I want to press you more on this...while I do agree that your example shows that Apple has become more competitive, I think your example is biased.
Latitute is far more expensive machines than Inspirion. Latitute is more for business-users whereas Inspirion is more for consumers. Since MacBook is also aimed that consumers, it would have been more appropriate to use Inspirion model for comparison.
If you do use Inspirion E1405 for comparison, you get arround $1099 (200 lower than your estimate). And also comparison is not perfect because Dell uses a 14" screen, Inspirion offers Media Center (which is close to Apple's offering) and because Dell often issues huge discounts - it is not uncommon to see $400 offers from Dell (I used it when I bought mine).
So while I do agree with your argument, I do not think that your evidence is fair.
Well, I'm planning on buying a new monitor soon and I'm probably going to get the new widescreen 20" monitors from Dell. I think it has a pretty reasonable and affordable price @ ~530 (older models were like 460). I think 400~500 dollar range is in the budget gamer range.
Anyway, the resolution on that monitor is 1680x1050 and I think most people will start buying these large wide-screen monitors for most new computers (or at least people who are buying computers for games). So while high resolution maybe not relevant for people who already has computers but I think it will probably relevant for future consumers...
Actually, I rarely look at fps for lower resolutions now since I am in the market for widescreen 20" lcd monitors.
To add little more to your post, I think the term is compromise effect: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=127302 9 (or also known extreme aversion effect). People will generally choose a midpoint of an option set and framing an option as a middle makes it more attractive.
Apparently, this effect has been "applied" to many fields like marketing, sales, negotiation and also in legislative world where a legislator will present a stupid bill that he knows will fail because of the backlash but will make his next bill more reasonable (as we see too often).
To add to the parents reply, when DOS was the dominant OS for personal computer, consider the following facts:
- Disk caching - many people did not have any HDD; even 20 meg HDD were very expensive and not many people had them. My first computer had 2 5.25 FDD and that was it. Even if people had HDD, they probably didn't have enough space nor need for disk caching since the bottleneck was primarily CPU (unlike nowadays were CPU is rarely the bottleneck)
- Memory management - most people had less than 640k of memory - there was no real need for protected memory for a long time and only when Win 3.1 started to take off.
- Multi-tasking - there was simply no use for multi-tasking at that time. it could be chicken and the egg problem but I don't remember single program at that period of time that could have been improved because I could multi-task. I don't think people could have written multi-tasking software. People were barely able to write simple non-multitasking software. They needed years of trial and error to establish practices and methodologies to write good multi-tasking software.
While I would argue that DOS was definitely not the pinnacle of software engineering, and there are valid criticisms against it, I do not think any of your criticims are valid. Like the parent said, DOS was pretty decent at the time and there were no options (unless you consider AmigaOS, GeoDesk but I would argue that they were useless since there were as applications for them than for DOS and you can't argue that that was because of MS's monopoly because they didn't have it then)
> DOS at the time was great, there were no other options other then Unix, which at the time was very expensive and very hard to use. For the most part he goes comparing OSs that really never went anywhere (like the Xerox OS's) with an marketed product. Yeah it's great Xerox has those features in 1981, but you have to put the product to market and have it accepted by the consumers.
One problem that Comcast might have are the patents. I believe Tivo and Gemstar has pretty much all the significant patents on PVR user interfaces. It could be even though Comcast could develop better GUI if they really wanted to, they are simply being cheap.
So, in fact you could be right. Tivo could get out of hardware business and simply license their technology and/or patents to Comcast.
Actually, it might be even more profitable for the shareholders of Tivo if it gets out of the entire business and become one of those patent-licensing firms like Rambus.
Ummm, if you read the article it says that the lawsuit was filed by "Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc." which is affiliated with "National Fair Housing Alliance" not some plaintiff lawyer.
If you go to their site, it says it is a "public interest law consortium of Chicago's leading law firms" and it tries to "preserve affordable housing, advocates for the rights and interests of poor children"
And if you go to National Fair Housing site it says it "is the only national organization dedicated soley to end discrimination in housing"
While they might be looking for fame, I highly doubt that they are looking for fortune. I would say they are more like EFF, ACLU, NAACP - trying to advance their social issue through the legal system.
Now if you want to argue that judicial system is not the best system to fix society's problems...that would be a whole different issue.
