Don't worry, we will soon solve the problem with "Cloud Printing" or some such nonsense; because implementing a hardware RIP like they did on a 12MHz M68k with less than 2MB of RAM back in '85 is much more difficult than dragging half the internet into the problem...
What is even more annoying is that, even if implementing a full Postscript RIP in the printer hardware were too expensive, or too slow, the standardization of USB, and the various USB device classes, would have been a perfect time to introduce a reasonably sane USB printer class, for low-end printers, where they could declare their parameters(color/BW, available media sizes, resolution, etc) and receive fully crunched pixel data, in appropriate color depth, resolution, and size, from a software Postscript RIP on the host computer. That would still burden the host CPU; but host CPUs are damn fast, and you'd just need to target a single page description language. Instead, we got a USB Printer Device class that is basically a polite standardization of "how to send whatever horror your cheap shit requires over a USB cable"...
If only HP had invented some sort of 'Printer Command Language' back in the 80s by which an embedded device might communicate with a great many of their printers(and a fair few 3rd party ones) with no platform-specific driver...
On the bright side, absolutely anything would be better than the utter shit that passes for firmware in their present models.
I had the delightful experience just the other day of encountering an HP wireless laser printer(a comparatively low-volume one; but a full 'Hi, I'm a networked device on the network' sort of thing) that would simply hang and drop off the network until power-cycled if you attempted to print to it using the HP 'Universal' print driver...
So, not only was this thing such a piece of shit that it wasn't compatible with HP's own, supposedly, 'universal' driver(PCL motherfucker, do you speak it?); but HP's own UPD could be used as an attack toolkit for a DOS that could only be recovered by a hard power cycle.
Now, if HP actually believes that there is some kind of "People who want a non-ipad with a shittastic inkjet attached, for reasons unknown to normal humans" market, I'd be delighted to sell them a bridge. If their doomed effort to build WebOS printers at least means that their network-attached printers will be running a linux kernel that doesn't fall over and die at the first sign of malformed network input, I'll be a lot happier...
The naive-optimist theory of human nature is that a good, hard, dose of oppression and brutality makes people see the evil of it.
In a few, noble, cases(e.g. Mr. Mandela), it does. In less uplifting characters(e.g. his former wife, it renders them brutal: see "necklacing; support of"). In the case of cynical opportunists(like much of the present ANC leadership) it merely awakens them to an understanding of how terribly convenient power can be...
(While the almost complete failure of this naive-optimist theory has applied time and again to post-colonial African governance, it is by no means exclusive to the continent. My very own New England was founded by religious refugees from Old England who sought a new land where, safe from their persecutors, they could safely persecute the shit out of people they didn't like... It is very lucky indeed that the foundation of the present day US occurred well after the initial round of assholes had died down a touch.)
Unfortunately, most of the available people with the relevant life experience accrued that experience during the long process of driving the Euro zone(among other locations, today's clusterfucks are so very cosmopolitan...) into said black hole...
I'm largely in agreement with your point, I just thought that Gattaca was a pretty terrible demonstration of its own premise...
I've never understood the ethical calculus where people who, say, negligently expose children to conditions that create a risk of morbidity or mortality(unfenced swimming pools, prenatal drugs, neglect, etc, etc.) are looked down on as scum; but people who negligently expose children to (known) risks of heritable disease are generally not condemned, sometimes even looked on as courageous or such.
Were genetic engineering (of sufficient maturity) available, it seems like the incentive to provide it broadly or universally would not only be populist appeal; but pragmatics: illness, weakness, stupidity, etc. are all expensive, and they usually bleed over on to those who live nearby(not to mention the emotional costs). Being able to reliably turn out people with the best body and mind genetic factors can offer would likely be an excellent investment.
Gattaca, unfortunately, gave it all up to tell a little story about a society that dumped (as best the viewer could tell) an enormous level of resources into actively repressing the non-engineered, without any particular effort to judge them on their merits. It ended up basically being a story about Jim Crow laws or caste systems with a spacesuit on...
That was the bit that really disappointed me about GATTACA: Instead of focusing on the genuinely interesting question of 'What happens when we can't even pretend that all men are created equal, and we can control a whole lot of you that used to be a roll of the dice?', it basically just did a slightly-futuristic totalitarian apartheid morality tale, where nobody actually gives a damn about the fact that genetic engineering actually makes you better, because they are too busy shoving around the non-genetically-engineered...
Earth to repressive future: If genetic engineering actually makes people superior, you wouldn't need a massive surveillance state dedicated entirely to keeping the inferiors in line, you'd just need a lightweight meritocracy...
