nerdyI think the getting paid part is winning.
Read my friend Bruce's cool essay about a Japanese professor who fooled fingerprint security devices with a little ingenuity and $10 worth of groceries and other supplies. He made gummi fingers from molds garnered from live fingers as well as residual fingerprints. I can see this kind of thing showing up in some cyberpunky movie with a grizzled old guy defeating some new technology with stuff cooked up in the kitchen. Shades of "Good Eats."
Reminds me again of a novel I read called "Godfather Bank," I think. The premise was that in this future society everyone was genetically tied to a world central bank. Positive and negative balances were measures of social rank; people wore devices that displayed them. Transactions were handled by machines that took a small tissue sample (like those blood checkers in Gattaca) and then charged you for goods or services based on the DNA.
Our hero in the novel was the only individual with a 0 balance. He would get food by slipping a piece of pork over the device that took the tissue sample. The theory was that the DNA was close enough to human to pass the simple tests of the local scanner and when passed for processing to bigger, better machines elsewhere, it was rejected as an anomalous reading. (Some hand-waving there, to be sure.)
