maximize best case, worst case, or average case? (TCPA)

[lynn.wheeler at firstdata.com]

I remember looking at possibility at adding tamper resisistent hardware
chip to PCs back in 83 or 84 time frame (aka the TCPA idea for PCs is going
on at least 20 years old now).  It was the first time I ran into embedding
chip in a metal case that would create electrical discharge frying the chip
if the container was breached.

Remember when applications came with their own copy-protection floppy
disks? .... it was possible to build up a library of such disks ....
requiring all sorts of remove, search, insert ... when switching from one
application to another. They eventually disappeared ... but imagine if they
had survived into the multitasking era .... when it would have been
necessary to have multiple different copy protection floppy disks crammed
into the same drive at the same time. The chip was suppose to provide an
analog to the CPU serial number used for licensing software on mainframes
.... dating at least from the original IBM 370s (store cpuid hardware
instruction).

Some of the higher-end applications still do that with some form of dongle
(originally in the serial port) that comes with the application .... it
doesn't quite have the downside of trying to cram multiple floppies into
the same drive concurrently; the serial port dongles allow for them to be
inline cascaded ... and in theory still be able to use the serial port for
other use at the same time.

i believe that there is some statistic some place about the UK and the US
are really great .... that in those two countries the copyright piracy is
estimated to only be 50 percent.



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