You might be missing a point (Score 4, Insightful)

In spite of the imagined throngs of doe-eyed deer-in-the-headlights otherwise thoughtless "consumers" out there, it's going to come to pass that Microsoft and their greed will overextend itself. The lock-out we-control-your-security methodology will only work until even the more moronic people have been bitten by it. Perhaps too late for their immediate circumstances, even the most ignorant and go-with-the-flow types will realize they have to leave this Microsoft environment. I believe what we are seeing is two things (a) desperate paranoia-fueled greed and (b) the beginning of the end for anyone so foolish to be so exclusive to the world's computing community. Here on this forum, I keep hearing people talking in little boxes about Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Linux, PCs and all of this shit in this little world we have encased ourselves into. I used to be one of those people. While now I'm working much of my time in Linux (although Windows world stuff still pays some of the bills and mainframes pay the rest) I have gone to a point from being immersed in the Microsoft environments to now being largely outside of them. People? Notice that we are the majority. And we can choose whether or not to be consumer cattle thoughtlessly following the loudest noise. We can choose our own directions. But mental and philosophical freedom is hard work. Not going with the large groups of clueless cattle to slaughter means a lot of effort. If this philosophy of "security" is a bad thing, and I sincerely believe "Palladium" is a very bad thing, don't follow it. Just. Don't. It will have some nice bells and whistles, but recognize a gilded cage and a machine under perpetual remote control and remote authorization for what it is. Don't sit there whining about how Windows 98 or Linux is your favorite OS of choice--please get your egos out of this and start working on some of the deeper principles of your liberty and facility with your own data on your own computers. If it means developing GPL-equivalent hardware, open design microprocessors, and a true open and truly standard machine architecture, done somewhere in the world, then accept this as the direction. Locking people out means locking yourself from them. We have a greedy minority of producers locking out and constricting a vast majority of consumers. Linux demonstrates that we as people can produce, but most of us are in the software or user spheres. People? If they are so intent on locking us out with these obviously evil "security" schemes--let them! But don't let yourself ever be locked in. Linux and OSS is one way to freedom (like Richard Stallman's idea of Freedom as liberty--not lack of cost or price). But perhaps leaving Microsoft, Intel, "Wintel", and going to newer, more open and honest architectures is the way to go. Wintel is rotting and dying. Linux and it's philosophies of openness will succeed because they allow people freedom and the proliferation of new and open idea. Wintel is like the dinosaurs in a sense of being widespread and formidable in the small computer market. This chapter of overreaching greed is the first few pebbles of the beginning of a meteoric shift. Look for freedom and reject this and all attempts to hijack and tyrannize computing.