Government already fixes the length of patents at 20 years, so as I said, the "govt sets arbitrary constants" bridge was already crossed. And if it's really a problem, we could spin it out into an independent body like has been done with central banks and the interest rate.
You're basically setting up a system which will only benefit "big" inventions (meaning those funded by wealthy individuals or corporations).
You're right, but I'm not convinced that's such a bad thing. The lone inventor producing a better mousetrap in his basement is something of a myth don't you think? Outside of web companies how often do you hear about a company becoming huge on the back of a single guys cheap invention? Google is perhaps the main example of this in recent years, but even so, developing the PageRank technology took years of research at a university followed by significant hardware investment to build a working implementation.
Compare to a much more common story today - a lone inventor patents something trivial or (worse) cool and new but isn't able to bring it to market. Thus society is deprived of a professional, large scale implementation of the idea, potentially for decades.
. For instance, in year one, the pool would be cost of development times 100 (or higher). In year 2, it drops to 75x.
Hmm, I need to ponder the maths of that. In a sense that's what already happens... a companies investment in the invention drops off every time there's a new entrant. Throttling the entrancy rate would be similar to what you suggest. I think this would be equivalent to setting a very high incentive rate.
Thanks for the great comments. It's because of posts like yours that I write this stuff on Slashdot instead of elsewhere.
Consider the following replacement patent system, let's call it the fractional pool system.
Let's say ACME Inc invents a new wonder drug at an approximate cost of $1 million. Let's also state that I is the "innovation incentive", a quasi-fixed constant specified by the government - sort of like the central banks base rate. I is expressed as a multiplier. For simplicity let's say I is 1.2
Multiply the cost of development by I to arrive at $1.2 million. ACME Inc applies for a patent on their wonder drug, and it is deemed novel thus granted. A new pool is created with a value of $1.2 million. Anybody who wishes to license this patent (and anybody can - there is no exclusivity in the fractional pools system) must enter the pool by paying enough into it to split it evenly.
For example, if MegaCorp wishes to compete with ACME Inc, they'd need to pay $600,000 into the pool, which is transferred to ACME Incs bank account. Now both companies are down $600k each. ZCorp sees that the wonder drug is popular and wants to enter the market too, so ZCorp pays $400k into the pool, which is split evenly between ACME Inc and MegaCorp. Thus all three participants in the pool are now down $400k.
This continues until the cost of entering the pool reaches some minimal floor at which point the pool is cancelled and the invention becomes public property. There is no particular time limit on this. It happens whenever it happens. You can see that ACME Inc will eventually make back their $1 million plus an additional profit of nearly (but not quite) $200k.
This scheme has some big advantages:
Pro - there is no exclusivity. Thus companies cannot blackmail other companies or cause widespread economic disruption by suspending the distribution of a popular product. Nor can a company sit on an invention for decades without using it.
Pro - the size of the pool is determined by the audited cost of development. Thus you cannot make millions off something trivial or obvious.
Pro - there is no arbitrary time limit on an invention, which will never be right for every industry.
Of course there are some disadvantages too:
Con - It can be difficult to judge exactly how much a particular invention cost - where do you draw the line between costs specific to that invention and general shared costs?
Con - The "innovation incentive" is a fixed constant under political control. I used 1.2x in my example but perhaps a more realistic value is a lot higher, like 20x. Thus governments of the day can adjust it up or down - up likely means more inventions but higher costs to the eventual consumer, lower means cheaper toys but less R&D. Whilst the value could be adjusted per industry or even per invention, it will never be quite right for everything.
Con - The second entrant to the pool has the advantage of not needing to do the R&D yet can immediately benefit from the invention. First mover advantage might not be enough to offset this. Perhaps could be solved by throttling the entry rate to the pool.
Despite these problems I think fractional pools are a more robust and flexible way to promote R&D than the existing patent system, which not only has arbitrary fixed constants but also gaping loopholes of the type we witness in this article. Discuss.
There's already a commercial Maglev train in Shanghai, you can take it to the airport. It peaks at around 420km/h. I've been on it - very cool. Only maglev in the world that is open to the public, apparently.
That's actually something that done to support Vista. It's got nothing to do with IT department restrictions and everything to do with the Vista security model.
That's misleading. Google Chrome is a rebadged version of Chromium, an entirely open source browser. The differences are minimal and mostly related to logo use - no different to Firefox.
