Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> wrote: Moral issues aside, one of the problems plaguing Bell's scheme is that it's not limited to eliminating "government thugs who violate your rights," as he likes to describe it. If it existed, anyone with some spare change could wipe out a nosy neighbor or even an irritating grocery store clerk. Not likely, but for another reason. Assuming you had the money to take out your neighbor, it's going to be fairly obvious who did it. (How many neighbors do you have? Pretty short list of suspects.) Also, killing some nobody in a grocery store is more prone to error, and less widely witnessed, and therefore harder to collect payment on, thus less profitable. The possibility of Microsoft killing their competition's engineers is somewhat more realistic, although lately they've been hiring a lot of them instead, so maybe they don't want to kill them. :)