I won't shop in a Barnes & Noble or a Booksamillion anymore because of the constant upselling at the register. If I say no thanks, and I'm not interested even ONCE, I don't need to hear the 60 second speech they have memorized.

Forgot to mention the reason we suddenly got the databases... They were "voluntarily" created by the companies a few weeks (or was it days) they got called in front of congress wondering about what could be done...

You're dead-on close... I used to work for a couple of resellers and it made me mad we didn't have databases at all when I knew as well as you what the ESN's and IMEI's could be used for in this regard.
We do have stolen device databases now... I believe they're still carrier specific at the moment, but they were to be combined this year or next, I think. Yeah, a marketing manager like that doesn't surprise me at all. Too bad the carriers wouldn't come up with that on their own, but hey, money is money.

Well, *theft* is... in these cases... But maybe you're worried about people that hobble up to you on a wooden peg-leg and say ARRR Matey... I'll be takin' yer phone, and there's a musketball with yer name on it if ye give chase!

Hmm. She said "future" incarnations, too, right?

I can only imagine how badly retailers are going to hate it. They don't want you photographing in their stores as it is with cell phones...
I wonder how long before there's a glass app (if that's what they call it) that just scans your camera input for bar codes and qr codes at all times.. As soon as it sees one, it runs the bar code through amazon to get cheaper prices for you. Yeah it already exists on the iphone.. But I'll bet they will hate it even more. I wouldn't be surprised to see more calls for cell phone jammers or RF-blocking paint.

In short, I think 99.9% of the hate will be all about the cameras. Especially if there's a workaround to turn off any indicator light that it's active.

Stick to the liberal arts paths, kids...
You can't get arrested or expelled for writing a pretty poem or sticking a cross in a jar with pee, after all. Just don't draw a picture of a gun.

We can't imagine being 2-10 times as smart as we are now, but then they go on to speculate why a civilization 100-1000 times as smart would or would not do ANYthing?

I think you mean IR. They leak craploads of infrared if the filters aren't just right.

What you said/did was right on.

You're not going to blind your dog. Not unless you can convince it to stare into the beam for a while, and good luck with that. I've heard of a study being done with "pointers" (and that term is very specifically directed at what you can buy in wal-mart/Staples/etc) on cow eyes and even eyes of people that were about to have them removed due to disease... Pointing into their eyes caused no detectable damage. Sorry, i can't cite the source.
As for the LPF guys being rude, keep in mind they daily deal with questions like yours (and they thought you were arguing with them) but more importantly, they deal daily with or even build their own handheld lasers (NOT POINTERS) that have safety switches and are capable of MULTI-WATT output. We're talking, "see that WALL? bang. just shot my laser at it. now you're blind (or permanently vision-damaged) from the reflection from 2 feet away"

pretty funny but if you pay attention to the HUD or the other stuff on the screen, it all changes when they go to night vision. I think this was just edited from other footage about a guy painting planes/helicopters and some footage from Afghanistan or Iraq.

They're reporting closer to 2000 incidents per year. I saw a youtube video of some guys in a cessna flying over a fireworks display and I kid you not, they got lit up from at least 4 separate green laser pointers at very far apart positions in the crowd.
And to be honest, I don't really want to know that my pilot is blocking out part of the visible light spectrum deliberately when he's making a night landing with me in the plane!

More dangerous, if anything. Fortunately, still relatively rare... You don't see them on sale at Staples or Office Max or the checkout counter of Wal-mart.
You can get them, but the sites that sell them are still somewhat specialized. You can get some cheap ones on amazon, but they're not "true" blue. The diodes come out of blu-ray players and SAY they are legal (5mw) but they're such cheapo chinese crap, I have heard some of them are more like 30mw. Very dangerous to your eyes. Especially since their wavelength (405 nanometers) is just barely within our visible spectrum. Our corneas actually block most of that light so what you "see" is a fraction of the energy coming out of them.
The "real" blue ones are 473nm and cost a minimum of $300 if you're lucky. They use a similar IR source getting adjusted by doped crystals to a visible wavelength as the green ones.