That's good page. However your definition of "spam" is not correct. Modern spam filters are trained based on what users report. Thus "spam" is by definition any mail which the majority of your recipients don't want, and click "report spam" on. It's got nothing to do with the total number of people who receive it.
Dalvik bytecode is significantly more compact than native code. On a memory/Flash constrained device like a phone, the more you can pack into memory/flash the more you can do. Given that the apps are meant primarily to direct the native code libraries and tell them what to do, that works OK.
You get security, no memory errors etc. Did Android have a remote-root buffer overflow in the SMS engine? No, that'd be the iPhone, written in a derivative of C.
But you can write native code JNI extensions for Android anyway, so if you really want to write your apps in C++ or D or whatever then go write ahead.... you'll only need a small shim to Java to interact with the OS.
More specifically, you can use an OS/DVD combination that does use the technology and buy DVDs that are not protected. Always remember that the protection is optional, it's just enforcing the wishes of the copyright holder. And even then the DRM makers understand fair use (look at BluRay managed copy). Not that any of this is relevant to TC mind you. Wake up me when Intel have produced an implementation of SINIT that doesn't routinely brick motherboards:-(
Great except, the FSF is spreading FUD. The following comment is nothing but FUD:
And if Microsoft's Trusted Computing technology were fully implemented the way the company would like, the vendor would have 'malicious and really complete control over your computer.'
It's FUD because it's a blatant lie. I am disturbed that the FSF is lying like this - I knew Stallman and his friends were sensationalist and extreme, but they haven't usually needed to lie to make their points.
Firstly, it's not Microsofts technology, these days it's mostly Intel pushing the TCG specs forward. Secondly it's not correct that TC makes your computer obey Microsoft (or any other company) instead of you. Here is what TC actually does..... wait for it....
TC lets you make an unforgeable proof about the state of your computer, and then send it to somebody elses computer.
Hmm, doesn't sound so bad now does it? It basically stops you from lying to a third party. Do you routinely lie to those you do business with? If so you might not like TC. Do the people you do business with sometimes lie to you? Do you have to deal with spam and other forms of automated abuse? TC might be just the thing you need.
TC hardware won't send such a proof without you running a program which does so. The TC hardware is fundamentally incapable of making your computer do anything at all, in fact. It simply adds additional features to the standard PC feature set, which you are free to use or not use as you see fit.
Now, that doesn't mean somebody else will do business with you if you refuse to present a proof. Kinda like how some bars refuse to let you in if you can't prove your age, some businesses might refuse to let you in unless you can prove you are running the program they actually sent you. This does not extend to the OS or indeed anything running on the OS. The SINIT instruction, in fact, is designed to make the running OS irrelevant by a clever use of VM technology. Linux, Windows, MenuetOS... whatever. The other party won't know or care what you use. This might sound impossible but it is not, read the Intel docs and you will see how it works. Indeed the goal is to minimize the amount of code "proved" in this way because the TC designers know the more code you have, the less likely it is to be secure.
TC does not advantage big companies over the individual. The feature set, specifications and implementations contain nothing that would do that. It could just as easily be a Disney server proving to YOU what it's running as the other way around.
TC as implemented today can't be used for DRM. For that you'd need "trusted graphics" and "trusted audio", both things for which there are no specs and no implementations. What it does allow (when it works) is the running of a program in a separate VM sealed from interference from the main OS. That has many uses in many fields, for instance, wouldn't it be nice for your bank to know that the transaction was submitted by a human using a keyboard rather than a virus that hijacked your browser?
I'm sick of the FSF spreading blatant FUD about this versatile and entirely open technology. Don't believe it.
Nope. A bad bootloader replacement would be an instant 100% bricking. Besides, the RRoD has a specific meaning - something to do with the gfx controller I believe. You just got unlucky - my xbox360 died a couple of weeks ago after intermittently failing to start up. If you got one of the first ones available it means you were like me - you got one of the ultra-high-failure-rate models. DRM isn't to blame here, bad manufacturing/design is.
Wiis is popular with users not game developers. Third party titles sell atrociously on the Wii. And forget about the indie market. If you want to make indie games and sell them for profit your best bet is either PC or XBox Live Arcade/Indie section. Lots of people there who are only a button press away from buying your game.
