Palladium and classic computing

Yes, but now we're fighting terrorism. Polls show that more than 55% of US citizens surveyed now want to give up their civil liberties to be protected from terrorism. :-( This Palladium stuff is the result of something I've been ranting about for years, the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance. On the surface, "Trusted Computing" sounds good. Until you realize that the buyer of the computer isn't the party that will be able to trust the TPCA equipped machine. Others have pointed out that if this stuff all goes through, people who don't run Windows will lose access to most of the Internet (best case), or possibly have to create another parallel Internet (if it remains legal to do so). But another effect is that non-Palladium hardware will become very expensive. Early Palladium hardware might just involve add-on chips that can easily be disabled (if you don't need to interoperate with other Palladium systems), but the agenda is to build it into the processor, and Intel and AMD both seem willing to do it. Once that happens, you won't even be able to buy a microprocessor without Palladium and still get competitive performance. Non-Palladium processors will exist for embedded applications, but they'll be older, slower technology, just as processors targeting embedded applications generally are now. Fight the Future! performance to the latest Intel and AMD parts