No they didn't. Although they benefited from the way their own diseases attacked the locals, the colonists didn't even have enough biology knowledge to recognized disease vectors, not to mention exploit them.
PS. "europeans" should be capitalized. Furthermore, "Native Americans" is incorrect- "American Aborigine" is more accurate.
If you have difficulty understanding why steganography can be important, remember to visualize a different class of enemy than in cryptography: instead of a spy tapping your phone line, it's the secret police of your own government, with full powers of search, arrest, and tortorous interrogation.
Random data is essentially the output of programs like zip. If I encrypt info
That absolutely won't work for steganography. The data stream from a zip is mathmatically quite random, but it's also easy to tell that something's been hidden there: simply try to decrypt it, and it reports as totally corrupted. Then the police start asking "Why do you have so many invalid zip files? What are they REALLY?"
The only way steganography can work is if it changes the original file so slightly that it still looks normal when viewed.
I cannot imagine how even knowing there's information there could lead to deciphering it.
Because they know there's information there, 6 to 9 strong guys with machine guns break into your house in the middle of the night. They chain you in their basement for a punching back for 2-3 weeks, and eventually you tell them the encryption code to decipher it.
what I ment was that I've never had to worry about when the video device driver, or device itself, refreshed a pixel on the screen.
True, and since you're too young to have experienced that history, we're explaining it to you.
(0,0) is in the upper-left technically because that's where most languages start writing from, and computer graphics systems are descended from line printer/tty output.
Because English is written from the upper-left, printers started from the upper left of a page, and then text output displays started from the upper-left too. Then when the buffer of characters was replaced with a buffer of pixels, they started from the same position- upper left. Then when people wrote programs addressing that video, it was simpler (and faster executing) to use the same coordinate system as the hardware- in the olden days, a useless subtraction opcode before writing each pixel was a measurable waste of time.
Whether positive Y is up or down is just a matter of conventions. There was no natural breaking point where it was appropriate to say "Yeah, today we'll flip to the reverse meaning of everything we've been using before"; it'd be a little like asking electricians today to swap the meaning of + and - terminals.
and they did not have anywhere near the naval forces necessary to maintain a blackade at such distance from the homeland.
As I obviously stipulated, this was all conditional on their naval forces not already having been destroyed, which could've been the result of many plausible scenarios.
It makes no difference that they would willingly have starved the civilians. They did not have the shipping to invade unless they had dropped every other military campaign,
No. If, as you claim, Hawaii couldn't survive without outside food sources, then defeating it would've required only 1 ship, assuming the rest of the Pacific war went well.
not sure why a CRT refreshing from top to bottom means much with regard to the API cord system but FWIW,
Simple. The first pixel to be refreshed is in the upper-left, so that's naturally pixel 0, so that's where (0,0) is. If you write graphics code at a low-level, it's more concise to have 0,0 in the upper left. Otherwise, you're continually subtracting or adding buffer_height to every y component.
IANBS (I Am Not Bruce Schneier), but Strong Encryption beats steg plus encryption, based on my (limited, but relevant) practical experience.
They shouldn't be directly compared, because steganography and encryption reach towards different goals. One conceals the fact that you're hiding information, the other protects information from someone who already knows to look for it.
In limited circumstances, each can perform the other's effect: steganography makes encryption irrelevant if they can't find the material, and encryption makes steganograph irrelevant if and only if a substantial portion of non-suspected people are also using encryption for daily correspondence.
There are governments today, however, that will rape you with a machinegun if they see you passing coded messages around, so steganography has immediate utility.
As in, Caesar-cipher era - i.e. the method is the key.
No. Caesar-cipher looks like "jebsb kysal". Get caught with that, and even if they can't read it, you're obviously trying to hide something. Primitive steganography is like "Buy 7 bananas and 3 oranges on next Monday", which has plausible deniability as a grocery list, even though it's logging the movement of enemy naval units out of port.
Japan would have had to take up the slack in feeding the locals,
Nope. Compare against the Japanese behavior when they invaded China and the Phillipines- survival of the local residents was not one of their priorities.