Well, given that selective female infanticide is driven by an underlying set of economic beliefs, with a surface coating of culturally localized misogyny, I suspect that the ability to prenatally identify computer geeks is rapidly drawing to the end of where it would be used to select against them. The cultural layer is taking longer to break down; but the economics of being a geek vs. being an athlete haven't exactly been tilting in the athlete's favor lately...
Incidentally, I always have to wonder how long it will take before countries with an enthusiasm for female infanticide will have it bite them in the ass and force a (likely very ugly) midcourse correction: Demanding dowries isn't going to work so well when there are 150 men per 100 women, and history suggests that young men with no real chance of getting married, or even getting laid, tend to take up unpleasant hobbies like crime and politics with considerable enthusiasm...
The real whining that this test deserves is that it is (like a fair few of the hokier genetic tests) overwhelmingly likely to be as or less predictive than a simple family history.
Because modest amounts of sequencing have gotten so cheap, tests of this flavor don't tend to be outright lies(they do, indeed, usually test precisely what they claim to test); but the sales pitch inevitably glosses over the fact that only a few phenotypic characteristics are actually wholly determined by the single gene they can economically sample for.
There are a few conditions that are sufficiently well understood, and causally simple, that you can actually get a "Yes/No" out of a genetic test; but they are rare, and this is unlikely to be one of them.
I'd certainly be delighted to see genetic defects avoided, and useful genetic traits made more commonly available, but I'm not impressed by the chances of opportunistic lab-coated fortune tellers being the ones who get us there...
I've heard that those crazy neckbeards over in comp-sci solved the problem of how to manage, timestamp, and attribute revisions to a complex file or group of files that can be expected to be revised over time according to new information, requirements, or refinements. And solved it bloody decades ago. Revision control, people, it isn't just for sourcecode.
Combine that with some of the newer and more www/browser friendly automated merge-and-pretty-print stuff, it should be architecturally trivial to provide a stable URL for a story, a full revision history(including times and who made the revisions), along with related stories, the ability to track revision activity of specific comitters, etc, etc.
I enjoy a good bit of handwaving about how to "best" express complex structures within the limitations of obsolete formats as much as the next guy, and quite possibly more; but it just seems so pointless in this case: There isn't any need to cram the entire sausage-factory of news production into a few square inches of ink-on-dead-tree, so lots of nuanced bloviation on how to do that is just a lot of fluff over a toy problem(nothing wrong with toy problems, as a hobby; but they are a distraction if you are supposed to actually be working...)
If the process is complex, involves multiple inputs over time, from multiple people, then it is indeed impossible to cram without some loss of fidelity into a single static text lump. We could either wring our hands over what transform algorithm is most 'true', or we could just stop fucking around and use a format actually designed to capture something structured that way. This doesn't seem like a difficult decision.
It's actually a plot to boost telcom profits by selling more voice and data services. The new and increasingly creative(and disturbing) euphemisms will proliferate at such speed that it will soon be impossible to have even the remotest confidence that any given SMS message (even if checked for lewdness before sending) will not end up being blacklisted and dropped before delivery...
It is slightly more specific than that, in this case:
Apple continued to ship Core2s in their smaller systems for a surprising length of time after the newer intel gear became available because that was the only way they could continue to get Nvidia GPUs in anything too small for a discrete graphics card, and they were just that unimpressed with intel's offering.
Given that, it seems likely that AMD must have had real, serious, dealbreaker, volume issues with their APU parts(not just 'we need our Intel marketing support money' volume issues) for Apple to have dropped that plan.
It would be interesting to know if AMD just can't ship them in quantity at all(which seems modestly unlikely, given the number of cheapie PC laptops where they've popped up, and the fairly low prices they must be selling for), or if Apple required some fancy low voltage bin that AMD's process just didn't hit regularly enough...
It is unfortunate that all the ones large enough to head the list are basically standard racks in rows with attractive door art.
Mare Nostrum is comparatively small; but the 'glass pod full of ebon supercomputer modules seemingly suspended in a historic Spanish chapel' effect is pretty neat...
While the example does provide support for the existence of French music, it is arguably the case that the more prominent and lucrative French artists one can name, the less well justified some sort of special taxation mechanism to nurture and protect the delicate artists is... The arguments for such things usually involve, at least in part, the idea that local culture must be subsidized in the face of hegemonic-and-profitable foreign trash.
