manage. Then I said "The best answer is to encrypt the executable, but then that doesn't stop someone from dumping the encrypted code from memory".

What I then said was: "The only way to stop someone copying your program is to have encryption built into the CPU and the program, such that the code is never decrypted in memory, but is decrypted on-the-fly by the CPU as it executes. Probably, in a few years time, all computers will be made like this, because if it's done properly it's the only way to stop software piracy"

I've often wondered if Phil ever told anyone else about this idea... It always worries me that I might have been the man who started the cogs turning and landed us with the hell that will be Palladium...