In fact, the easiest way for them to invade Hawaii would've been to navally interdict food shipments for a few months, and then stroll ashore when everyone's collapsed from hunger. (Had they won at Midway and Coral Sea, which could've easily happened if they had just one smart, influential mathmatician, then that assault would've been open)
He, and 4 close friends, would've made it 900 kilometers north before running out of fuel after fleeing the imperial devastation of his army. Instead of proudly displaying his severed head, the Romans would just swap stories about his spectacular disappearance.
( This is the logic for using the bomb in the pacific. )
Correction: that's the publicly claimed logic.
The real logic was that if Japan didn't surrender to the USA immediately, it would hold out until the USSR had conquered part of it's territory, and the USA didn't want to be forced to share, like they were with East Germany.
You mean Germany had no WMDs? I say we dig up Truman and put him on trial for WAR CRIMES! Truman lied, people died!
In fact, it was Albert Einstein who warned that Germany must be defeated before it could get the atomic bomb. And if you want to punish him, there's no need for sweaty digging, because the brain is in a jar on a shelf.
Please tell me that was a joke. His sexual indiscretions had no effect on his actual effectiveness as a leader.
No, his wandering penis really did hurt his attentiveness to fighting terrorism.
On the evening of the impeachment hearing, Clinton ordered an airstrike to kill Osama Bin Laden. It missed (and killed 10 or so innocent people), but at least he was trying. The Republican-controlled Congress saw this as an attempt to distract the public from their sexual inquisition.
One could put the blame either way- "If the Republicans hadn't been so obessed with using Clinton's sexuality to bring him down, they wouldn't have taken national focus away from antiterrorism". But the fact is, a more restrained man would've been at least marginally more aggressive in defeating Bin Laden.
(By comparison, G.W. Bush wasn't interested in fighting Al Quaeda at all, and actively reversed sanctions Clinton had imposed on the Taliban)
Hitler could not have invaded Britain. He did not have the shipping to land an invasion force or sustain an occupying force, or the air power and sea power to protect the invasion.
True, there was no way Nazi Germany could've pushed through an invasion of Britain in the style of Operation Sealion.
However, they might've been able to win the Battle of Britian and achieve air superiority over England (particularly if their bombing runs had focused on actual airfields and industry, instead of civilian terror-targets). That would've been all they needed to prevent an American landing in Europe in something like D-Day.
D-Day was difficult enough when they only had to cross the English Channel. If the Luftwaffe was free to bomb English ports at will, any amphibious assault would be destroyed by aircraft before getting close to the French coast. (Yes, the Americans could counterattack with carrier-launched planes, but that would divert carriers from the Pacific, leaving the Japanese victorious at Midway and free to move on Australia and Hawaii, etc...)
His fighters had barely enough fuel to sustain 15 minutes of combat over the nearest parts of Britain,
True, but if the Nazis had been smarter, that wouldn't have mattered. Better choice of bombing targets could've destroyed the RAF on the ground (or prevented them from taking off), and then 2 years later the Luftwaffe would gain the Me-262, which could fly anywhere and defeat any plane of the era.
I'm not saying that correcting the blatant stragetic mistakes would've been enough to turn the tide- but it would've given the Luftwaffe a fighting chance of victory, instead of wasting their best pilots in a fool's errand.
Yes, if you mean that they're (most of the time) played from the perspective of the game character.
Nope. Third person shooters are (by definition!) from some perspective other than the main character. If they were from her perspective, they'd be called first person.
No, it doesn't, and performance benchmarks have been done to prove this.
Performance benchmarks have also shown the reverse. PC OS installs are too diverse for you to make any simplistic pronouncements about which is faster. For example, on the AMD64 chip, the 64 bit Linux OS can run all programs quicker than a 32-bit Windows XP could (even if the program itself was only compiled for 32)
AC: We develop games currently for PS2, XBox, Windows and previously NGC.
Hi, I'm also a game developer, and your experience is less relevant than mine. The differences between desktop PCs and XBox/PS2 consoles are tremendously bigger than between any two general purpose desktop PC OSes.
