Pointing out one thing that no one has mentioned:
How long does it take to design and productize a modern high-performance microprocessor? Call it roughly 250 people for 5 years. Sometimes more, sometimes less. This is a good number to work with though.
At what point must you stop adding big changes to this design such that you can actually get it out into the market in a timely fashion (in other words, at what point do you have to freeze the design in order to meet schedule)? About 3 years before you release it all features need to be included.
If a bill like the SSSCA were to be passed by Congress mandating that all devices, including your multi-million CPU design must have some form of TCPA technology otherwise it couldn't be sold, how far ahead would a CPU design company have to be looking for this not to impact them? The answer here is "it depends on a lot of things". But you don't hedge your company on a bad bet, and it costs little to include these features, but not including them could preclude the product's sale in a couple of years.
This applies both to hardware, and, in Microsoft's case, to software. They have long product cycles, that involve lots of people. You can't add features in on the fly and still hope that the schedule will be ok on software any more than you can on hardware.
Besides, as I mentioned in the other thread, these technologies are essentially opt-in. You don't have to use the software if you don't want the feature, and if enough people don't use it (like Circuit City's Divx), it will just disappear. The real danger is legislation like the DCMA, the SSSCA and other DRM legislation that mandates the use of copy-prevention technology.
If you want to fight this, get on the mailing list for the
EFF, send in your donation (like I did), receive your t-shirt (like I have), wear it frequently (but not too frequently... it might start smelling) and get involved in writing letters (like I do - I have mailed in over a dozen personalized letters to my representatives over the last year). I see a lot of people who write angry soundbites in threads like these, but how many of these people are actually writing letters to their Congressional representatives? If Congress only hears from the RIAA and MPAA lobbyists, then they only hear one side of the story. Write letters to Intel, AMD and Microsoft, if you must, but the really important people to write to are in Congress.
* I am never speaking as a representative of Intel , but in this thread in particular, I am most definitely not speaking for Intel Corp but merely as a concerned geek *
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