Slashdot Mirror
A Pizza Box for Your Laptop
Dark Twonky writes "Human Beans is selling the perfect gift for the geek who has everything. It's the PowerPizza, a pizza box for transporting your precious laptop in. From the web site: Desirable laptops are desirable to thieves too. Disguise your laptop with a PowerPizza and reduce the risk of getting it nicked."
The thief is hungry.
I carry mine in a non-descript back pack rather than an obvious laptop case that has DELL written all over it.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
until some stoned kid walks by your car and decides he wants some pizza ....
he'll take it home and be pissed off he only got a laptop.
If your pizza box has a Domino's logo, there is no chance that anyone would steal it to get the contents, either.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Looks cool, but ...
I don't see any protective padding at the edges where it's needed.
-- Sally
Never going to happen around here.
Those pizza boxes get double/triple/quadruple checked in case there is the slightest remnant of cheese left before they are reluctantly chucked into the gaping bin.
And besides who's going to throw away a significantly heavier than usual box without checking inside?
...and buy a pizza for that much. Or better yet, buy the pizza and ask for a spare box. Some acoustic foam and velcro, and you're good to go.
Look for people walking around with pizza boxes tucked under their arms... That's what'll end up happening after people get tired of carrying their laptop around like it's a pizza.
If real.
And I can't be asked to do the due diligence to see if it is.
This reminds me of back in the day when I delivered pizza for college money. To prevent hungry college students from stealing the pizza, I disguised them in "Packard Bell" computer boxes; that way no-one ever bothered me!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
A full-swing marketing campaign was launched, so no one would be ignorant of what those "executive lunchboxes" looked like.
The result was predictable: EVERYONE knew when some white-collar worker was bringing his lunch to the office, thus triggering the same social stigma as if he were carrying a blue-collar lunchbox, as blue-collar workers would laugh with a big "THERE GOES ANOTHER EXECUTIVE LUNCHBOX!!!" whenever they saw one.
The phrase eventually became a Madison Avenue monicker to designate a marketing failure...
- Putting your PowerPizza in a carrier bag will not only increase the level of disguise - it'll keep it dry too.
And how awkward would it be to walk around carrying a pizza box? If you tucked it under your arm, people would know it wasn't a pizza. If you walked around with it held in a proper pizza manner that would suck too.Really, how hard is it to pick up a nice black leather or blastic nylon bag that isn't plastered with "TARGUS" logos and just KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE DAMN LAPTOP?
I've owned many laptops for many years and I've never once come close to having it nicked because I tend to pay attention to my surroundings when I'm carrying it with me.
I had a machine stolen about three months ago, and notified the local police. It was running the GMail notifier (that checks mail on bootup), so I emailed Google from my gmail account and told them: "The only machine running the GMail notifier keyed to *account name* was recently stolen. From now on, if someone logs into this gmail account, they're doing it from a stolen machine; could you give the IP address to the local police so they can track it down?
GMail wouldn't do it, even though there's no threat to user privacy here: the police are the only ones getting information, and that information was requested by the owner of the account.
That got me thinking: someone (laptop manufacturers) should run a phone-home service, that keeps a log of the IP addresses that send in requests (with an authentication string specific to the user or computer). That way, using that same string and a password, you could get a list of all the IP addresses your machine has connected to the Internet from... which could be turned over to the police if necessary. If you trust the site explicitly, you could even run an applet that will respond to remote instructions (including flashing the BIOS with a "THIS IS STOLEN PROPERTY" message on bootup) when the site's notified that it is stolen. Once laptops start including onboard GPS, this would make recovery a snap.
This won't do anything to deter sophisticated thieves, who will start formatting drives, but it would be cheap to implement and would provide another layer of protection from theft.
How on earth did this get slashdotted? This is pure Fark fodder and nothing more. Are they letting the dog post?
As a former Pizza delivery person (Hello Mamma's in Edinburgh !), I can guarantee that an unsecured pizza box is far more likely to be stolen on a Friday night after the pubs turn out than an unsecured laptop bag.
The thief wants pizza, is fairly confident that the Pizza company is too busy to report the theft and in all likelihood would never dream of stealing a laptop.
-S
Especially on a college campus?
Proverbs 21:19
Maybe "Infectious Medical Waste" or "Pauly Shore Movie Collection". People like pizza.