As you've already ignored my saying, the game-oriented libraries used on Mac OSX and Linux ports are highly similar. They are the same in terms of graphics, networking, memory management, and disc access (aside from like SecureRom). The biggest differences come in input and sound, which aren't too hard to overcome if you're already cross-platform between Mac and Win.
Nope: It's a different compiler for Linux (why would anyone interested in performance use gcc on windows?)
Wrong. The compiler doesn't matter when talking about optimizations targeted towards a specific CPU's instruction set, which are often still done with assembly anyhow.
This is all because there isn't (perhaps wasn't) good libraries for writing games under Linux. They're coming - Open GL is getting to be useful without investing losts of time in writing specific renderers for different hardware
That stupid claim is directly contradicted by the fact that some high-performance Windows games are written with OpenGL.
Also for the PC there is no such thing as The same hardware.
Wrong. I have personally seen that there are more than 1 identical Nvidia GeForceFX 6800 card existing in the world. That's the same hardware.
I truly wish it were as easy as you like to just up ship and change operating system/platform because if it were don't you think that us game developers would be doing it.
Quite true: it is that easy, and that's why game developers do it. There are official Linux ports of recent games like Doom3, Neverwinter Nights, America's Army, Unreal, Sims, and a few others. They didn't write those ports to make money- they did it because the effort involved was quite low.
What part of "not going to sell any additional units" do you not get?
That's an idiotic lie. There would certainly be at least 1 additional unit sold. Or do you believe that companies like Transgaming survive on $0 of annual revenue?
You found "one" sale good enough to inspire a Mac port, so why isn't it also good enough for Linux?
You forgot things like compatibility with a specific X server version, specific library linking (IE, the "correct version" and maybe even things such as SDL version and specific window/desktop manager version.
So they link everything statically, adding about 30 megabytes to the profile of an install that's already 800+, and call it a day.
Sure, they could build for a target distro, but then they'd leave a good 80% of the Linux community out of their potential clientele
Your supposition is demonstrably false today. Download America's Army or purchase Doom3, and you'll see that it installs fine on almost any Linux distro that people run on modern hardware.
Developer incurs the cost of making a Mac version, Mac guy buys it. that's one sale
It's true that the revenue boost from a Mac version is far greater than what a Linux version would provide today. However, if a company has already decided on releasing a Mac port, then the additional effort required for a Linux port is far less.
Once the codebase is platform independent, adding 3rd or 4th platforms is far simpler than adding the 2nd.
Consider: to port a game to Mac, you must reprogram the internals to function in a Unix-based OS, and change the graphics engine to output OpenGL instead of DirectX. And of course, those two things are also the greatest obstacles to a Linux release.
Further reasons why porting to Linux can be relatively cheap: 1) Unlike the Mac port, the Linux version will usually run on the same hardware as the original, meaning there's no CPU-specific optimizations to change. 2) If the game is online multiplayer, it probably already had a partial Linux port for the dedicated server, so some of the work has been started.
but nothing outside of the TPM has ever kwown my TPM's private key. The TPM seecretly generated it at manufacture tiime.
The RIAA/MPAA will use comments like that as proof that PC makers must keep a list of all their customers' TPM keys in escrow, for the inevitable day when they're needed to dismantle terrorist piracy rings like yours.
Because there's no "this" there. Your idea of being able to trust that the RIAA is running the program you want them to is meaningless, because the RIAA will never agree to run your programs.
It's the money and power again... can you really think of any scenario where the admin of an RIAA computer (by which I really mean a computer owned by a corporate music store) would willingly decide to execute any program that didn't come from the OS vendor, or at least another member of the ETC? The only programs they'll run are those from someone they control, either financially, contractually, or legally.
