You mean only save the lives of iPhone users... Everyone who chooses a different phone will be punished to death for their arrogance...
Sadly, this scenario seems more likely IMO given Apple.
After all, if they intended to patent it "to stop others blocking it" they could just as easily have made it into prior art and it would have been cheaper to do.
If you thought the no-fly list was bad, wait until you end up on the no-programmer-jobs list...
How long before they decide that if your surname is Hyaka, that that sounds like hacker and ban you from working for anyone who supplies the government.
A long time ago I lost a job based on the fact that I hadn't completed my degree. My employer knew that I didn't have it, but they had a contract to develop software for the US DoD who noticed and threatened to pull all of their contracts if they didn't get rid of any non-degree'ed programmers.
And I wasn't even going to be working on their contracts!
The employer did it's best to accommodate me, but the short story is that the roadblock wasn't worth working around so I went in another direction and became a hardware developer for a different company.
There's no point in appealing to their common sense, because in this case the DoD doesn't seem to have any.
I had to run a hardware emulator to support later DirectX video modes (for dynamic shading etc.) but it was playable without significant frame loss on an external monitor at 1280x1024.
I also played Tron2.0 on it at the same resolution and it was quite smooth.
Showing people both tended to impress them.
The P1510 still beats most modern netbooks and it's 3 years old now. Well ahead of it's time, although did cost a bit of a premium... But the tablet mode is nice:)
My wife went through a passing phase a while back ago, so I got her a quad-core P4 w/4gb/500Mb, Radeon 1950 x 2 in crossfire, 41" monitor, Wireless mouse, Keyboard, joysticks, gamepads. Basically everything I wanted in a game machine, while I only had a small netbook (although I could play Farcry on my netbook so it wasn't that bad...)
I thought it was a GREAT idea... She would get tired of it and I get a new gaming machine that she would never let me buy.
Unfortunately, she loved it so much she kept it and I didn't get to "inherit" it all after the passing phase.
But at least she didn't give me any grief over getting (more recently) a much better spec machine, because it cost me a lot less than hers did at the time.
There was never a law saying to have to tell anyone how your stuff works.
No, but there is a law saying it's illegal for you to figure out how someone else's stuff works and another that stops you from creating something that works the same way.
Them having to tell you is irrelevant most of the time, because humans can (could) figure most things out... Until they started calling it "Reverse Engineering"...
These technologies actually improve the situation and make use of land that otherwise cannot be used at all.
GrpA
This is a mystery. It's not about land that is not being used otherwise. There's no such thing like land not being used otherwise. There is land that is not _commercially_ used by man, but that does not mean it's not being used _at all_, and it does not mean it is useless waste land.
It's a mystery how so many replies seem to not know that such land does in fact exist.
Yes it is useless waste land, unless you count using it to produce biofuel or pumping in billions to repair the damage of salinity.
A thin layer of salt covers everything and underneath is thick mud, waiting to trap unwary animals who venture into it.
No animals live there. There is no plant life there. Only organisms like algae can live there.
When your land is saltier than the sea, it's pretty lifeless. Anything you do to improve things is a good thing. Grow biofuel, plant salt-tolerant species to absorb the salt, anything.
I'm talking about millions of hectares where I live. (Just in my own state) that cannot be used for agriculture.
But they can use it to produce Biofuel...
Look up Algae based fuels, and be careful running on SVO (Straight Veggie Oil) - it tends to carbon up your engine which will eventually cause you serious compression related issues.
Even fewer diesel cars can use SVO than Diesel...
But you can get some Biodiesels that ALL cars can use and you can mix it with normal Diesel too...
Ethanol isn't ideal... Getting rid of Petrol/Ethanol engines would be better.
And lumping in problem biofuels because of the market for them isn't being honest either...
Biodiesel is a useful fuel, and it does a lot less damage to the environment than batteries, although I'm a big fan of batteries too.
As for food?
I get very angry when I hear comments like people starving so we can drive cars.
People have starved for the past century while there's plenty of food wasted. There's only as much food grown as is economically viable. People convert vast swathes of land to support GM seeds that IMO are only fit for Biofuel, not for human consumption.
And as for alternatives? People are seriously looking at Algae based biofuels right now. Is it economical? Not while we're still destroying the worlds oil reserves... But we're probably going to run out of those fairly soon and fusion's not an option (yet or in the near foreseeable future).
There's enough capacity to make huge salty-algae fuel farms without losing any farming land.
Anyway, if you don't like conventional biofuels, you can always run your car on peanuts...
You've clearly never used Biodiesel in your life and have no idea what you're talking about.