I can't speak for the specifics of each country's implementation(and, in practice, many of them probably do a bit of both, with some sort of targeted levy and some level of generic funding for the arts or culture or what have you); but there seem to be three distinct flavors:
1. Some sort of funding out of general tax receipts, as with the National Endowment for the Arts or NPR in the US. The overall level is set by something resembling representative democracy; but there is neither the assertion nor the intention that there is any particular relationship between the stuff being taxed and the stuff being funded, the stuff being funded is just seen to be something by which the public good is served(accurately or not, I'm not hugely interested in arguing on that specific point).
2. Some sort of funding out of a specific category of tax, as with special taxes(in addition to generic sales/VAT) on digital storage media in a number of countries. This category does assert a connection between the thing taxed and the thing funded; but it is marked by the relatively indescriminate nature of the tax: digital storage levies essentially assume that all storage media are used for piracy, for instance.
3. Some sort of funding tied relatively closely to use of(within the limits of gauging that) the thing being funded, as with taxes on motor fuels to fund roads, or taxes on broadcast TV receivers to fund the BBC. This category also asserts a connection between the thing taxed and the thing funded but, unlike #2, makes some(usually imperfect) effort to be accurate: The BBC's fee doesn't cover monitors without TV tuners, motor fuel taxes frequently distinguish between roadway vehicles and agricultural or aviation uses, that sort of thing.
Is it truly the case that ISPs and such, with all their hardware, facilities, staff, and sales in France, somehow manage to avoid paying roughly the same taxes that other businesses operating there do? Or is our favorite undersized gallic weasel just lying...
Also, if the intertubes are being taxed to pay for the production of french culture or something, ISP subscribers can download it without legal worry, right?
(unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do);
In the UK he does. And people have been punished for not handing it over.
Unfortunately for everybody, really, the potential 5-year RIPA sentence for refusing to disclose a key is crazy draconian as a threat to induce Joe Public to open every Turing-complete device in his entire life to the cops(after what is, no doubt, a impeccable judicial review); but it is substantially less scary than the sentence you might get for various serious crimes that the key might be hiding, along with any incentive provided by your criminal colleagues in favor of loyalty to the organization...
It may not help the poor bastard being asked for them; but, depending on the implementation, delivering the keys may simply not be possible.
It takes a pretty exceptional human to actually remember a useful crypto key, so most systems store the key for you and depend on a password, passphrase, and/or some sort of hardware device to grant access to the key. If the system that actually stores the crypto key is designed to resist tampering, there are a reasonable number of initial attempts at forensics that might trip tamper detection and cause the key to be wiped, irrevocably.
Your classier cryptographic coprocessor modules offer such tamper resistance, and the enthusiasm of DRM peddlers and corporate customers who have backups; but really, really, hate data-breach stories will likely continue to push it further down into cheaper and more common business desktops and laptops.
(Even the TPMs of today may be pretty tricky to subvert without pissing them off, though I don't think that they are required to adhere to the same anti-tamper standards as the more serious hardware security modules).
In this case, I'm more inclined to pessimism than usual about the utility of technological anti-theft systems.
A ~$5k electric scooter is a fairly atypical piece of kit. This isn't a generic "ISO standard bike for getting around campus" or "some massively popular compact car", either of which can disappear or turn into parts even in the hands of a complete n00b; but where getting GPS-tracked or otherwise running into an unexpected security system might discourage/catch a low end opportunistic operator.
If you are going to be stealing something as relatively unusual as a $5,000 light nerdmobile, you are either curious and joyriding(in which case the system will turn up within one charge-length of where it was stolen; but in god knows what condition, hope you have insurance), or because you have some definite plan in mind(most likely transporting the whole thing well away from the market in which it was stolen for use or resale, or breaking it up for the probably rather pricey battery and components). Anybody who tries to flip it on craigslist or something similarly low-rent is going to discover pretty quickly that the sheer oddity of the vehicle will make that difficult.
Because of the sheer inconvenience of having stuff stolen, I certainly wouldn't leave it less locked than the other bikes and stuff near it; but I'd be very much inclined to make any security investment beyond the basics in the form of insurance, rather than technology...
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Don't worry, we will soon solve the problem with "Cloud Printing" or some such nonsense; because implementing a hardware RIP like they did on a 12MHz M68k with less than 2MB of RAM back in '85 is much more difficult than dragging half the internet into the problem...
