I've been having a brief discussion with someone on this list about the pentium flaws. for those of you who don't know, there's actually a minor crisis brewing in chip design. Intel probably tests their chips more rigorously than just about anybody. the crisis is that because of the enormous increasing complexity of individual chips, it's becoming statistically impossible to completely test them. that is, as much as people want to curse Intel for their bugs, it's actually the case that they've been ahead of the curve as much as possible in testing. there are new schemes in the works by which Intel etc. are trying to deal with this, including a remarkable scheme in which new microcode can be downloaded to the chip. it also involves encryption in which one needs to know the encryption mechanism for the chip to accept the new instructions. apparently it's done in such a way that no one except those who know the encryption can successfully alter the chip. but this does raise a lot of cypherpunk issues such as about reverse engineering etc.