1. ALL Biodiesel I've heard of has significantly lower emissions and also less harmful emissions that diesel. It doesn't take much of a search to confirm that, so please tell me which biodiesel you think produces more greenhouse gases than regular diesel.
2. There doesn't have to be a negative impact of biodiesel on the environment. In fact, a lot of commercial biodiesel is made from used vegetable oil that's recycled.... That's actually a useful thing.
If everyone started using it, then you need to make lots which means using some agricultural land to make it... but it's still better than using crude oil to make the stuff.
3. What? What a lot of rubbish. Most biodiesel (commercial) is 98% as much energy as Diesel... I used it for three months and had almost no change of fuel economy.. 27mpg in a 1980's JEEP. That's better than twice the economy you get from a Petrol Jeep.
2% is NOT 50%... I've never heard of Biodiesel being 50% worse... Are you thinking of a petrol substitute? Even Ethanol isn't nearly that bad.
Also, some biodiesel, notably Palm/Coconut based not only has 1/100th the emissions of normal diesel, it also has 20% more energy...
That means for the same tankful, you get 20% more range, 20% more power or 20% more torque...
Do some research before you go talking about facts...
I've used the stuff, bought commercially, in an unmodified Jeep. (Same diesel engine it came out of the US factory with in 1982)... The only drawback is that it's a little harder to start in the cold.
On the positive side, it provided better lubrication and smelt better too.
But I got sligtly improved fuel economy so the stuff I was buying was probably slightly better than normal diesel.
FTA: Since biofuels frequently lead to greater emissions than either diesel or gas,
That's not really true... Using Biodiesel can result in 75% less CO2 emissions, at the exhaust pipe.
Some Biodiesels, eg, based on Coconut oil, are incredibly low on emissions.
People who claim biodiesel releases more CO2 are making an argument industry wide, including the converting of existing land not used for agriculture to produce biofuels.
Which is a little dishonest, because there are other technologies being developed that make use of badly salt-affected land to produce Biofuel. (Algae based production)
These technologies actually improve the situation and make use of land that otherwise cannot be used at all.
Easy solution... I did something like this a long time ago.
We used to split our upstream into "Priority" and "Non-priority" and all users went into "Non-Priority"
When we gave them a real-time "price" meter... It had a button and a small display that showed how much your bill was for the month.
Use the service at non-priority and the $$$ ticked over slowly.
But hit the "Turbo" button, it added your IPs to the priority stream and the $$$ scream over and you get a big speed boost. Great for businesses who used it.
We only ever tried it in beta while we had significant oversubscription due to limited availability of bandwidth at the time, but we noticed a few strange effects.
First, people just liked pressing the button. They would go on, off, on, off while waiting for anything.
Second, it was instant gratification - you hit th e button and your download speed goes straight up... Very effective and you know it's going faster because the $$$ tick over faster.
Thirdly, the level of satisfaction was directly influenced by the speed the $$$ ticked over... We accidently released a buggy version under Beta where the $$$ ticked over at ten times the rate.
It turned out to be the most popular and people started requesting it after we fixed the bug in the subsequent version... Seems that if they got charged more, the mental connection was that it was faster.
Anyway, then bandwidth prices came down and we just got more bandwidth, and all the beta testers moaned when we turned off their turbo buttons...
We weren't actually charging the beta testers for the button at the time, but they were all willing to pay for the service, because they loved being able to see at all times (through a small widget-like interface) exactly what they were spending.
An image created as millions of radials. The image itself was on the computer but it was optically captured.
Also, the distance from the origin to each point was captured, so each pixel had a distance from the origin, a vector and a color.
The result was a 3-D image that could appear exactly as someone would view it. You could even adjust for optical properties of photographic equipment (including our eyes).
I suppose you could even project it back onto a curved surface if you wanted to.
The only thing it lacked was resolution, but the results were pretty good. It was being developed at a local University about 10 years ago.
I suppose the credit is due to the guys who did it, but since your criteria for the Nobel prize is only suggesting it, I guess I qualify. Please send me your prestigious award!:)
I worked for a company like that once. It had a 1-week notice period so it didn't have to wait to get rid of people.
That tells you something about the company.
So when I gave in my notice, they dropped a new project on my desk and told me to have it completed by the end of the week. Basically they were angry that I dared to leave them when they refused to give me a raise they promised me.
I completed the project in one week and left on Friday, thinking pulling off a design project (encrypted pin-pad that ran of scavenged power from a serial port) in my last week would leave me in good standing.
Two months later, they were still unable to find a replacement to do the next project and asked me to come in on a weekend and help them out.
They even got my friends who worked there to make the call.
I asked my friends to get me an invoice number. (Why? So I can bill them....)