I don't know about China but it seemed that at least in my experiences, the big companies in Korea are cognizant about GPL licensing issues and are pretty good at complying with the license.
For example, when I was working there a year ago (1) Korea-equivalent of BSA would conduct random audits of software licenses. Actually one consulting company that my company hired had to stop working for couple days because apparently they didn't have proper number of licenses for Visual Studio. The company I worked for also ran in-house audits from time to time to detect not only licensed software but unauthorized software like MSN, mp3, etc.
(2) The company actually had an entire group devote to GPL and there were several initiatives to educate engineers and product planners about various licenses including GPL (I attended several presentations on it) and I belive we also purchased (or acquired) several software that was supposed to detect presense of popular GPL software in our sources.
(3) Engineers and markets usually talked and argued about including GPL stuff in the product we developed. We would usualy opt for commercial libraries because we usually didn't want to go through the hassle (we were big enough not to care about costs most of the time - if we had to think about cost, it probably meant that marketing guys weren't doing a good job in product planning)
(4) Last group that I worked in actually forbade usage of linux because of GPL license and we spent couple mil buying commerical RTOS and was in the process of coverting linux to that OS.
So, while I don't think Korean companies are up to standards of U.S. companies, I think it is a mischaracterization that all Asian countries don't care shit about IP stuff. Maybe private citizens might not care (there weren't too many cases of Korean-equivilant of RIAA suing people but Korea is a much less-litigious society) but I think most companies by far are pretty good about complying with GPL.
The reason why Korean companies would care is that while chances are low they will be sued in Korea, they will be sued in U.S. and almost all companies need to sell their crap in U.S. to make money. So basically U.S. law becomes more-or-less de facto "international" law.
This was not a frivolous case! McDonalds intentionally served scalding hot coffee to increase their profits (based on consultants' advice that coffee at 180 degree would give the optimal taste).
Jury ruled that their actions were negligent given the fact that McDonalds knew of at least 700 people during a ten year period were burned by the coffee and therefore McDonalds action was highly reckless (analogy would be a company continuing to sell a product that they knew to be dangerous)
Also, the damages were not that out-of-hand. The plaintiff got her medical expenses back and the punative damages were simply two days profits of selling coffee. In any case, the punative damages were reduced in appeal, so the system worked.
So what will happen is that ex-subscribers will get a small amount of money back and the lawyers (by the virtue of class-action suit that will aggregate the fees) will get a huge amount of money (actually, i received an email about a lawsuit regarding Netflix. Apparently, I'm eligible for free month of DVDs. I'm sure the lawyer got his/her millions)
"Amazon.com reserves the right (but not the obligation) to remove or edit such content, but does not regularly review posted content."
So, as long as Amazon's Condition of Use is held valid by the court, I don't think Jack has any cause of action except for the individual commenters whom he believes has slandered him.
Well, I think the question is what did you actually pay for?
Software? Software + support? Software + support + updates?
Or another way to ask the question might be: Should we require the software companies to include the price of technical support and updates within the price of the software or should we let the consumer be able to pick and choose the level of service?
My concern is that if you start requiring software companies to include technical support and continous updates for free, the price of software will increase. (I guess this is what supporters of FOSS probably want to happen anyway)
In regards to your concern, I guess one possible to your solution might be requiring software companies to honor return requests if there are serious flaws in their software and if they require people to pay for the fixes.
Except that, you can't produce/manufacture big-screen televisions.
The main advantage of flat-panel tv (lcd or pdp) is that companies can produce gigantic screen like 50" or 60" or even 100" somewhat economically. You could possibly buy a projection tv with those types of dimensions but projection tv have even worse display quality than flat-panel tv.
So under 30", CRTs rule and will maintain its dominance for a while (2~3 years). But you can't even find any CRT tvs greater than 36" in any volume.
Television manufacturers are betting that consumers will easily sacrifice some quality in favor of having a big screen (for watching dvd, watching sports, etc)
What we use is a security card (like one-time pad) and we get a certificate key from a key authority identifying the user by using the one-time pad.
The problem is, everytime there is a news of someone's bank account getting hacked (and there has been few instances of such), the bank blames the user for not handling the security properly and usually will reset the balance.
However, on the other hand, I do see the point of the bank. If the user doesn't take minimum precautions, what is the bank supposed to do?
