The other way, where people never listen, is what happened with nuclear power, seat belts, electronics on planes, and vaccines:
1. New technology or idea proposed with significant internal research. It gets pushed hard by megacorps who see profit made in volume, but the technical research isn't widespread outside the industry.
2. Problems arise such as cancer, different injuries, slowly-developing illness, etc. Rumors and blame spread as the public is scared into believing anyone with any claim of expertise.
3. Industry reacts immediately to the concerns of regular citizens. Incidents due to operator error are reported to be 'isolated events' and media representatives are given the cold shoulder when their networks run stories spun to damage the industry.
4. Mounting evidence suggests new technology is just fine, but mounting anecdotes from "concerned citizens" continues to claim it's dangerous and has negative consequences.
5. Industry responds insisting everything is OK. Concerned citizens insist it isn't.
6. More evidence mounts, legislation gets proposed to curtail the technology and enact regulation, responding to public pressure.
7. Industry pushes back with their own research, while noting the gaps in what the research covers. Industry argues that regulation is not the answer because once enacted, regulation stops any further research into the issue, while wasting investment capital on certification costs.
8. Deaths, major accidents, and environmental impacts are being seen, but still can't be directly attributed to the new technology. Rumors and accusations still fly.
9. Industry starts pushing congressmen to ignore the panicking public. Congress, as usual, has already seen dozens of good panics in the last decade that didn't pan out, so this is unlikely to be different.
10. Industry no longer need to formally responds to complaints. Evidence against the technology consists solely of anecdotes and control-less studies crafted and spread to support the movement rather than the truth.
11. Industry pulls out after litigation expenses become threatening to the company, or simply accepts reduced profit until the unfounded controversy dies down and the technology is accepted as normal.
If you let carelessness run amok to the point of negligence, yes... but the circumstances for negligence must be defined in law. There is no such law for information security, outside a few particular areas (financial institutions, health care, and military).
When are residents going to be held responsible for the security of their valuables?
If things like cash and jewelery are stored behind unlocked doors, the households storing them should be fined and the people responsible for the storage prosecuted if there is a theft. It's just gross irresponsibility, for which nobody has seemed to get punished.
That needs to change.
I'm exaggerating a little, but this is really how the law works now. The criminal responsibility falls to the guy who thought "I'm going to violate this obvious demarcation line and grab whatever I want", rather than the guy who thinks "That barely-visible boundary should be obvious enough". The concept applies broadly, affecting harassment, copyright, theft, injury, and discrimination suits, just to name a few. While there is some consideration given to whether the victim should have taken more reasonable precaution, being careless is not a crime in itself.
They betrayed their nation's ideals and thereby undermined its moral authority.
That's assuming it had moral authority to begin with. America's enemies, almost by definition, don't accept it as a moral leader, for various reasons. Cuba doesn't like how we've screwed up their political sovereignty (pretty much for as long as they've been sovereign). Several Middle-Eastern factions don't like how American culture is squeezing out their own traditions. China doesn't like our treatment of Communism. Russia has been portrayed as a second-class country since World War II.
American history is full of shame, but we just don't cover it in schools. Every few years, we forget that we're just as bad as everywhere else, but differently. Then somebody brings up something we've done wrong, and everyone is so surprised that we could ever be so imperfect. After all, we have that lovely Constitution, written by those omniscient forefathers, which protects us all from every injustice everywhere, right?
you have fewer journals that have to be audited for procedural honesty
Taking this to its logical conclusion, a monopoly is the most honest organization, right?
Once one of these "fewer" journals has an established reputation, it can obscure its procedures and refuse to be audited, while it turns corrupt for profit. Since it's still a well-known journal (because who really has time to monitor the procedural audits, anyway?) it will still get the submissions and readers, and it will stay relevant for many years after "everybody knows" its' corrupt.
The Declaration of Independence is a manifesto. It just wasn't titled as such.
A manifesto simply explains the motivations and reasoning behind actions. It's a common trait of psychopaths and sociopaths, because they feel that their actions are completely logical, but the rest of society just needs a good explanation to wake up and rally to their cause.
Snowden doesn't need to explain his motivation to recruit followers, as the public outrage over surveillance is already quite significant. This seems to be less of a manifesto, and more of a reflection.
Yes, it is. You may have some moral justification, but it can still be a crime. In the US, telling the truth about intelligence techniques to real and potential enemies is a crime, even if you also tell the public. Snowden broke the law, and is now a criminal evading law enforcement, but he satisfied his own conscience.