This discussion is about the Pirate Party who have an explicit aim of significantly weakening copyright law, actually making it nearly useless for things that can be file shared, so saying "the question is how long copyright terms should be for" is attempting to redefine the debate after it started. If it were about modifying the length of copyright terms then I'd agree with you - the current terms are too long. Reasonable people can disagree on where that line is drawn but there's wide consensus that longer than a human lifetime is far too long.
I'm sure that the people with these views considered these issues, and aren't simply arguing for "maximum freedom for me at the expense of everyone else"
Your faith is inspiring:) Unfortunately I cannot match it.
And if you could persuade Disney to release the first Mickey Mouse under a free licence, then there'd be no need for a political party in the first place.
Indeed - and there isn't any need for a political party. If Disney doesn't want to release Mickey Mouse under a better license then maybe the solution is to ignore Mickey Mouse rather than make piracy legal? Disney is a US company anyway so changes in British law wouldn't have much impact on them (in fact it'd probably violate WIPO treaties). Maybe Andrew should start with the BBC. They are TV license funded anyway, so, losing the revenue from exclusive distribution agreements with foreign TV firms wouldn't be a killer financial blow. If he can convince the BBC to release its programs under a "non commercial copying OK" license then he'd have a much stronger position to argue that it should be mandatory for everyone.
If it's pure idiocy why did the parties own founder quit after claiming the party was infiltrated by the far right? Why did the UKIP throw out 11 (!) BNP "infiltrators" in 2004? Why do they require all new recruits to state they aren't racist?
If you weren't a hobbyist musician but rather, say, a musician who worked on video game music - perhaps you'd find yourself one of those lobbyists yourself? I mean, the word lobbyist conjures images of slick-haired besuited lawyers, but what it actually means is "person who is concerned enough to meet regularly with politicians about certain policies, or is paid by somebody who is". If you as a musician called up your MP and arranged a meeting with them, you too would be a lobbyist!
We know what post copyright business models look like already - they look almost the same as pre copyright business models. See the "dark ages" for reference. Great for rich heirs and heiresses who could afford to commission works of art. Sucked for everyone else.
There is one post copyright business model that didn't exist back then - strong DRM. The video games industry is rapidly moving to a "consoles first, PC later if at all" model and several studios have said it's because of piracy.
The PS3 has "perfect" DRM, you know, that thing derided as impossible for years here on Slashdot? Well it turns out that when you have a hardware company who stands to lose billions if software doesn't sell well, they get it right. PS3 has been out for nearly 3 years now and has never been cracked. The XBox 360 has a very low level of disc-based piracy and again apparently unbreakable DRM for internet-activated or distributed software. The trend is clearly heading towards internet distribution so the future seems clear - if there is no copyright enforcement then industries which can do so will simply protect themselves.
I believe the pirate parties response to this is "outlaw DRM too". For a party that claims to stand for personal freedom and a small state they're quite willing to impose sweeping restrictions on artists, programmers, writers, actors, movie producers etc!
we are well aware that there needs to be balance in copyright law, and that artists need to be financially rewarded when their work is sold.... I hope you'll also see that we are a rational, balanced group of people.
Well, I'm sorry, but I disagree. I'm a long time Slashdotter myself (I was given the ad-free version by the TacoTeam for my contributions), but by aping the policies of the Swedish pirate party you are coming across as anything but balanced and rational.
The main problem I have with their (now your) policies is that they rely on a particularly populist form of intellectual dishonesty. Take copyright. Copyright law is in fact a very strong stake in the ground for personal freedom and "small state" economics. Copyright law doesn't tell you what you should do with the fruits of your intellectual labor. It essentially says, you - the individual or business behind a creative work - only you can decide how you want your work to be used. Want to charge $50 a pop? That's OK. Government will defend your freedom to do that. Want to charge nothing? That's also OK - government will stand beside you too. Want to impose arbitrary conditions like releasing derivative works under the same license - guess what, government will be there for you as well.
The Pirate Parties "reform" of copyright at first may look like a win for personal freedom in much the same way weakening or abolishing any law might, but it isn't. Seeing as you are a fan of extremes, consider it being like repealing laws on murder. Hell, if somebody insults my mum and I want to challenge him to a duel at dawn who is government to tell me I can't do that? MOAR FREEDOM PLZ. Except that's obviously absurd because everyone intuitively understands that punishing murderers harshly by taking away their freedom (potentially forever) actually increases the freedom of everyone else, because it means I can go on TV and say something unpopular and chances I'll get killed for it are low.
