Honeypots - A way to protect your network?

In today's electronic world where hackers are always on the prowl to break you network "sniffing" around and looking for a vulnerability, how do you ensure that your network is protected and hidden away from the hackers and the bad guys? One of the options could be honeypots. Honeypots are essentially decoys put in place to lure attackers away from the paydirt and are closely monitored for suspicious activities.

Honeypots are set up just for the purpose of getting compromised. You have set up a honeypot successfully and effectively if it gets attacked. Once the the honeypots gets attacked and you see a pattern in traffic, you can then take evasive action on your real production network and protect it easily. So far so good.

Being inherently sarcastic about the good things in life, I cannot help but think about Joe Hacker. He is a guy who has broken the best of security systems and fooled the best security experts. Is he naive enough to believe his good luck when he sees a seemingly unprotected network asking to be attacked. Let's assume he is. But doesn't he get suspicious when he is mounting an attack and there are no preventive actions and instead he gets to play around as much as he wants and see whatever he wants to? My bet is that he does and the moment he realises that it is a honey pot he will run away the way a spy or undercover agent does the moment he realises that he is walking in a trap.

So how do we protect our networks? Is there no way to protect them? So far, honeypots have been successful (?) but we need to ensure it remains successful, if we have to be successful. I am not an expert in this area, but hope to be soon sometime. This is an invitation to all security experts to build a honeypot that will be dynamic enough to recognize the activity, trace the hacker and report to the authorities. All this before the hacker realises he has walked in a trap.

Disclaimer: I have used a masculine connotation for the hacker for simplicity sake. I don't mean to be sexist by any counts.