Actually the reason why US steel industry is in a poor shape is the pension plans of union workers. Unfortunately, steel industry has to support more retired workers than the actual workers => huge liabilities. This won't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that US steel industry is very fragmented into small mills. Huge liabilities makes it very hard for consolidation hence making it hard for US steel industry to survive at all.
The recent increase in tarriff was largely aimed at non-European steel producers (namely S. Korea). Europeans also raised their steel tarriffs because Europe would have then been a dumping ground for cheap steel. Now China has also followed the Europeans in raising the tarriffs.
In korea, cops pay freelancers to take photos of traffic violations. There are dudes hiding at an intersection where traffic violations commonly occur (illegal u-turns and whatnot) and snap photos. Apparently it is pretty lucrative job since some people have made it a full time job. Cops send a nice ticket to traffic violators and split the fine with the dudes who photographed the violation.
However, hidden cameras are not too hidden in korea, cops must put a sign some saying there is a camera nearby (about 50 ft in front of the camera) by some law or something.
> Here in the UK, the "TV Licence" that so many USians seem to just not understand pays for something like 6 advert
Well, it is more than that. US government is restricted from law from meddling with tv or radio (i believe pbs is an explicit exception). The worry was that government would run propaganda to government tv (not that it was prevented).
On a related note, Korea also has a TV license - about $5 USD per month per household. What it gives us is all the ads in the front of the show and uninterrupted programming afterwards. Its great but it has been argued that the tv stations are pawns of the government from time to time precisely because 3 out of 4 stations are govnment owned.
Have you even bought or sold used books on amazon? I have and amazon's used book sales is not even close to what you are describing.
The used books sales in amazon are mostly person to person sales. For example, I buy a book, I finish reading the book, I want to sell the book. I go to amazon.com and post the book I want to sell. Someone else buy the book and I ship the book to the person. All amazon does is facillitate the sale and payment. They don't even see the item. As you can see, this is much akin to ebay's model.
What you are describing does happen to certain degree for other items but is *highly* dependent on the contracts. Some contracts, amazon is responsible when they get the items, sometimes amazon is in possesion of an item briefly before the item is sold. However, this does not apply to used books section.
Anyway, visit the site and see what the used books is for yourself before submitting comments.
I believe MS doesn't get to pay any taxes because of all the stock options they give out. Stock option are considered expendetures or liabilities (any accountants here?). So even though MS is raking on cash, their income statement will show that they didn't make any money.
No, you are not correct and parent poster was correct. The sysadmin was not being careful. At the company I work for, we tested the 2.4 kernel on a test box for couple of weeks and after noticing strangeness and the sysdamins never went to 2.4 yet. And we even had a really pressing need to go to 2.4 (stupid 2 gig file size limit isn't good for multi-terabyte system).
The sysdamin should have tested on a test box for a long time and see how it goes and then go to production. At first sign of trouble, the sysadmin should have downgraded (did he have a good rollback plan?) and tinkered with the *test* box until it was stable there.
The point is production servers does not have to following the bleeding edge of technology and sysadmin was being very careless.
I believe overall sales are higher for ipaq than palms because ipaqs are more expensive. The link is here
I heard from someone who works at a online retailer and he told me that wince sales are outpacing palm by a pretty wide margin now. (again sales, not unit, don't know about that)
Even then this is a good deal for Korean government. Instead of paying $XXXX mil to Microsoft, they pay much less to a local company. This will keep money in the country as well as encourage local development in the country. A win-win situation IMO.
Paying 15 top Open Source programmers? Who are these top Open Source programmers - not Koreans. Korean government has responsibility to their citizens so paying their own citizens to help local dev is much preferable to paying non-citizens who will def. not contribute back into tax coffers.
Yes, this sin't what open source needs but this is exactly what the Korean gov and the people needs.
Great for companies too? How about internal email? Do you want to tax those?
How about email to listserves? Listserves generate lots of email everyday - they will be taxed to death as it gets popular. There are many other scenarios where legitimate users will notice.
Badly thought out idea IMO.
Re:Weight & Storage Questions
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
I don't think theft will be a problem for a while. Suppose some dude steals one, he will be so conspicuous, it'll take no time for police to get the dude. Even if he gets away, what he do with it? Sell it, then that would be another great giveaway to the police.