If you really believe the way copyright violators are punished is stupid, you should be campaigning for votes amongst copyright holders. They're the ones who decide how their work should be licensed. They could, if they wanted, distribute their work under a license that said file sharing is OK. They could do it tomorrow. Winning your campaign this way would have a moral legitimacy far beyond winning an election based on short term populist policies because instead of taking away a versatile tool you would have convinced the owners to wield it differently.
However, I don't expect you to do that. Whilst you try and distance yourself from the Pirate Party name in the interview, in fact you chose to use it. Winning votes by promising voters free stuff is a tactic as old as politics itself, I'm sure you'll be met with great success.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that Xbox piracy only affects disc based games right? TFA is talking about games distributed via XBL which does not have piracy.
I think the point of TFA is that modern console security does not get cracked. There is no piracy on Xbox Live and I presume PSN is the same.
Government already fixes the length of patents at 20 years, so as I said, the "govt sets arbitrary constants" bridge was already crossed. And if it's really a problem, we could spin it out into an independent body like has been done with central banks and the interest rate.
You're right, but I'm not convinced that's such a bad thing. The lone inventor producing a better mousetrap in his basement is something of a myth don't you think? Outside of web companies how often do you hear about a company becoming huge on the back of a single guys cheap invention? Google is perhaps the main example of this in recent years, but even so, developing the PageRank technology took years of research at a university followed by significant hardware investment to build a working implementation.
Compare to a much more common story today - a lone inventor patents something trivial or (worse) cool and new but isn't able to bring it to market. Thus society is deprived of a professional, large scale implementation of the idea, potentially for decades.
Hmm, I need to ponder the maths of that. In a sense that's what already happens ... a companies investment in the invention drops off every time there's a new entrant. Throttling the entrancy rate would be similar to what you suggest. I think this would be equivalent to setting a very high incentive rate.
Thanks for the great comments. It's because of posts like yours that I write this stuff on Slashdot instead of elsewhere.
Consider the following replacement patent system, let's call it the fractional pool system.
Let's say ACME Inc invents a new wonder drug at an approximate cost of $1 million. Let's also state that I is the "innovation incentive", a quasi-fixed constant specified by the government - sort of like the central banks base rate. I is expressed as a multiplier. For simplicity let's say I is 1.2
Multiply the cost of development by I to arrive at $1.2 million. ACME Inc applies for a patent on their wonder drug, and it is deemed novel thus granted. A new pool is created with a value of $1.2 million. Anybody who wishes to license this patent (and anybody can - there is no exclusivity in the fractional pools system) must enter the pool by paying enough into it to split it evenly.
For example, if MegaCorp wishes to compete with ACME Inc, they'd need to pay $600,000 into the pool, which is transferred to ACME Incs bank account. Now both companies are down $600k each. ZCorp sees that the wonder drug is popular and wants to enter the market too, so ZCorp pays $400k into the pool, which is split evenly between ACME Inc and MegaCorp. Thus all three participants in the pool are now down $400k.
This continues until the cost of entering the pool reaches some minimal floor at which point the pool is cancelled and the invention becomes public property. There is no particular time limit on this. It happens whenever it happens. You can see that ACME Inc will eventually make back their $1 million plus an additional profit of nearly (but not quite) $200k.
This scheme has some big advantages:
Of course there are some disadvantages too:
Despite these problems I think fractional pools are a more robust and flexible way to promote R&D than the existing patent system, which not only has arbitrary fixed constants but also gaping loopholes of the type we witness in this article. Discuss.
There's already a commercial Maglev train in Shanghai, you can take it to the airport. It peaks at around 420km/h. I've been on it - very cool. Only maglev in the world that is open to the public, apparently.
That's actually something that done to support Vista. It's got nothing to do with IT department restrictions and everything to do with the Vista security model.
That's misleading. Google Chrome is a rebadged version of Chromium, an entirely open source browser. The differences are minimal and mostly related to logo use - no different to Firefox.
That's good page. However your definition of "spam" is not correct. Modern spam filters are trained based on what users report. Thus "spam" is by definition any mail which the majority of your recipients don't want, and click "report spam" on. It's got nothing to do with the total number of people who receive it.