(ETC = Entertainment/Technology Complex, and includes both RIAA/MPAA, and the vendors of hardware/software used to display their products)
For the specific example that might really happen, the RIAA could commission a P2p app to distribute songs purchased from them. Because they're assured that only that specific app is being run, they are less worried about infringement- and as a bonus, the customers don't just pay for the file, but take care of the majority of bandwidth to distribute it too. (The program, for example, might not permit you to play the file if you don't spend an hour providing it to others customers)
Your mutual trust idea makes some sense if a few friends want to play a FPS game without allowing anyone to run wireframe wallhacks, but doesn't make sense in terms of corporationindividual relationships.
but nothing outside of the TPM has ever kwown my TPM's private key. The TPM seecretly generated it at manufacture tiime.
See, you're ignoring that the RIAA has the money and legal power to induce the hardware vendor to record those numbers before shipment, so they can retroactively revote your applications' security under a court order.
After the hardware implementation is set in stone.
If I waited for the software implementation to be set in stone, it'd be totally perfect too.
Still, it's true that hardware can help protect against that risk- but not TCPA-style hardware! A special smartcard reader which allows a PC to sign files without that CPU reading the actual private key could be good. (If the machine is owned, then the attacker will be able to use your key as long as he stays connected, but can't take it with him for later use. So he'll have to start the money transfers immediately, rather than taking his time about it)
Too bad that's not really what TCPA is doing (portions of TCPA could be resuable for that, but they're not taking a direct route to get there). A USB-interface personal cryptocard coprocessor could be built best as a separate product, without need for support inside the CPU case (except for at the software application level). That'd be handily portable too... which is why RSA or a competitor will surely market it long before TCPA gets off the ground.
It's a flagarante violation of the Unix-style development rule: Design small parts to work together, doing one thing and doing it well. TCPA does many things, which is a public-relations trick: because there are occasional good bits that someone can point out, the audience can be deluded into thinking the whole thing is good, or that the rest of it is a prerequisite for those aspects.
Slashdot Mirror
The europeans committed biological warfare.
No they didn't. Although they benefited from the way their own diseases attacked the locals, the colonists didn't even have enough biology knowledge to recognized disease vectors, not to mention exploit them.
PS. "europeans" should be capitalized. Furthermore, "Native Americans" is incorrect- "American Aborigine" is more accurate.
If you have difficulty understanding why steganography can be important, remember to visualize a different class of enemy than in cryptography: instead of a spy tapping your phone line, it's the secret police of your own government, with full powers of search, arrest, and tortorous interrogation.
Random data is essentially the output of programs like zip. If I encrypt info
That absolutely won't work for steganography. The data stream from a zip is mathmatically quite random, but it's also easy to tell that something's been hidden there: simply try to decrypt it, and it reports as totally corrupted. Then the police start asking "Why do you have so many invalid zip files? What are they REALLY?"
The only way steganography can work is if it changes the original file so slightly that it still looks normal when viewed.
I cannot imagine how even knowing there's information there could lead to deciphering it.
Because they know there's information there, 6 to 9 strong guys with machine guns break into your house in the middle of the night. They chain you in their basement for a punching back for 2-3 weeks, and eventually you tell them the encryption code to decipher it.
what I ment was that I've never had to worry about when the video device driver, or device itself, refreshed a pixel on the screen.
True, and since you're too young to have experienced that history, we're explaining it to you.
(0,0) is in the upper-left technically because that's where most languages start writing from, and computer graphics systems are descended from line printer/tty output.
Because English is written from the upper-left, printers started from the upper left of a page, and then text output displays started from the upper-left too. Then when the buffer of characters was replaced with a buffer of pixels, they started from the same position- upper left. Then when people wrote programs addressing that video, it was simpler (and faster executing) to use the same coordinate system as the hardware- in the olden days, a useless subtraction opcode before writing each pixel was a measurable waste of time.
Whether positive Y is up or down is just a matter of conventions. There was no natural breaking point where it was appropriate to say "Yeah, today we'll flip to the reverse meaning of everything we've been using before"; it'd be a little like asking electricians today to swap the meaning of + and - terminals.
and they did not have anywhere near the naval forces necessary to maintain a blackade at such distance from the homeland.
As I obviously stipulated, this was all conditional on their naval forces not already having been destroyed, which could've been the result of many plausible scenarios.