Now, if IT becomes popular, then you might run into problems but like cars, security stuff will come (cars didn't have car alarms and shit when it first came out).
Slashdot Mirror
I want to press you more on this...while I do agree that your example shows that Apple has become more competitive, I think your example is biased.
Latitute is far more expensive machines than Inspirion. Latitute is more for business-users whereas Inspirion is more for consumers. Since MacBook is also aimed that consumers, it would have been more appropriate to use Inspirion model for comparison.
If you do use Inspirion E1405 for comparison, you get arround $1099 (200 lower than your estimate). And also comparison is not perfect because Dell uses a 14" screen, Inspirion offers Media Center (which is close to Apple's offering) and because Dell often issues huge discounts - it is not uncommon to see $400 offers from Dell (I used it when I bought mine).
So while I do agree with your argument, I do not think that your evidence is fair.
Well, I'm planning on buying a new monitor soon and I'm probably going to get the new widescreen 20" monitors from Dell. I think it has a pretty reasonable and affordable price @ ~530 (older models were like 460). I think 400~500 dollar range is in the budget gamer range.
Anyway, the resolution on that monitor is 1680x1050 and I think most people will start buying these large wide-screen monitors for most new computers (or at least people who are buying computers for games). So while high resolution maybe not relevant for people who already has computers but I think it will probably relevant for future consumers...
Actually, I rarely look at fps for lower resolutions now since I am in the market for widescreen 20" lcd monitors.
To add little more to your post, I think the term is compromise effect: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=127302 9 (or also known extreme aversion effect). People will generally choose a midpoint of an option set and framing an option as a middle makes it more attractive.
Apparently, this effect has been "applied" to many fields like marketing, sales, negotiation and also in legislative world where a legislator will present a stupid bill that he knows will fail because of the backlash but will make his next bill more reasonable (as we see too often).
To add to the parents reply, when DOS was the dominant OS for personal computer, consider the following facts:
- Disk caching - many people did not have any HDD; even 20 meg HDD were very expensive and not many people had them. My first computer had 2 5.25 FDD and that was it. Even if people had HDD, they probably didn't have enough space nor need for disk caching since the bottleneck was primarily CPU (unlike nowadays were CPU is rarely the bottleneck)
- Memory management - most people had less than 640k of memory - there was no real need for protected memory for a long time and only when Win 3.1 started to take off.
- Multi-tasking - there was simply no use for multi-tasking at that time. it could be chicken and the egg problem but I don't remember single program at that period of time that could have been improved because I could multi-task. I don't think people could have written multi-tasking software. People were barely able to write simple non-multitasking software. They needed years of trial and error to establish practices and methodologies to write good multi-tasking software.
While I would argue that DOS was definitely not the pinnacle of software engineering, and there are valid criticisms against it, I do not think any of your criticims are valid. Like the parent said, DOS was pretty decent at the time and there were no options (unless you consider AmigaOS, GeoDesk but I would argue that they were useless since there were as applications for them than for DOS and you can't argue that that was because of MS's monopoly because they didn't have it then)
> DOS at the time was great, there were no other options other then Unix, which at the time was very expensive and very hard to use. For the most part he goes comparing OSs that really never went anywhere (like the Xerox OS's) with an marketed product. Yeah it's great Xerox has those features in 1981, but you have to put the product to market and have it accepted by the consumers.
One problem that Comcast might have are the patents. I believe Tivo and Gemstar has pretty much all the significant patents on PVR user interfaces. It could be even though Comcast could develop better GUI if they really wanted to, they are simply being cheap.
So, in fact you could be right. Tivo could get out of hardware business and simply license their technology and/or patents to Comcast.
Actually, it might be even more profitable for the shareholders of Tivo if it gets out of the entire business and become one of those patent-licensing firms like Rambus.
Ummm, if you read the article it says that the lawsuit was filed by "Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc." which is affiliated with "National Fair Housing Alliance" not some plaintiff lawyer.
If you go to their site, it says it is a "public interest law consortium of Chicago's leading law firms" and it tries to "preserve affordable housing, advocates for the rights and interests of poor children"
And if you go to National Fair Housing site it says it "is the only national organization dedicated soley to end discrimination in housing"
While they might be looking for fame, I highly doubt that they are looking for fortune. I would say they are more like EFF, ACLU, NAACP - trying to advance their social issue through the legal system.