270-something comments before I came here to say this, and it's the next-to-last comment on the page.
If the polygraph countermeasures were illegal to teach, then the police didn't need to convince him to teach them, as he was clearly already willing, so it's not entrapment. If the countermeasures were legal, then he wasn't doing anything illegal regardless of being convinced, so still not entrapment.
This could be considered a sting, but not entrapment.
Are you referring to my comment or the summary? I see more ageism in the summary (which pulls it directly from TFA). The article suggests that it's the younger employees' responsibility to avoid being rude. On the other hand, I feel it is generally preferential to avoid being offended, regardless of age.
In my opinion, much of the trouble in the world stems from a knee-jerk offense reaction. A minor miscommunication is assumed to be malicious, and the response is usually the first intentional harm. In this case, I think that all the meeting participants should recognize that their priorities are not universal, so they should all use their own judgement as to when their messages should be acknowledged or ignored, and respect each others' judgement as well. Ultimately, everyone there was hired for a single goal: the success of the company. While opinions may differ as to how to reach that goal, everyone' opinion should be respected.
But what happens if we look over your shoulder and the message is just from your girlfriend?
Then you should infer that the employee finds his personal relationships more important than your meeting. Maybe it's the employee's fault for not valuing your precious information, or maybe it's yours for not understanding your employees' needs.
Or if it is your direct boss asking you to be in the meeting and participating?...Someone more important than you... has decided that you need to be there
Is he asking me to participate now, though? I don't think I've ever had a meeting (other than one-on-ones) where everyone's participation was required all the time. In the time where the topic has gone on a tangent unrelated to my duties, I think it is appropriate and ethical to maintain a connection to the world outside the meeting. At the very least, such a connection is a reassurrance to the employee that the meeting is indeed the most important thing going on presently. At most, the employee can still support other operations as needed. The exact level of communication that is appropriate depends on the meeting and the communication.
If the CEO calls the meeting, is your time then worth more than the meeting? Is the CEO somehow clueless by not realizing that your entry level job is so vital to the functioning of the company?
Possibly. I've walked out on a C*O's meeting before when a situation demanded immediate attention. He never questioned it, because he knew that the only reason I'd do such a thing is if the interruption was indeed more important (and it was). I've been pretty fortunate in this regard, in that most of my bosses have understood and accepted that I put my direct work responsibilities first at all times, even during meetings. On the other hand, that also includes most personal time - I'd much rather be interrupted while playing a video game than be unaware when I next arrive at work.
Let me guess, when the company decides to have a party for everyone during work hours (free food and beer) that you turn it down because you still have vital job duties that you're being paid to do.
Probably not... but I would just as easily interrupt that for a message, because I'm still being paid to do my job. That also means that the beer consumption would have to be limited, as well. If it were possible to be certain that nothing could demand attention (for example if everyone is indeed at the party, and my regular duties could only be invoked by someone else's request), then it would be appropriate to turn off the phone and relax, just as it may be appropriate to turn off the phone and be unavailable during an actually-important one-on-one meeting.
Everyone who thinks their job is so vital often finds out that no one misses them after they're laid off.
My job is not vital, but I am still responsible for it. If I were laid off (or on vacation), my duties would be unassigned, and work would go on. That does not excuse me from those responsibilities now.
TFA does not differentiate. Since it's asking whether people find such behavior rude, I don't see a reason to differentiate, either... the person getting offended isn't likely going to know who's on the other end of the message. The offended person is just jumping to the conclusion that nothing could possibly be more important than their meeting. While that is sometimes true (especially in one-on-one meetings), it is not a safe blanket assumption (especially in a meeting with an emergency support staff).
As a one-man IT department, I've personally outright left a meeting in response to a text message. The message was from Nagios, telling me that the team's main file server had just decided to stop serving requests. By the time the meeting was over and everyone went back to doing real work, the server was back and nobody noticed any problem. I'm terribly sorry if they were offended, but again, I was being paid to keep that server running, not listen to economic forecasts.
I'm not sure how to read your comment, so I'll respond to the two interpretations I see. I suspect the latter interpretation is more likely.
...Business meetings are not important to them now, but they'll need the information if/when they're managing.
...by which time they've forgotten most of the details they would miss while responding to a text message, anyway. I do agree that by the time they get into more senior positions, they should be familiar with more than just their own little area, but they don't need to know every detail.