It makes no difference that they would willingly have starved the civilians. They did not have the shipping to invade unless they had dropped every other military campaign,
No. If, as you claim, Hawaii couldn't survive without outside food sources, then defeating it would've required only 1 ship, assuming the rest of the Pacific war went well.
not sure why a CRT refreshing from top to bottom means much with regard to the API cord system but FWIW,
Simple. The first pixel to be refreshed is in the upper-left, so that's naturally pixel 0, so that's where (0,0) is. If you write graphics code at a low-level, it's more concise to have 0,0 in the upper left. Otherwise, you're continually subtracting or adding buffer_height to every y component.
IANBS (I Am Not Bruce Schneier), but Strong Encryption beats steg plus encryption, based on my (limited, but relevant) practical experience.
They shouldn't be directly compared, because steganography and encryption reach towards different goals. One conceals the fact that you're hiding information, the other protects information from someone who already knows to look for it.
In limited circumstances, each can perform the other's effect: steganography makes encryption irrelevant if they can't find the material, and encryption makes steganograph irrelevant if and only if a substantial portion of non-suspected people are also using encryption for daily correspondence.
There are governments today, however, that will rape you with a machinegun if they see you passing coded messages around, so steganography has immediate utility.
As in, Caesar-cipher era - i.e. the method is the key.
No. Caesar-cipher looks like "jebsb kysal". Get caught with that, and even if they can't read it, you're obviously trying to hide something. Primitive steganography is like "Buy 7 bananas and 3 oranges on next Monday", which has plausible deniability as a grocery list, even though it's logging the movement of enemy naval units out of port.
Japan would have had to take up the slack in feeding the locals,
Nope. Compare against the Japanese behavior when they invaded China and the Phillipines- survival of the local residents was not one of their priorities.
In fact, the easiest way for them to invade Hawaii would've been to navally interdict food shipments for a few months, and then stroll ashore when everyone's collapsed from hunger. (Had they won at Midway and Coral Sea, which could've easily happened if they had just one smart, influential mathmatician, then that assault would've been open)
"What if Sparticus had a piper-cub?"
He, and 4 close friends, would've made it 900 kilometers north before running out of fuel after fleeing the imperial devastation of his army. Instead of proudly displaying his severed head, the Romans would just swap stories about his spectacular disappearance.
( This is the logic for using the bomb in the pacific. )
Correction: that's the publicly claimed logic.
The real logic was that if Japan didn't surrender to the USA immediately, it would hold out until the USSR had conquered part of it's territory, and the USA didn't want to be forced to share, like they were with East Germany.
AC: So technically although Hitler never invaded mainland Britian, he did invade and capture some British teritory.
Well, obviously. He took nearly the whole north coast of africa from britain.
You mean Germany had no WMDs? I say we dig up Truman and put him on trial for WAR CRIMES! Truman lied, people died!
In fact, it was Albert Einstein who warned that Germany must be defeated before it could get the atomic bomb. And if you want to punish him, there's no need for sweaty digging, because the brain is in a jar on a shelf.
Please tell me that was a joke. His sexual indiscretions had no effect on his actual effectiveness as a leader.
No, his wandering penis really did hurt his attentiveness to fighting terrorism.
On the evening of the impeachment hearing, Clinton ordered an airstrike to kill Osama Bin Laden. It missed (and killed 10 or so innocent people), but at least he was trying. The Republican-controlled Congress saw this as an attempt to distract the public from their sexual inquisition.
One could put the blame either way- "If the Republicans hadn't been so obessed with using Clinton's sexuality to bring him down, they wouldn't have taken national focus away from antiterrorism". But the fact is, a more restrained man would've been at least marginally more aggressive in defeating Bin Laden.
(By comparison, G.W. Bush wasn't interested in fighting Al Quaeda at all, and actively reversed sanctions Clinton had imposed on the Taliban)
Hitler could not have invaded Britain. He did not have the shipping to land an invasion force or sustain an occupying force, or the air power and sea power to protect the invasion.
True, there was no way Nazi Germany could've pushed through an invasion of Britain in the style of Operation Sealion.