Now if you want to argue that judicial system is not the best system to fix society's problems...that would be a whole different issue.
I don't know about China but it seemed that at least in my experiences, the big companies in Korea are cognizant about GPL licensing issues and are pretty good at complying with the license.
l (pretty decent product, although concept-wise, it is a knock off of japanese products)
For example, when I was working there a year ago
(1) Korea-equivalent of BSA would conduct random audits of software licenses. Actually one consulting company that my company hired had to stop working for couple days because apparently they didn't have proper number of licenses for Visual Studio. The company I worked for also ran in-house audits from time to time to detect not only licensed software but unauthorized software like MSN, mp3, etc.
(2) The company actually had an entire group devote to GPL and there were several initiatives to educate engineers and product planners about various licenses including GPL (I attended several presentations on it) and I belive we also purchased (or acquired) several software that was supposed to detect presense of popular GPL software in our sources.
(3) Engineers and markets usually talked and argued about including GPL stuff in the product we developed. We would usualy opt for commercial libraries because we usually didn't want to go through the hassle (we were big enough not to care about costs most of the time - if we had to think about cost, it probably meant that marketing guys weren't doing a good job in product planning)
(4) Last group that I worked in actually forbade usage of linux because of GPL license and we spent couple mil buying commerical RTOS and was in the process of coverting linux to that OS.
So, while I don't think Korean companies are up to standards of U.S. companies, I think it is a mischaracterization that all Asian countries don't care shit about IP stuff. Maybe private citizens might not care (there weren't too many cases of Korean-equivilant of RIAA suing people but Korea is a much less-litigious society) but I think most companies by far are pretty good about complying with GPL.
For example: http://opensrc.sec.samsung.com/ has the sources for linux used in this product: http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7933085076.htm
The reason why Korean companies would care is that while chances are low they will be sued in Korea, they will be sued in U.S. and almost all companies need to sell their crap in U.S. to make money. So basically U.S. law becomes more-or-less de facto "international" law.
This was not a frivolous case! McDonalds intentionally served scalding hot coffee to increase their profits (based on consultants' advice that coffee at 180 degree would give the optimal taste).
Jury ruled that their actions were negligent given the fact that McDonalds knew of at least 700 people during a ten year period were burned by the coffee and therefore McDonalds action was highly reckless (analogy would be a company continuing to sell a product that they knew to be dangerous)
Also, the damages were not that out-of-hand. The plaintiff got her medical expenses back and the punative damages were simply two days profits of selling coffee. In any case, the punative damages were reduced in appeal, so the system worked.
Source: http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
Well, you can get your subscription fees back.
So what will happen is that ex-subscribers will get a small amount of money back and the lawyers (by the virtue of class-action suit that will aggregate the fees) will get a huge amount of money (actually, i received an email about a lawsuit regarding Netflix. Apparently, I'm eligible for free month of DVDs. I'm sure the lawyer got his/her millions)
Not really, if you read Amazon's Condition of Use
"Amazon.com reserves the right (but not the obligation) to remove or edit such content, but does not regularly review posted content."
So, as long as Amazon's Condition of Use is held valid by the court, I don't think Jack has any cause of action except for the individual commenters whom he believes has slandered him.
Well, I think the question is what did you actually pay for?
Software?
Software + support?
Software + support + updates?
Or another way to ask the question might be: Should we require the software companies to include the price of technical support and updates within the price of the software or should we let the consumer be able to pick and choose the level of service?
My concern is that if you start requiring software companies to include technical support and continous updates for free, the price of software will increase. (I guess this is what supporters of FOSS probably want to happen anyway)
In regards to your concern, I guess one possible to your solution might be requiring software companies to honor return requests if there are serious flaws in their software and if they require people to pay for the fixes.
Except that, you can't produce/manufacture big-screen televisions.
The main advantage of flat-panel tv (lcd or pdp) is that companies can produce gigantic screen like 50" or 60" or even 100" somewhat economically. You could possibly buy a projection tv with those types of dimensions but projection tv have even worse display quality than flat-panel tv.
So under 30", CRTs rule and will maintain its dominance for a while (2~3 years). But you can't even find any CRT tvs greater than 36" in any volume.
Television manufacturers are betting that consumers will easily sacrifice some quality in favor of having a big screen (for watching dvd, watching sports, etc)
Actually, that is what's happening in Korea.
