Yep, at the end of the day what prevents tyranny from taking over everywhere is the fact that the ruling class has to live in the same world and use the same ec

Yep, at the end of the day what prevents tyranny from taking over everywhere is the fact that the ruling class has to live in the same world and use the same economy as everyone else. You see this dynamic up and down the government. Big business needs to be able to access machines that don't have all this locked-down crap. I'm not super-worried about the copyright lobby's fervent wish to make it impossible to use a general purpose machine. They're going to eventually run right up against corporate America's full-throated embrace of open source. Sure, ordinary people already are heavily spied on and restricted. But the machines doing the spying and restricting have to run their own OSes as well. The inverse of the 'who watches the watchers' problem.