However, they might've been able to win the Battle of Britian and achieve air superiority over England (particularly if their bombing runs had focused on actual airfields and industry, instead of civilian terror-targets). That would've been all they needed to prevent an American landing in Europe in something like D-Day.
D-Day was difficult enough when they only had to cross the English Channel. If the Luftwaffe was free to bomb English ports at will, any amphibious assault would be destroyed by aircraft before getting close to the French coast. (Yes, the Americans could counterattack with carrier-launched planes, but that would divert carriers from the Pacific, leaving the Japanese victorious at Midway and free to move on Australia and Hawaii, etc...)
His fighters had barely enough fuel to sustain 15 minutes of combat over the nearest parts of Britain,
True, but if the Nazis had been smarter, that wouldn't have mattered. Better choice of bombing targets could've destroyed the RAF on the ground (or prevented them from taking off), and then 2 years later the Luftwaffe would gain the Me-262, which could fly anywhere and defeat any plane of the era.
I'm not saying that correcting the blatant stragetic mistakes would've been enough to turn the tide- but it would've given the Luftwaffe a fighting chance of victory, instead of wasting their best pilots in a fool's errand.
Yes, if you mean that they're (most of the time) played from the perspective of the game character.
Nope. Third person shooters are (by definition!) from some perspective other than the main character. If they were from her perspective, they'd be called first person.
I've played all the other FP shooters, and I keep coming back to AA for every one of those reasons above.
Have you really? Because every single positive effect you listed for AA was done 6 years earlier in Counterstrike.
No respawn, no health packs, no powerups, balanced maps, punkbuster,
No, it doesn't, and performance benchmarks have been done to prove this.
Performance benchmarks have also shown the reverse. PC OS installs are too diverse for you to make any simplistic pronouncements about which is faster. For example, on the AMD64 chip, the 64 bit Linux OS can run all programs quicker than a 32-bit Windows XP could (even if the program itself was only compiled for 32)
A Windows user could simply reboot to DOS and play the game, and hence there was little incentive to switch to Windows.
Wrong. Only idiots rebooted to get to DOS. Normal people closed Program Manager.
AC: We develop games currently for PS2, XBox, Windows and previously NGC.
Hi, I'm also a game developer, and your experience is less relevant than mine. The differences between desktop PCs and XBox/PS2 consoles are tremendously bigger than between any two general purpose desktop PC OSes.
As you've already ignored my saying, the game-oriented libraries used on Mac OSX and Linux ports are highly similar. They are the same in terms of graphics, networking, memory management, and disc access (aside from like SecureRom). The biggest differences come in input and sound, which aren't too hard to overcome if you're already cross-platform between Mac and Win.
Nope: It's a different compiler for Linux (why would anyone interested in performance use gcc on windows?)
Wrong. The compiler doesn't matter when talking about optimizations targeted towards a specific CPU's instruction set, which are often still done with assembly anyhow.
This is all because there isn't (perhaps wasn't) good libraries for writing games under Linux. They're coming - Open GL is getting to be useful without investing losts of time in writing specific renderers for different hardware
That stupid claim is directly contradicted by the fact that some high-performance Windows games are written with OpenGL.
Also for the PC there is no such thing as The same hardware.
Wrong. I have personally seen that there are more than 1 identical Nvidia GeForceFX 6800 card existing in the world. That's the same hardware.
I truly wish it were as easy as you like to just up ship and change operating system/platform because if it were don't you think that us game developers would be doing it.
Quite true: it is that easy, and that's why game developers do it. There are official Linux ports of recent games like Doom3, Neverwinter Nights, America's Army, Unreal, Sims, and a few others. They didn't write those ports to make money- they did it because the effort involved was quite low.
What part of "not going to sell any additional units" do you not get?
That's an idiotic lie. There would certainly be at least 1 additional unit sold. Or do you believe that companies like Transgaming survive on $0 of annual revenue?
You found "one" sale good enough to inspire a Mac port, so why isn't it also good enough for Linux?