...Business meetings are not important to them, but the meetings are vitally important to their superiors.
In this case I still see no good reason to require everyone to pay full attention at all times. I've sat through too many meetings that are more just sequences of one-on-one conversations, or one-to few at best. I see no reason not to acknowledge the role of parallel communications. Is it the meeting environment itself that's important to the job, or the content being presented at the meeting?
You aren't paying me anything. The company is paying me to do a job, and that job is what matters, not your self-important rambling about your findings that don't concern me. If my message helps gets the job done more than whatever you're talking about, then I'm really being paid to send that message, and you're the one being rude by wasting time with the meeting.
Young folks know that business meetings are usually not actually important. Most of the meeting is spent addressing other people's concerns or bragging about some piece of information that the presenter feels is important, but is only trivia to most of the audience. If there's anything else, like a text message, that is perceived as a better use of one's time, they're likely to pay attention to that, rather than the meeting.
Older folks would previously have just dozed off in meetings, or doodled on notebooks looking like they were paying attention. Now that older folks are likely to be the ones leading the meeting*, of course they feel slighted when their subordinates are devoting attention elsewhere.
Another contributing factor is that young folks are more often the expendable workforce. They're the ones who are getting the longer hours and heavier workloads, being taught through their short careers that handling two problems at once is a minimum. There's a good chance that text message is work-related, and not responding would be the greater offense.
* From TFA:
People with higher incomes are more judgmental about mobile phone use than people with lower incomes
...which indicates to me that the older ones are the managers. On a wider study, this assumption may be invalid, as different industries have more youth at the top, but it appears this study covered 200 employees at a beverage distributor for its initial phase, and it doesn't reveal how many were used for the second phase. Not much hope for demographic diversity.
It's enough of a change to invalidate the phone book as prior art. Whether it's enough to satisfy the non-obvious requirement is up to the examiner, who apparently thought it was. Personally, I think it's ripe for reexamination, since the patent itself is vague enough in its claims that I think AltaVista would qualify as prior art making the advertisement focus obvious.
What's interesting is that what's described is effectively a search engine explicitly for advertisements, where the user queries by keyword, and the engine responds with common results and suggested refinements, used to further narrow the search. The engine would then learn from its mistakes, offering different options for that user in the future. As described, it's a very user-centric learning system, based on the user's past results.
What's claimed is any search engine that incorporates user's stored preferences.
He alleges that advocates accuse reviewers of trolling. I don't address that allegation at all. Rather, I think his entire post was itself written in a trolling manner, but did raise a valid concern. Yes, FOSS advocates are often accusatory, because often there is journalistic misconduct involved. My proposed solution is the same standard as applies to any professional writing: Conflicts and biases should be addressed, and the writer should have expertise in the field before trying to claim authority on the subject. That goes for paid-for software reviews, FOSS reviews, sports commentary, and any other writing where an opinion is expressed.
That's why I encrypted it with ROT-13 before encoding. Twice, for extra security.
Then I remembered that there's some obscure vulnerability in the double-ROT-13 implementation, so I ran it through ROT-26 as well. I figure that's good enough for anybody... but just for fun, I then XOR'd it with a string of 0xFF bytes. Since XOR encryption is fairly easy to hack, I took the resulting string, converted it to binary, and ran an extra ROT-1 pass on it (modulo 2, of course... I'm not stupid), and converted the result back to ASCII.
It's more like a vendor telling their client FUD myths so the FOSS option is never considered. Then the vendor only has to compete against their closed-source competitors (if any), and this FUD usually comes from the closed-source leader.
As a personal example, I did some IT work for a small radio station. Our studio computers (to be used by hosts while recording shows) had simple requirements, boiling down to "a web browser and a text editor". A vendor representative told me outright that my plan for Linux desktops was unsuitable, because supposedly Linux can't run web browsers, only servers. He then offered to sell me Windows 7 Ultimate. That's the sort of manipulation that occurs daily, keeping the "FOSS isn't a serious option" perception in the purchasing public's mind.
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The other way, where people never listen, is what happened with nuclear power, seat belts, electronics on planes, and vaccines:
1. New technology or idea proposed with significant internal research. It gets pushed hard by megacorps who see profit made in volume, but the technical research isn't widespread outside the industry.
2. Problems arise such as cancer, different injuries, slowly-developing illness, etc. Rumors and blame spread as the public is scared into believing anyone with any claim of expertise.