Android uses a Java interpreter because:
But you can write native code JNI extensions for Android anyway, so if you really want to write your apps in C++ or D or whatever then go write ahead .... you'll only need a small shim to Java to interact with the OS.
More specifically, you can use an OS/DVD combination that does use the technology and buy DVDs that are not protected. Always remember that the protection is optional, it's just enforcing the wishes of the copyright holder. And even then the DRM makers understand fair use (look at BluRay managed copy). Not that any of this is relevant to TC mind you. Wake up me when Intel have produced an implementation of SINIT that doesn't routinely brick motherboards :-(
Wait, a mandatory gym?! That truly is exceptional ....
Great except, the FSF is spreading FUD. The following comment is nothing but FUD:
It's FUD because it's a blatant lie. I am disturbed that the FSF is lying like this - I knew Stallman and his friends were sensationalist and extreme, but they haven't usually needed to lie to make their points.
Firstly, it's not Microsofts technology, these days it's mostly Intel pushing the TCG specs forward. Secondly it's not correct that TC makes your computer obey Microsoft (or any other company) instead of you. Here is what TC actually does ..... wait for it ....
TC lets you make an unforgeable proof about the state of your computer, and then send it to somebody elses computer.
Hmm, doesn't sound so bad now does it? It basically stops you from lying to a third party. Do you routinely lie to those you do business with? If so you might not like TC. Do the people you do business with sometimes lie to you? Do you have to deal with spam and other forms of automated abuse? TC might be just the thing you need.
TC hardware won't send such a proof without you running a program which does so. The TC hardware is fundamentally incapable of making your computer do anything at all, in fact. It simply adds additional features to the standard PC feature set, which you are free to use or not use as you see fit.
Now, that doesn't mean somebody else will do business with you if you refuse to present a proof. Kinda like how some bars refuse to let you in if you can't prove your age, some businesses might refuse to let you in unless you can prove you are running the program they actually sent you. This does not extend to the OS or indeed anything running on the OS. The SINIT instruction, in fact, is designed to make the running OS irrelevant by a clever use of VM technology. Linux, Windows, MenuetOS ... whatever. The other party won't know or care what you use. This might sound impossible but it is not, read the Intel docs and you will see how it works. Indeed the goal is to minimize the amount of code "proved" in this way because the TC designers know the more code you have, the less likely it is to be secure.
TC does not advantage big companies over the individual. The feature set, specifications and implementations contain nothing that would do that. It could just as easily be a Disney server proving to YOU what it's running as the other way around.
TC as implemented today can't be used for DRM. For that you'd need "trusted graphics" and "trusted audio", both things for which there are no specs and no implementations. What it does allow (when it works) is the running of a program in a separate VM sealed from interference from the main OS. That has many uses in many fields, for instance, wouldn't it be nice for your bank to know that the transaction was submitted by a human using a keyboard rather than a virus that hijacked your browser?
I'm sick of the FSF spreading blatant FUD about this versatile and entirely open technology. Don't believe it.
What was wrong with the SharedPreferences object? Or just using Java serialization?
Nope. A bad bootloader replacement would be an instant 100% bricking. Besides, the RRoD has a specific meaning - something to do with the gfx controller I believe. You just got unlucky - my xbox360 died a couple of weeks ago after intermittently failing to start up. If you got one of the first ones available it means you were like me - you got one of the ultra-high-failure-rate models. DRM isn't to blame here, bad manufacturing/design is.
Wiis is popular with users not game developers. Third party titles sell atrociously on the Wii. And forget about the indie market. If you want to make indie games and sell them for profit your best bet is either PC or XBox Live Arcade/Indie section. Lots of people there who are only a button press away from buying your game.
This discussion is about the Pirate Party who have an explicit aim of significantly weakening copyright law, actually making it nearly useless for things that can be file shared, so saying "the question is how long copyright terms should be for" is attempting to redefine the debate after it started. If it were about modifying the length of copyright terms then I'd agree with you - the current terms are too long. Reasonable people can disagree on where that line is drawn but there's wide consensus that longer than a human lifetime is far too long.
Your faith is inspiring :) Unfortunately I cannot match it.
