We rely on mainstream computer engineering every day, but it's insanely complex, poorly understood, unreliable, and, as CCC reminds us every year, chronically insecure. This talk will explain some ways that we can do better: taming parts of this this chaos with precise understanding - illustrated with disturbing facts and clean models for current architectures and the C language, from the REMS project, and principled but pragmatic new alternatives, that build in more hardware and software security protection,as developed in the CHERI project.