3. Industry reacts immediately to the concerns of regular citizens. Incidents due to operator error are reported to be 'isolated events' and media representatives are given the cold shoulder when their networks run stories spun to damage the industry.
4. Mounting evidence suggests new technology is just fine, but mounting anecdotes from "concerned citizens" continues to claim it's dangerous and has negative consequences.
5. Industry responds insisting everything is OK. Concerned citizens insist it isn't.
6. More evidence mounts, legislation gets proposed to curtail the technology and enact regulation, responding to public pressure.
7. Industry pushes back with their own research, while noting the gaps in what the research covers. Industry argues that regulation is not the answer because once enacted, regulation stops any further research into the issue, while wasting investment capital on certification costs.
8. Deaths, major accidents, and environmental impacts are being seen, but still can't be directly attributed to the new technology. Rumors and accusations still fly.
9. Industry starts pushing congressmen to ignore the panicking public. Congress, as usual, has already seen dozens of good panics in the last decade that didn't pan out, so this is unlikely to be different.
10. Industry no longer need to formally responds to complaints. Evidence against the technology consists solely of anecdotes and control-less studies crafted and spread to support the movement rather than the truth.
11. Industry pulls out after litigation expenses become threatening to the company, or simply accepts reduced profit until the unfounded controversy dies down and the technology is accepted as normal.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
-Randall Munroe
If you let carelessness run amok to the point of negligence, yes... but the circumstances for negligence must be defined in law. There is no such law for information security, outside a few particular areas (financial institutions, health care, and military).
When are residents going to be held responsible for the security of their valuables?
If things like cash and jewelery are stored behind unlocked doors, the households storing them should be fined and the people responsible for the storage prosecuted if there is a theft. It's just gross irresponsibility, for which nobody has seemed to get punished.
That needs to change.
I'm exaggerating a little, but this is really how the law works now. The criminal responsibility falls to the guy who thought "I'm going to violate this obvious demarcation line and grab whatever I want", rather than the guy who thinks "That barely-visible boundary should be obvious enough". The concept applies broadly, affecting harassment, copyright, theft, injury, and discrimination suits, just to name a few. While there is some consideration given to whether the victim should have taken more reasonable precaution, being careless is not a crime in itself.
They betrayed their nation's ideals and thereby undermined its moral authority.
That's assuming it had moral authority to begin with. America's enemies, almost by definition, don't accept it as a moral leader, for various reasons. Cuba doesn't like how we've screwed up their political sovereignty (pretty much for as long as they've been sovereign). Several Middle-Eastern factions don't like how American culture is squeezing out their own traditions. China doesn't like our treatment of Communism. Russia has been portrayed as a second-class country since World War II.
American history is full of shame, but we just don't cover it in schools. Every few years, we forget that we're just as bad as everywhere else, but differently. Then somebody brings up something we've done wrong, and everyone is so surprised that we could ever be so imperfect. After all, we have that lovely Constitution, written by those omniscient forefathers, which protects us all from every injustice everywhere, right?
Oh yes... A hivemind with knee-jerk reactions is great for science!
you have fewer journals that have to be audited for procedural honesty
Taking this to its logical conclusion, a monopoly is the most honest organization, right?
Once one of these "fewer" journals has an established reputation, it can obscure its procedures and refuse to be audited, while it turns corrupt for profit. Since it's still a well-known journal (because who really has time to monitor the procedural audits, anyway?) it will still get the submissions and readers, and it will stay relevant for many years after "everybody knows" its' corrupt.
The surveillance causes some embarrassment and a loss of trust. Enemies being able to evade the surveillance can cause death.
...Not that the death is particularly likely, mind you, but aiding an enemy is considered by the law to be more heinous than breaches of privacy.
The Declaration of Independence is a manifesto. It just wasn't titled as such.
A manifesto simply explains the motivations and reasoning behind actions. It's a common trait of psychopaths and sociopaths, because they feel that their actions are completely logical, but the rest of society just needs a good explanation to wake up and rally to their cause.
Snowden doesn't need to explain his motivation to recruit followers, as the public outrage over surveillance is already quite significant. This seems to be less of a manifesto, and more of a reflection.
You mean the ones who disagree?
To tell the truth is not a crime.
Yes, it is. You may have some moral justification, but it can still be a crime. In the US, telling the truth about intelligence techniques to real and potential enemies is a crime, even if you also tell the public. Snowden broke the law, and is now a criminal evading law enforcement, but he satisfied his own conscience.
