I wish my real account still had mod points, that was excellent. Damn you for making me figure out the password I used on this yahoo account :)

I felt I had to respond on a couple points. First, minor points. I past my l33t h4x0r stage before the term existed, don't worry about hurting my feelings. No, I haven't finished my BS yet, but I'm already doing research towards a Master's. (Not in CS, btw. BS in Chemical Engineering, pursuing a Master's in Biomedical Engineering.) Purchasing an XBox would be supporting Microsoft whether they are losing money on them or not. For most of the rest of your post, I'm going to presume sarcasm over ignorance.

Second, there's a serious ambiguity in my original post, and you've construed it the wrong way. When I said I would add my intelligence to the efforts to stop them, I was not referring to the efforts to hack the XBox to run alternate software. That, last time I checked, was not an effort to stop Microsoft, particularly not at the strategic level I implied. (Or at least I thought I implied.) If you look around there are several groups trying, at various levels of subtlety, to remove Microsoft from the picture. There is a lot of vapour floating around (For every conspiracy theory there appears to be an equal and opposite conspiracy theory...) but some of them seem to be legitimate.

I was trying not to be so melodramatic as to say 'Mark my words...', but, well, mark my words. :) Trusted Computing won't make any dent in the market. And just maybe, if I manage to make as big a contribution as I'm planning, I may be the main cause of it. But that's too much to hope for, as long as trusted computing doesn't take root that's enough. (Although a serious competitor to Windows would definitely be nice...)

And I shouldn't be posting at 2:30AM, I'm probably not making as much sense as I wanted to. Oh, well, hopefully you got the gist of it.