Numbers

Once upon a time I worked for a company in Sweden where we struggled to create unique id:s used for logging. After thinking that several companies must have the same problem I came up with a brilliant business idea; to sell unique numbers! Basically companies would pay a fee to be allowed to call nextNumber() on our server, where nextNumber() would return a number guaranteed not to be returned to any other company. The software would be trivial and the earnings astronomical - of course nothing happened. I remembered this when I stumbled across www.random.org - a site that offers true random numbers through HTTP, SOAP, and CORBA.