What is even more annoying is that, even if implementing a full Postscript RIP in the printer hardware were too expensive, or too slow, the standardization of USB, and the various USB device classes, would have been a perfect time to introduce a reasonably sane USB printer class, for low-end printers, where they could declare their parameters(color/BW, available media sizes, resolution, etc) and receive fully crunched pixel data, in appropriate color depth, resolution, and size, from a software Postscript RIP on the host computer. That would still burden the host CPU; but host CPUs are damn fast, and you'd just need to target a single page description language. Instead, we got a USB Printer Device class that is basically a polite standardization of "how to send whatever horror your cheap shit requires over a USB cable"...
If only HP had invented some sort of 'Printer Command Language' back in the 80s by which an embedded device might communicate with a great many of their printers(and a fair few 3rd party ones) with no platform-specific driver...
On the bright side, absolutely anything would be better than the utter shit that passes for firmware in their present models.
I had the delightful experience just the other day of encountering an HP wireless laser printer(a comparatively low-volume one; but a full 'Hi, I'm a networked device on the network' sort of thing) that would simply hang and drop off the network until power-cycled if you attempted to print to it using the HP 'Universal' print driver...
So, not only was this thing such a piece of shit that it wasn't compatible with HP's own, supposedly, 'universal' driver(PCL motherfucker, do you speak it?); but HP's own UPD could be used as an attack toolkit for a DOS that could only be recovered by a hard power cycle.
Now, if HP actually believes that there is some kind of "People who want a non-ipad with a shittastic inkjet attached, for reasons unknown to normal humans" market, I'd be delighted to sell them a bridge. If their doomed effort to build WebOS printers at least means that their network-attached printers will be running a linux kernel that doesn't fall over and die at the first sign of malformed network input, I'll be a lot happier...
The naive-optimist theory of human nature is that a good, hard, dose of oppression and brutality makes people see the evil of it.
In a few, noble, cases(e.g. Mr. Mandela), it does. In less uplifting characters(e.g. his former wife, it renders them brutal: see "necklacing; support of"). In the case of cynical opportunists(like much of the present ANC leadership) it merely awakens them to an understanding of how terribly convenient power can be...
(While the almost complete failure of this naive-optimist theory has applied time and again to post-colonial African governance, it is by no means exclusive to the continent. My very own New England was founded by religious refugees from Old England who sought a new land where, safe from their persecutors, they could safely persecute the shit out of people they didn't like... It is very lucky indeed that the foundation of the present day US occurred well after the initial round of assholes had died down a touch.)
Unfortunately, most of the available people with the relevant life experience accrued that experience during the long process of driving the Euro zone(among other locations, today's clusterfucks are so very cosmopolitan...) into said black hole...
I'm largely in agreement with your point, I just thought that Gattaca was a pretty terrible demonstration of its own premise...
I've never understood the ethical calculus where people who, say, negligently expose children to conditions that create a risk of morbidity or mortality(unfenced swimming pools, prenatal drugs, neglect, etc, etc.) are looked down on as scum; but people who negligently expose children to (known) risks of heritable disease are generally not condemned, sometimes even looked on as courageous or such.
Were genetic engineering (of sufficient maturity) available, it seems like the incentive to provide it broadly or universally would not only be populist appeal; but pragmatics: illness, weakness, stupidity, etc. are all expensive, and they usually bleed over on to those who live nearby(not to mention the emotional costs). Being able to reliably turn out people with the best body and mind genetic factors can offer would likely be an excellent investment.
Gattaca, unfortunately, gave it all up to tell a little story about a society that dumped (as best the viewer could tell) an enormous level of resources into actively repressing the non-engineered, without any particular effort to judge them on their merits. It ended up basically being a story about Jim Crow laws or caste systems with a spacesuit on...
That was the bit that really disappointed me about GATTACA: Instead of focusing on the genuinely interesting question of 'What happens when we can't even pretend that all men are created equal, and we can control a whole lot of you that used to be a roll of the dice?', it basically just did a slightly-futuristic totalitarian apartheid morality tale, where nobody actually gives a damn about the fact that genetic engineering actually makes you better, because they are too busy shoving around the non-genetically-engineered...
Earth to repressive future: If genetic engineering actually makes people superior, you wouldn't need a massive surveillance state dedicated entirely to keeping the inferiors in line, you'd just need a lightweight meritocracy...
Well, given that selective female infanticide is driven by an underlying set of economic beliefs, with a surface coating of culturally localized misogyny, I suspect that the ability to prenatally identify computer geeks is rapidly drawing to the end of where it would be used to select against them. The cultural layer is taking longer to break down; but the economics of being a geek vs. being an athlete haven't exactly been tilting in the athlete's favor lately...
