Well, you know that DRM will not become universal, right? The more greed attempts to squeeze, the more there will be opportunities for other systems to grow.
That is a nice concept but thus far, hasn't panned out. Currently if you want full functionality out of a PC, and I mean truely full, not just limited choices per genre, you're talking about one running Windows. Already then we see there isn't opportunity for other systems, it's main competition is free software!
What will windows do? Inevitably, MS is going towards web services, locking down licenses, and supporting future technologies that have industries conspiring against consumers. IF you want to run these things on a programmable system, that system will have hardware or quite deeply software-embedded limitations. It's not a matter of choosing something else when nothing else exists except set-top boxes with even less potential (or hackers targeting it to remove limitations?).
Vista in it's fullest version will be more expensive than low-end desktops (hardware). Would this be enough to move people in droves to Linux? Time will tell but I think not. If there is so much greed over digital transmission, will you find an alternative to a HDMI chip validation? Hack something with microcontollers? It won't be greed fueling that, it will be a hobby as it can't be profitable as these devices will be illegally circumventing copy control measures, and that in even more countries soon because of the US' heavy hand at swaying those who have more liberal laws.
It will be a game for awhile of course, those protecting content vs. the hackers, but after a certain point the hackers will not be able to do anything, because the skill level, even cost of equipment alone to hack will be prohibitive. This point may be closer than we realize- it's quite amazing how fast computers are evolving, and quite a bit of money and time is being thrown at controling use- If anything, computer hardware and software engineers are control freaks! The only question is when one concedes they lost control over their system, and how much the market will be able to control costs- they can lock it down but they can't force content purchases, it'll have to be priced based on what the market bears.
If your hardware or software doesn't support their model, you simply won't be able to use the software or multimedia, because such technologies will be licensed and to get (a license) it will have to adhere to the criteria.
A few dozen TB... If you think in terms of right now, that's a decent estimate. But I expect that as storage gets faster and continues along the path of reduction in cost per unit size, information density (example: image resolution) will grow to increase storage bloat.
Agreed, but storage capacity is growing faster than *necessary* resolution. If I shot 1GB worth of pictures daily, it still takes over 2 years to fill up today's HDDs, and at the end of that 2 years, they'll be larger still.
Monitor and printer resolution isn't growing so fast either so unless these technologies accelerate, there is not going to be as much of a useful purpose to ever escalating resolution, as the human eye can't even distinguish as high as we have currently and going much higher we don't have image stabilization technology sufficient to actually discriminate individual pixels better than we'd have just extrapolating them.