What we use is a security card (like one-time pad) and we get a certificate key from a key authority identifying the user by using the one-time pad.
The problem is, everytime there is a news of someone's bank account getting hacked (and there has been few instances of such), the bank blames the user for not handling the security properly and usually will reset the balance.
However, on the other hand, I do see the point of the bank. If the user doesn't take minimum precautions, what is the bank supposed to do?
Jeez, don't take it personally. I only stated what I knew of the situation, I never agreed on what was happening. Chill dude.
The recent increase in tarriff was largely aimed at non-European steel producers (namely S. Korea). Europeans also raised their steel tarriffs because Europe would have then been a dumping ground for cheap steel. Now China has also followed the Europeans in raising the tarriffs.
Free market - great huh?
However, hidden cameras are not too hidden in korea, cops must put a sign some saying there is a camera nearby (about 50 ft in front of the camera) by some law or something.
Well, it is more than that. US government is restricted from law from meddling with tv or radio (i believe pbs is an explicit exception). The worry was that government would run propaganda to government tv (not that it was prevented).
On a related note, Korea also has a TV license - about $5 USD per month per household. What it gives us is all the ads in the front of the show and uninterrupted programming afterwards. Its great but it has been argued that the tv stations are pawns of the government from time to time precisely because 3 out of 4 stations are govnment owned.
Have you even bought or sold used books on amazon? I have and amazon's used book sales is not even close to what you are describing.
The used books sales in amazon are mostly person to person sales. For example, I buy a book, I finish reading the book, I want to sell the book. I go to amazon.com and post the book I want to sell. Someone else buy the book and I ship the book to the person. All amazon does is facillitate the sale and payment. They don't even see the item. As you can see, this is much akin to ebay's model.
What you are describing does happen to certain degree for other items but is *highly* dependent on the contracts. Some contracts, amazon is responsible when they get the items, sometimes amazon is in possesion of an item briefly before the item is sold. However, this does not apply to used books section.
Anyway, visit the site and see what the used books is for yourself before submitting comments.
I believe MS doesn't get to pay any taxes because of all the stock options they give out. Stock option are considered expendetures or liabilities (any accountants here?). So even though MS is raking on cash, their income statement will show that they didn't make any money.
No, you are not correct and parent poster was correct. The sysadmin was not being careful. At the company I work for, we tested the 2.4 kernel on a test box for couple of weeks and after noticing strangeness and the sysdamins never went to 2.4 yet. And we even had a really pressing need to go to 2.4 (stupid 2 gig file size limit isn't good for multi-terabyte system).
The sysdamin should have tested on a test box for a long time and see how it goes and then go to production. At first sign of trouble, the sysadmin should have downgraded (did he have a good rollback plan?) and tinkered with the *test* box until it was stable there.
The point is production servers does not have to following the bleeding edge of technology and sysadmin was being very careless.
I believe overall sales are higher for ipaq than palms because ipaqs are more expensive. The link is here
I heard from someone who works at a online retailer and he told me that wince sales are outpacing palm by a pretty wide margin now. (again sales, not unit, don't know about that)
Some of them do - OpenBSD and qmail (http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html) guarantees their security.
Even then this is a good deal for Korean government. Instead of paying $XXXX mil to Microsoft, they pay much less to a local company. This will keep money in the country as well as encourage local development in the country. A win-win situation IMO.
Paying 15 top Open Source programmers? Who are these top Open Source programmers - not Koreans. Korean government has responsibility to their citizens so paying their own citizens to help local dev is much preferable to paying non-citizens who will def. not contribute back into tax coffers.
Yes, this sin't what open source needs but this is exactly what the Korean gov and the people needs.
Great for companies too? How about internal email? Do you want to tax those?
How about email to listserves? Listserves generate lots of email everyday - they will be taxed to death as it gets popular. There are many other scenarios where legitimate users will notice.
Badly thought out idea IMO.
I don't think theft will be a problem for a while. Suppose some dude steals one, he will be so conspicuous, it'll take no time for police to get the dude. Even if he gets away, what he do with it? Sell it, then that would be another great giveaway to the police.
Now, if IT becomes popular, then you might run into problems but like cars, security stuff will come (cars didn't have car alarms and shit when it first came out).