Incidentally, I always have to wonder how long it will take before countries with an enthusiasm for female infanticide will have it bite them in the ass and force a (likely very ugly) midcourse correction: Demanding dowries isn't going to work so well when there are 150 men per 100 women, and history suggests that young men with no real chance of getting married, or even getting laid, tend to take up unpleasant hobbies like crime and politics with considerable enthusiasm...
The real whining that this test deserves is that it is (like a fair few of the hokier genetic tests) overwhelmingly likely to be as or less predictive than a simple family history.
Because modest amounts of sequencing have gotten so cheap, tests of this flavor don't tend to be outright lies(they do, indeed, usually test precisely what they claim to test); but the sales pitch inevitably glosses over the fact that only a few phenotypic characteristics are actually wholly determined by the single gene they can economically sample for.
There are a few conditions that are sufficiently well understood, and causally simple, that you can actually get a "Yes/No" out of a genetic test; but they are rare, and this is unlikely to be one of them.
I'd certainly be delighted to see genetic defects avoided, and useful genetic traits made more commonly available, but I'm not impressed by the chances of opportunistic lab-coated fortune tellers being the ones who get us there...
Was dialoging with my stakeholder a win-win for you too, Anonymous Coward?
Somebody has to spell-check and scrub for PR-flack fingerprints the press releases before they can be reformatted and sent to the printer...
I've heard that those crazy neckbeards over in comp-sci solved the problem of how to manage, timestamp, and attribute revisions to a complex file or group of files that can be expected to be revised over time according to new information, requirements, or refinements. And solved it bloody decades ago. Revision control, people, it isn't just for sourcecode.
Combine that with some of the newer and more www/browser friendly automated merge-and-pretty-print stuff, it should be architecturally trivial to provide a stable URL for a story, a full revision history(including times and who made the revisions), along with related stories, the ability to track revision activity of specific comitters, etc, etc.
I enjoy a good bit of handwaving about how to "best" express complex structures within the limitations of obsolete formats as much as the next guy, and quite possibly more; but it just seems so pointless in this case: There isn't any need to cram the entire sausage-factory of news production into a few square inches of ink-on-dead-tree, so lots of nuanced bloviation on how to do that is just a lot of fluff over a toy problem(nothing wrong with toy problems, as a hobby; but they are a distraction if you are supposed to actually be working...)
If the process is complex, involves multiple inputs over time, from multiple people, then it is indeed impossible to cram without some loss of fidelity into a single static text lump. We could either wring our hands over what transform algorithm is most 'true', or we could just stop fucking around and use a format actually designed to capture something structured that way. This doesn't seem like a difficult decision.
The worst happens for advertisers and advertising companies that send bulk SMS and later find out that nothing has delivered!
Thanks a lot, bastard, now I have to reconsider my opposition to setting up a totalitarian theocratic regime and pervasive censorship apparatus!
It's actually a plot to boost telcom profits by selling more voice and data services. The new and increasingly creative(and disturbing) euphemisms will proliferate at such speed that it will soon be impossible to have even the remotest confidence that any given SMS message (even if checked for lewdness before sending) will not end up being blacklisted and dropped before delivery...
Has something that wasn't a terrible plan ever been implemented by people who use the phrase "consultations with stakeholders" with a straight face?
The "story", in this case, is not that 'Apple had a prototype' but the claim that AMD was Plan A and that the intel Air shipped for volume reasons.
It's been a while since AMD was plan A for a thin-n-light laptop design...
It is slightly more specific than that, in this case:
Apple continued to ship Core2s in their smaller systems for a surprising length of time after the newer intel gear became available because that was the only way they could continue to get Nvidia GPUs in anything too small for a discrete graphics card, and they were just that unimpressed with intel's offering.
Given that, it seems likely that AMD must have had real, serious, dealbreaker, volume issues with their APU parts(not just 'we need our Intel marketing support money' volume issues) for Apple to have dropped that plan.
It would be interesting to know if AMD just can't ship them in quantity at all(which seems modestly unlikely, given the number of cheapie PC laptops where they've popped up, and the fairly low prices they must be selling for), or if Apple required some fancy low voltage bin that AMD's process just didn't hit regularly enough...
It is unfortunate that all the ones large enough to head the list are basically standard racks in rows with attractive door art.
Mare Nostrum is comparatively small; but the 'glass pod full of ebon supercomputer modules seemingly suspended in a historic Spanish chapel' effect is pretty neat...