My friends called back that night and said the manager was furious. He expected me to do it for free (ie, if I didn't ask, he didn't have to pay was his attitude)... Seems he had been vilifying me in the intervening weeks too.
Four years later, I had some important email come to me regarding them and passed it back to them.
Spoke to my friends again. The manager was still vilifying me to the employees and several of the employees who knew it was all lies were threatened into silence.
Bottom line? Anyone who will threaten you like that is bad news.
The term is Sociopath.
You can't bargain with a sociopath. You can't win. No matter what you do. They already hate you just for leaving and nothing will remedy that - not even staying.
Take a long length of cable (or fiber, but cable is fine) and turn it into memory...
Give them an appreciation for how much of an ethernet frame is actually in transit over 100m of ethernet at any one time. (about 33 bits). Teach them to take Ethernet cards apart and use the circuits in them to build a complete memory unit.
Make them develop their own memory - enough to store their name, using common components, eg, using sound waves or similar to store data. You can even store data as mechanical waves in a spring with transducers.
Use high frequency programmable pulse generators to gate image tubes so you can use light to build a three dimensional image (like LIDAR) with a camera. (You can build LIDARs too, but that usually requires complex mechanical components).
Having a concept of how dynamic things can be can be useful. Most people tend to have static minds - eg, we see things in a fixed state.
Thinking of things as dynamic can be a useful skill to gain.
Also, don't forget practical recreation of physics experiments, such as measuring the speed of light with rotating mirrors and lasers (or even a candle)....
Reproducing an old experiment can also be incredibly valuable. Or better still, use modern technology to improve such an experiment to make it "classroom" sized.
The premise was that the smaller pieces were as much danger as the larger pieces. A piece of copper wire 2mm in diameter and 5mm long travelling at just 10 times the speed of sound has as much kinetic energy as an M16 round and many times the penetration capacity.
Needless to say, the speeds involved are MUCH MUCH FASTER than this, so that little tiny piece of wire is more powerful than a 50 caliber round in reality.
But as you'll recall, they couldn't clean up everything, so they tended to tackle whatever was the biggest threat.
Have a magic show... Have your assistant "Show" two padlocks to the audience and demonstrate how they are both solid...
That's closed-source.
Now pass the padlocks around for everyone to test them... Suprise, one of them opens with a little effort... And you can see the lock has been filed back.
That's open source.
In a closed source model, you don't get to verify the security yourself, so you're trusting the vendor. In this case, the magician, the assistant, or his plant in the audience.
In an open source model, you can make up your own mind based on being able to actually see what's going on. You can test the padlock.
If someone mentions that even with proprietary software you can "inspect" things with an agreement, point out others who don't have the same agreement might spot things you missed, then give the better padlock to an "outsider" who has a "standard" key for it... This demonstrates that not everyone knows where to look
for the vulnerabilities and only when many eyes work together can you be sure that it's really secure.
Wouldn't tenth sense be a better claim? (albeit marketting)
What really annoys me about this is that there are already nine recognized physical senses, two interoceptive ones, six exteroceptive and two feedback senses.
I still can't understand why some who claim to be scientists still think in terms of the limited "5 senses" model which has been outdated for more than a century.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean only save the lives of iPhone users... Everyone who chooses a different phone will be punished to death for their arrogance...
Sadly, this scenario seems more likely IMO given Apple.
After all, if they intended to patent it "to stop others blocking it" they could just as easily have made it into prior art and it would have been cheaper to do.
GrpA
More of note.
If it's 640 light years away, then it probably went boom 640 years ago.
Which only makes sense, since after all, 640 years should be enough for anyone.
GrpA
If you thought the no-fly list was bad, wait until you end up on the no-programmer-jobs list...
How long before they decide that if your surname is Hyaka, that that sounds like hacker and ban you from working for anyone who supplies the government.
A long time ago I lost a job based on the fact that I hadn't completed my degree. My employer knew that I didn't have it, but they had a contract to develop software for the US DoD who noticed and threatened to pull all of their contracts if they didn't get rid of any non-degree'ed programmers.
And I wasn't even going to be working on their contracts!
The employer did it's best to accommodate me, but the short story is that the roadblock wasn't worth working around so I went in another direction and became a hardware developer for a different company.
There's no point in appealing to their common sense, because in this case the DoD doesn't seem to have any.
GrpA
A Fujitsu P1510 with Intel 915 GMS chipset.
I had to run a hardware emulator to support later DirectX video modes (for dynamic shading etc.) but it was playable without significant frame loss on an external monitor at 1280x1024.
I also played Tron2.0 on it at the same resolution and it was quite smooth.
Showing people both tended to impress them.