270-something comments before I came here to say this, and it's the next-to-last comment on the page.
If the polygraph countermeasures were illegal to teach, then the police didn't need to convince him to teach them, as he was clearly already willing, so it's not entrapment. If the countermeasures were legal, then he wasn't doing anything illegal regardless of being convinced, so still not entrapment.
This could be considered a sting, but not entrapment.
Are you referring to my comment or the summary? I see more ageism in the summary (which pulls it directly from TFA). The article suggests that it's the younger employees' responsibility to avoid being rude. On the other hand, I feel it is generally preferential to avoid being offended, regardless of age.
In my opinion, much of the trouble in the world stems from a knee-jerk offense reaction. A minor miscommunication is assumed to be malicious, and the response is usually the first intentional harm. In this case, I think that all the meeting participants should recognize that their priorities are not universal, so they should all use their own judgement as to when their messages should be acknowledged or ignored, and respect each others' judgement as well. Ultimately, everyone there was hired for a single goal: the success of the company. While opinions may differ as to how to reach that goal, everyone' opinion should be respected.
But what happens if we look over your shoulder and the message is just from your girlfriend?
Then you should infer that the employee finds his personal relationships more important than your meeting. Maybe it's the employee's fault for not valuing your precious information, or maybe it's yours for not understanding your employees' needs.
Or if it is your direct boss asking you to be in the meeting and participating? ...Someone more important than you ... has decided that you need to be there
Is he asking me to participate now, though? I don't think I've ever had a meeting (other than one-on-ones) where everyone's participation was required all the time. In the time where the topic has gone on a tangent unrelated to my duties, I think it is appropriate and ethical to maintain a connection to the world outside the meeting. At the very least, such a connection is a reassurrance to the employee that the meeting is indeed the most important thing going on presently. At most, the employee can still support other operations as needed. The exact level of communication that is appropriate depends on the meeting and the communication.
If the CEO calls the meeting, is your time then worth more than the meeting? Is the CEO somehow clueless by not realizing that your entry level job is so vital to the functioning of the company?
Possibly. I've walked out on a C*O's meeting before when a situation demanded immediate attention. He never questioned it, because he knew that the only reason I'd do such a thing is if the interruption was indeed more important (and it was). I've been pretty fortunate in this regard, in that most of my bosses have understood and accepted that I put my direct work responsibilities first at all times, even during meetings. On the other hand, that also includes most personal time - I'd much rather be interrupted while playing a video game than be unaware when I next arrive at work.
Let me guess, when the company decides to have a party for everyone during work hours (free food and beer) that you turn it down because you still have vital job duties that you're being paid to do.
Probably not... but I would just as easily interrupt that for a message, because I'm still being paid to do my job. That also means that the beer consumption would have to be limited, as well. If it were possible to be certain that nothing could demand attention (for example if everyone is indeed at the party, and my regular duties could only be invoked by someone else's request), then it would be appropriate to turn off the phone and relax, just as it may be appropriate to turn off the phone and be unavailable during an actually-important one-on-one meeting.
Everyone who thinks their job is so vital often finds out that no one misses them after they're laid off.
My job is not vital, but I am still responsible for it. If I were laid off (or on vacation), my duties would be unassigned, and work would go on. That does not excuse me from those responsibilities now.
TFA does not differentiate. Since it's asking whether people find such behavior rude, I don't see a reason to differentiate, either... the person getting offended isn't likely going to know who's on the other end of the message. The offended person is just jumping to the conclusion that nothing could possibly be more important than their meeting. While that is sometimes true (especially in one-on-one meetings), it is not a safe blanket assumption (especially in a meeting with an emergency support staff).
As a one-man IT department, I've personally outright left a meeting in response to a text message. The message was from Nagios, telling me that the team's main file server had just decided to stop serving requests. By the time the meeting was over and everyone went back to doing real work, the server was back and nobody noticed any problem. I'm terribly sorry if they were offended, but again, I was being paid to keep that server running, not listen to economic forecasts.
I'm not sure how to read your comment, so I'll respond to the two interpretations I see. I suspect the latter interpretation is more likely.
...Business meetings are not important to them now, but they'll need the information if/when they're managing.
...by which time they've forgotten most of the details they would miss while responding to a text message, anyway. I do agree that by the time they get into more senior positions, they should be familiar with more than just their own little area, but they don't need to know every detail.