You forgot things like compatibility with a specific X server version, specific library linking (IE, the "correct version" and maybe even things such as SDL version and specific window/desktop manager version.
So they link everything statically, adding about 30 megabytes to the profile of an install that's already 800+, and call it a day.
Sure, they could build for a target distro, but then they'd leave a good 80% of the Linux community out of their potential clientele
Your supposition is demonstrably false today. Download America's Army or purchase Doom3, and you'll see that it installs fine on almost any Linux distro that people run on modern hardware.
Developer incurs the cost of making a Mac version, Mac guy buys it. that's one sale
It's true that the revenue boost from a Mac version is far greater than what a Linux version would provide today. However, if a company has already decided on releasing a Mac port, then the additional effort required for a Linux port is far less.
Once the codebase is platform independent, adding 3rd or 4th platforms is far simpler than adding the 2nd.
Consider: to port a game to Mac, you must reprogram the internals to function in a Unix-based OS, and change the graphics engine to output OpenGL instead of DirectX. And of course, those two things are also the greatest obstacles to a Linux release.
Further reasons why porting to Linux can be relatively cheap: 1) Unlike the Mac port, the Linux version will usually run on the same hardware as the original, meaning there's no CPU-specific optimizations to change. 2) If the game is online multiplayer, it probably already had a partial Linux port for the dedicated server, so some of the work has been started.
but nothing outside of the TPM has ever kwown my TPM's private key. The TPM seecretly generated it at manufacture tiime.
The RIAA/MPAA will use comments like that as proof that PC makers must keep a list of all their customers' TPM keys in escrow, for the inevitable day when they're needed to dismantle terrorist piracy rings like yours.
You do not understand how this works.
Because there's no "this" there. Your idea of being able to trust that the RIAA is running the program you want them to is meaningless, because the RIAA will never agree to run your programs.
It's the money and power again... can you really think of any scenario where the admin of an RIAA computer (by which I really mean a computer owned by a corporate music store) would willingly decide to execute any program that didn't come from the OS vendor, or at least another member of the ETC? The only programs they'll run are those from someone they control, either financially, contractually, or legally.
(ETC = Entertainment/Technology Complex, and includes both RIAA/MPAA, and the vendors of hardware/software used to display their products)
For the specific example that might really happen, the RIAA could commission a P2p app to distribute songs purchased from them. Because they're assured that only that specific app is being run, they are less worried about infringement- and as a bonus, the customers don't just pay for the file, but take care of the majority of bandwidth to distribute it too. (The program, for example, might not permit you to play the file if you don't spend an hour providing it to others customers)
Your mutual trust idea makes some sense if a few friends want to play a FPS game without allowing anyone to run wireframe wallhacks, but doesn't make sense in terms of corporationindividual relationships.
but nothing outside of the TPM has ever kwown my TPM's private key. The TPM seecretly generated it at manufacture tiime.
See, you're ignoring that the RIAA has the money and legal power to induce the hardware vendor to record those numbers before shipment, so they can retroactively revote your applications' security under a court order.
After the hardware implementation is set in stone.
If I waited for the software implementation to be set in stone, it'd be totally perfect too.
Still, it's true that hardware can help protect against that risk- but not TCPA-style hardware! A special smartcard reader which allows a PC to sign files without that CPU reading the actual private key could be good. (If the machine is owned, then the attacker will be able to use your key as long as he stays connected, but can't take it with him for later use. So he'll have to start the money transfers immediately, rather than taking his time about it)
Too bad that's not really what TCPA is doing (portions of TCPA could be resuable for that, but they're not taking a direct route to get there). A USB-interface personal cryptocard coprocessor could be built best as a separate product, without need for support inside the CPU case (except for at the software application level). That'd be handily portable too... which is why RSA or a competitor will surely market it long before TCPA gets off the ground.
It's a flagarante violation of the Unix-style development rule: Design small parts to work together, doing one thing and doing it well. TCPA does many things, which is a public-relations trick: because there are occasional good bits that someone can point out, the audience can be deluded into thinking the whole thing is good, or that the rest of it is a prerequisite for those aspects.