While at a gut level, I think I agree with you, your logic is flawed.

Morality has something to do with it when YOU have morality. Saying "I'm throwing my moral code out the window because others don't abide by it" doesn't fly.

If you're really saying "I see that those who don't have a moral code have the life I want, so I'm going to abandon my moral code too and become like them" then your argument is perfectly correct.

Some people value their morals more than their privilege to entertainment though, and for them, your argument doesn't work. Instead of shelling out $100/month to be entertained by TV shows, they choose to shell out $30/month to gain access to Project Gutenberg and Youtube (and other free offeringx) and add to this entertainment by going for walks, hanging out with friends, spending even MORE money to make and eat tasty food, etc.

Oh, and you're wrong about HBO: they care about you. You're an untapped revenue stream. You care about them too: they're a tapped luxury entertainment stream.

Actually, this could probably be done without recording anything... just have a needle trigger hooked up to an audio compressor tube. If the needle jiggles too much, it trips the recording device.

Of course, in this case it would be impossible to tell if it was really a gunshot that set it off, as you'd never record the gunshot (or other loud noise) itself.

Indeed... make a thicker lexan composite, and someone will just make a custom bullet designed to go through it, or hit it with regular ammunition often enough to cause it to crumble. To me, the biggest part of real security is not the part that directly stops the attacks, but the part that returns things to normal operation after the attack. Targeted obscurity is what you put on the other side -- if you have fewer people who know where the attack surface is, you will have fewer hits in the first place.

Remember: obscurity is no substitute for security, but it IS the first line of defence. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to mislead you.

The answer to the first one anyway is "yes" -- assuming that it's not your country who's working on it. While all the security companies have a US presence, most are global in scope, and a sizeable portion of their customers are not in the US.

The whole idea is that it only has to be done once, and only one assembler algorithm has to be produced. You wouldn't store a literal representation of the molecule and resulting substances, only a much lighter-weight symbolic representation, as is done with bmpmapping currently on advanced videogames.

And as I implied in my original post, you'd definitely not be able to get much more advanced than a single celled object (which, as you point out, is plenty advanced already). Creating an entire block of wood, atom by atom or molecule by molecule would run into significant limits, not the least of which would be that you'd need at least one atom on the storage medium to represent every atom or molecule in the object being built.

That would be kind of neat actually... have a simplified physics model based solely on gravitational attraction of proton, electron and neutron blocks, each with their relative mass. Based on that, you could build up algorithms for elements, cellular structures, etc. and keep most of the popular ones available. Then you'll get the really focused people building RNA etc. and attampting to build real-world models to see how the physics need to be tweaked to replicate real-world interactions.

Then we can get a little microbial Mario jumping on real mushroom fibers!

Yes... but then all they need is another microbe where they can't write that bit. String them together to get your storage. Replicate ad nauseam....

Just make sure to protect it; you wouldn't want to get a virus....

Likely video drivers and other "non-free" stuff.

However, it can be argued that almost ALL Linux software is 3rd party.... as well as being first party. That's the whole point.

Actually... I should admit: I have facebook's image and CDN servers blocked in my browser, so they're not tracking me most of the time :)