...Business meetings are not important to them, but the meetings are vitally important to their superiors.
In this case I still see no good reason to require everyone to pay full attention at all times. I've sat through too many meetings that are more just sequences of one-on-one conversations, or one-to few at best. I see no reason not to acknowledge the role of parallel communications. Is it the meeting environment itself that's important to the job, or the content being presented at the meeting?
You aren't paying me anything. The company is paying me to do a job, and that job is what matters, not your self-important rambling about your findings that don't concern me. If my message helps gets the job done more than whatever you're talking about, then I'm really being paid to send that message, and you're the one being rude by wasting time with the meeting.
Young folks know that business meetings are usually not actually important. Most of the meeting is spent addressing other people's concerns or bragging about some piece of information that the presenter feels is important, but is only trivia to most of the audience. If there's anything else, like a text message, that is perceived as a better use of one's time, they're likely to pay attention to that, rather than the meeting.
Older folks would previously have just dozed off in meetings, or doodled on notebooks looking like they were paying attention. Now that older folks are likely to be the ones leading the meeting*, of course they feel slighted when their subordinates are devoting attention elsewhere.
Another contributing factor is that young folks are more often the expendable workforce. They're the ones who are getting the longer hours and heavier workloads, being taught through their short careers that handling two problems at once is a minimum. There's a good chance that text message is work-related, and not responding would be the greater offense.
* From TFA:
People with higher incomes are more judgmental about mobile phone use than people with lower incomes
...which indicates to me that the older ones are the managers. On a wider study, this assumption may be invalid, as different industries have more youth at the top, but it appears this study covered 200 employees at a beverage distributor for its initial phase, and it doesn't reveal how many were used for the second phase. Not much hope for demographic diversity.
It's enough of a change to invalidate the phone book as prior art. Whether it's enough to satisfy the non-obvious requirement is up to the examiner, who apparently thought it was. Personally, I think it's ripe for reexamination, since the patent itself is vague enough in its claims that I think AltaVista would qualify as prior art making the advertisement focus obvious.
What's interesting is that what's described is effectively a search engine explicitly for advertisements, where the user queries by keyword, and the engine responds with common results and suggested refinements, used to further narrow the search. The engine would then learn from its mistakes, offering different options for that user in the future. As described, it's a very user-centric learning system, based on the user's past results.
What's claimed is any search engine that incorporates user's stored preferences.
In other words, a phone book isn't prior art. Whether the patent itself is valid or not is a separate question.
Except not at all. The claims require that the page be displayed as the result of a query, sent over a network.
The phone book may have been a contributing predecessor, but not prior art in any legal sense.
Oh, so very much yes.
Run it like mod points, with a stronger emphasis on metamod (metaediting?).
Your reading comprehension is failing.
He alleges that advocates accuse reviewers of trolling. I don't address that allegation at all. Rather, I think his entire post was itself written in a trolling manner, but did raise a valid concern. Yes, FOSS advocates are often accusatory, because often there is journalistic misconduct involved. My proposed solution is the same standard as applies to any professional writing: Conflicts and biases should be addressed, and the writer should have expertise in the field before trying to claim authority on the subject. That goes for paid-for software reviews, FOSS reviews, sports commentary, and any other writing where an opinion is expressed.
That's why I encrypted it with ROT-13 before encoding. Twice, for extra security.
Then I remembered that there's some obscure vulnerability in the double-ROT-13 implementation, so I ran it through ROT-26 as well. I figure that's good enough for anybody... but just for fun, I then XOR'd it with a string of 0xFF bytes. Since XOR encryption is fairly easy to hack, I took the resulting string, converted it to binary, and ran an extra ROT-1 pass on it (modulo 2, of course... I'm not stupid), and converted the result back to ASCII.
That's what I encoded.
It's more like a vendor telling their client FUD myths so the FOSS option is never considered. Then the vendor only has to compete against their closed-source competitors (if any), and this FUD usually comes from the closed-source leader.
As a personal example, I did some IT work for a small radio station. Our studio computers (to be used by hosts while recording shows) had simple requirements, boiling down to "a web browser and a text editor". A vendor representative told me outright that my plan for Linux desktops was unsuitable, because supposedly Linux can't run web browsers, only servers. He then offered to sell me Windows 7 Ultimate. That's the sort of manipulation that occurs daily, keeping the "FOSS isn't a serious option" perception in the purchasing public's mind.