A Nasty Surprise for Car Thieves. Booby-trapped 'bait cars' are helping police catch car thieves in the act. A satellite tracking mechanism ensures the stolen vehicles don't get very far. By Randy Dotinga. [Wired News]
Actually, everything you own should have a tiny GPS and wireless set-up embedded in it.
Need an inventory or the replacement value of your possessions for insurance purposes? A listing of your CD collection? Click on a link and view the report.
Lost something? See a map of your house complete with the item highlighted in its current position.
Something been stolen? They had better keep it in a Faraday cage.
What's in your kitchen cupboards, and what's about to go past its use-by-date? Automatic shopping orders? No problem.
Bar-code scanners and shop checkouts? Don't need them. Generic bar-codes would die.
In conjunction with reliable personal digital ID, some goods could be sold by leaving them in appropriate places - no shops required.
The GPS would need to be effectively non-removable, perhaps intertwined completely with whatever makes the item useful.
Indicating a change of ownership would be interesting, but we seem to manage now with this issue, so perhaps it's not such a big deal. Actually, it could simplify things. Selling a house may not need so much lawyer involvement, at least for the transaction.
The security issues, as with some of my other blatherings, would be stupendous. The "steal to order" people would love it if they could get a drive-by inventory - but they would have to sell the item outside the coverage of the system, assuming anywhere was outside the system.
Anyway, time to stop having ideas that have a 99.99% certainty of having already been documented, published and discussed about twenty years ago. (Actually, I'd better keep going with that. What else am I going to do all day?)
8:03:37 AM 
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