I've talked in the past about reasons for concern about our ability to beat DRM systems. But I didn't make my case as well as I could have. So go read this — a very, very good post explaining why rosy optimism about amateur hackers' future success against Big Content is a less than sure thing.

Securing content on x86 is hopeless. But as processors inevitably get cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous, x86 will handle less and less of our computing. The systems that replace it will largely be either a) not general purpose, and therefore less documented/harder to access or b) properly secured.