Indeed - and there isn't any need for a political party. If Disney doesn't want to release Mickey Mouse under a better license then maybe the solution is to ignore Mickey Mouse rather than make piracy legal? Disney is a US company anyway so changes in British law wouldn't have much impact on them (in fact it'd probably violate WIPO treaties). Maybe Andrew should start with the BBC. They are TV license funded anyway, so, losing the revenue from exclusive distribution agreements with foreign TV firms wouldn't be a killer financial blow. If he can convince the BBC to release its programs under a "non commercial copying OK" license then he'd have a much stronger position to argue that it should be mandatory for everyone.
If you don't need or want content why does this topic even concern you? Save the bandwidth for those of us who do care.
If it's pure idiocy why did the parties own founder quit after claiming the party was infiltrated by the far right? Why did the UKIP throw out 11 (!) BNP "infiltrators" in 2004? Why do they require all new recruits to state they aren't racist?
If you weren't a hobbyist musician but rather, say, a musician who worked on video game music - perhaps you'd find yourself one of those lobbyists yourself? I mean, the word lobbyist conjures images of slick-haired besuited lawyers, but what it actually means is "person who is concerned enough to meet regularly with politicians about certain policies, or is paid by somebody who is". If you as a musician called up your MP and arranged a meeting with them, you too would be a lobbyist!
We know what post copyright business models look like already - they look almost the same as pre copyright business models. See the "dark ages" for reference. Great for rich heirs and heiresses who could afford to commission works of art. Sucked for everyone else.
There is one post copyright business model that didn't exist back then - strong DRM. The video games industry is rapidly moving to a "consoles first, PC later if at all" model and several studios have said it's because of piracy.
The PS3 has "perfect" DRM, you know, that thing derided as impossible for years here on Slashdot? Well it turns out that when you have a hardware company who stands to lose billions if software doesn't sell well, they get it right. PS3 has been out for nearly 3 years now and has never been cracked. The XBox 360 has a very low level of disc-based piracy and again apparently unbreakable DRM for internet-activated or distributed software. The trend is clearly heading towards internet distribution so the future seems clear - if there is no copyright enforcement then industries which can do so will simply protect themselves.
I believe the pirate parties response to this is "outlaw DRM too". For a party that claims to stand for personal freedom and a small state they're quite willing to impose sweeping restrictions on artists, programmers, writers, actors, movie producers etc!
Well, I'm sorry, but I disagree. I'm a long time Slashdotter myself (I was given the ad-free version by the TacoTeam for my contributions), but by aping the policies of the Swedish pirate party you are coming across as anything but balanced and rational.
The main problem I have with their (now your) policies is that they rely on a particularly populist form of intellectual dishonesty. Take copyright. Copyright law is in fact a very strong stake in the ground for personal freedom and "small state" economics. Copyright law doesn't tell you what you should do with the fruits of your intellectual labor. It essentially says, you - the individual or business behind a creative work - only you can decide how you want your work to be used. Want to charge $50 a pop? That's OK. Government will defend your freedom to do that. Want to charge nothing? That's also OK - government will stand beside you too. Want to impose arbitrary conditions like releasing derivative works under the same license - guess what, government will be there for you as well.
The Pirate Parties "reform" of copyright at first may look like a win for personal freedom in much the same way weakening or abolishing any law might, but it isn't. Seeing as you are a fan of extremes, consider it being like repealing laws on murder. Hell, if somebody insults my mum and I want to challenge him to a duel at dawn who is government to tell me I can't do that? MOAR FREEDOM PLZ. Except that's obviously absurd because everyone intuitively understands that punishing murderers harshly by taking away their freedom (potentially forever) actually increases the freedom of everyone else, because it means I can go on TV and say something unpopular and chances I'll get killed for it are low.
If you really believe the way copyright violators are punished is stupid, you should be campaigning for votes amongst copyright holders. They're the ones who decide how their work should be licensed. They could, if they wanted, distribute their work under a license that said file sharing is OK. They could do it tomorrow. Winning your campaign this way would have a moral legitimacy far beyond winning an election based on short term populist policies because instead of taking away a versatile tool you would have convinced the owners to wield it differently.
However, I don't expect you to do that. Whilst you try and distance yourself from the Pirate Party name in the interview, in fact you chose to use it. Winning votes by promising voters free stuff is a tactic as old as politics itself, I'm sure you'll be met with great success.
Is the hardware itself bug free?!
There is already strong encryption deployed en-masse to the consumer market, it's called Skype. And law enforcement use spyware to break it.