While the example does provide support for the existence of French music, it is arguably the case that the more prominent and lucrative French artists one can name, the less well justified some sort of special taxation mechanism to nurture and protect the delicate artists is... The arguments for such things usually involve, at least in part, the idea that local culture must be subsidized in the face of hegemonic-and-profitable foreign trash.
I can't speak for the specifics of each country's implementation(and, in practice, many of them probably do a bit of both, with some sort of targeted levy and some level of generic funding for the arts or culture or what have you); but there seem to be three distinct flavors:
1. Some sort of funding out of general tax receipts, as with the National Endowment for the Arts or NPR in the US. The overall level is set by something resembling representative democracy; but there is neither the assertion nor the intention that there is any particular relationship between the stuff being taxed and the stuff being funded, the stuff being funded is just seen to be something by which the public good is served(accurately or not, I'm not hugely interested in arguing on that specific point).
2. Some sort of funding out of a specific category of tax, as with special taxes(in addition to generic sales/VAT) on digital storage media in a number of countries. This category does assert a connection between the thing taxed and the thing funded; but it is marked by the relatively indescriminate nature of the tax: digital storage levies essentially assume that all storage media are used for piracy, for instance.
3. Some sort of funding tied relatively closely to use of(within the limits of gauging that) the thing being funded, as with taxes on motor fuels to fund roads, or taxes on broadcast TV receivers to fund the BBC. This category also asserts a connection between the thing taxed and the thing funded but, unlike #2, makes some(usually imperfect) effort to be accurate: The BBC's fee doesn't cover monitors without TV tuners, motor fuel taxes frequently distinguish between roadway vehicles and agricultural or aviation uses, that sort of thing.
Is it truly the case that ISPs and such, with all their hardware, facilities, staff, and sales in France, somehow manage to avoid paying roughly the same taxes that other businesses operating there do? Or is our favorite undersized gallic weasel just lying...
Also, if the intertubes are being taxed to pay for the production of french culture or something, ISP subscribers can download it without legal worry, right?
Why would we resort to torture when we have pain compliance?
(unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do);
In the UK he does. And people have been punished for not handing it over.
Unfortunately for everybody, really, the potential 5-year RIPA sentence for refusing to disclose a key is crazy draconian as a threat to induce Joe Public to open every Turing-complete device in his entire life to the cops(after what is, no doubt, a impeccable judicial review); but it is substantially less scary than the sentence you might get for various serious crimes that the key might be hiding, along with any incentive provided by your criminal colleagues in favor of loyalty to the organization...
It may not help the poor bastard being asked for them; but, depending on the implementation, delivering the keys may simply not be possible.
It takes a pretty exceptional human to actually remember a useful crypto key, so most systems store the key for you and depend on a password, passphrase, and/or some sort of hardware device to grant access to the key. If the system that actually stores the crypto key is designed to resist tampering, there are a reasonable number of initial attempts at forensics that might trip tamper detection and cause the key to be wiped, irrevocably.
Your classier cryptographic coprocessor modules offer such tamper resistance, and the enthusiasm of DRM peddlers and corporate customers who have backups; but really, really, hate data-breach stories will likely continue to push it further down into cheaper and more common business desktops and laptops.
(Even the TPMs of today may be pretty tricky to subvert without pissing them off, though I don't think that they are required to adhere to the same anti-tamper standards as the more serious hardware security modules).
In this case, I'm more inclined to pessimism than usual about the utility of technological anti-theft systems.
A ~$5k electric scooter is a fairly atypical piece of kit. This isn't a generic "ISO standard bike for getting around campus" or "some massively popular compact car", either of which can disappear or turn into parts even in the hands of a complete n00b; but where getting GPS-tracked or otherwise running into an unexpected security system might discourage/catch a low end opportunistic operator.
If you are going to be stealing something as relatively unusual as a $5,000 light nerdmobile, you are either curious and joyriding(in which case the system will turn up within one charge-length of where it was stolen; but in god knows what condition, hope you have insurance), or because you have some definite plan in mind(most likely transporting the whole thing well away from the market in which it was stolen for use or resale, or breaking it up for the probably rather pricey battery and components). Anybody who tries to flip it on craigslist or something similarly low-rent is going to discover pretty quickly that the sheer oddity of the vehicle will make that difficult.
Because of the sheer inconvenience of having stuff stolen, I certainly wouldn't leave it less locked than the other bikes and stuff near it; but I'd be very much inclined to make any security investment beyond the basics in the form of insurance, rather than technology...