>> The intended usage:

>> 	(2) Might be utterly useless (e.g. for software licensing,

The original message called for it to be settable, which right there
makes it just as useless for software licensing.

Heck, even supposedly-non-settable IDs are just as useless.  "Long long
ago and far far away", I once had to deal with an emergency in which a
Sun machine had died, a vendor was being slow to transfer a license to
the replacement machine's ID, and someone was under the gun for a "we
need it yesterday" deadline.  It proved to be a simple matter to add a
sethostid() syscall to the kernel - and this was SunOS, a vendor
binary-only kernel.  (No, I'm not giving out the code.  I don't think I
even have a copy any longer.  Knowing what I know now, I would have
just bashed the ID bytes in the "EEPROM".)

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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