The P1510 still beats most modern netbooks and it's 3 years old now. Well ahead of it's time, although did cost a bit of a premium... But the tablet mode is nice :)
GrpA
My wife went through a passing phase a while back ago, so I got her a quad-core P4 w/4gb/500Mb, Radeon 1950 x 2 in crossfire, 41" monitor, Wireless mouse, Keyboard, joysticks, gamepads. Basically everything I wanted in a game machine, while I only had a small netbook (although I could play Farcry on my netbook so it wasn't that bad...)
I thought it was a GREAT idea... She would get tired of it and I get a new gaming machine that she would never let me buy.
Unfortunately, she loved it so much she kept it and I didn't get to "inherit" it all after the passing phase.
But at least she didn't give me any grief over getting (more recently) a much better spec machine, because it cost me a lot less than hers did at the time.
GrpA
There was never a law saying to have to tell anyone how your stuff works.
No, but there is a law saying it's illegal for you to figure out how someone else's stuff works and another that stops you from creating something that works the same way.
Them having to tell you is irrelevant most of the time, because humans can (could) figure most things out... Until they started calling it "Reverse Engineering"...
GrpA
By telling them they will respawn in the next life... Or respawn in heaven or some variation of that.
At least, that's the reasoning and rationale behind a lot of people who fight on both sides.
GrpA
True, but parchment was the death of the stone tablet industry back in the day. They must still be hurting, I guess.
No they just updated their business model...
And they're so popular that people are dying just to get one...
Unless you prefer cremation of course.
GrpA
These technologies actually improve the situation and make use of land that otherwise cannot be used at all.
GrpA
This is a mystery. It's not about land that is not being used otherwise. There's no such thing like land not being used otherwise. There is land that is not _commercially_ used by man, but that does not mean it's not being used _at all_, and it does not mean it is useless waste land.
It's a mystery how so many replies seem to not know that such land does in fact exist.
Yes it is useless waste land, unless you count using it to produce biofuel or pumping in billions to repair the damage of salinity.
A thin layer of salt covers everything and underneath is thick mud, waiting to trap unwary animals who venture into it.
No animals live there. There is no plant life there. Only organisms like algae can live there.
When your land is saltier than the sea, it's pretty lifeless. Anything you do to improve things is a good thing. Grow biofuel, plant salt-tolerant species to absorb the salt, anything.
I'm talking about millions of hectares where I live. (Just in my own state) that cannot be used for agriculture.
But they can use it to produce Biofuel...
Look up Algae based fuels, and be careful running on SVO (Straight Veggie Oil) - it tends to carbon up your engine which will eventually cause you serious compression related issues.
Even fewer diesel cars can use SVO than Diesel...
But you can get some Biodiesels that ALL cars can use and you can mix it with normal Diesel too...
GrpA
Ethanol isn't ideal... Getting rid of Petrol/Ethanol engines would be better.
And lumping in problem biofuels because of the market for them isn't being honest either...
Biodiesel is a useful fuel, and it does a lot less damage to the environment than batteries, although I'm a big fan of batteries too.
As for food?
I get very angry when I hear comments like people starving so we can drive cars.
People have starved for the past century while there's plenty of food wasted. There's only as much food grown as is economically viable. People convert vast swathes of land to support GM seeds that IMO are only fit for Biofuel, not for human consumption.
And as for alternatives? People are seriously looking at Algae based biofuels right now. Is it economical? Not while we're still destroying the worlds oil reserves... But we're probably going to run out of those fairly soon and fusion's not an option (yet or in the near foreseeable future).
There's enough capacity to make huge salty-algae fuel farms without losing any farming land.
Anyway, if you don't like conventional biofuels, you can always run your car on peanuts...
That was, afterall, the original idea.
GrpA
I'm always surprised to see comments like this...
You've clearly never used Biodiesel in your life and have no idea what you're talking about.
1. ALL Biodiesel I've heard of has significantly lower emissions and also less harmful emissions that diesel. It doesn't take much of a search to confirm that, so please tell me which biodiesel you think produces more greenhouse gases than regular diesel.
2. There doesn't have to be a negative impact of biodiesel on the environment. In fact, a lot of commercial biodiesel is made from used vegetable oil that's recycled. ... That's actually a useful thing.
If everyone started using it, then you need to make lots which means using some agricultural land to make it... but it's still better than using crude oil to make the stuff.
3. What? What a lot of rubbish. Most biodiesel (commercial) is 98% as much energy as Diesel... I used it for three months and had almost no change of fuel economy.. 27mpg in a 1980's JEEP. That's better than twice the economy you get from a Petrol Jeep.
2% is NOT 50%... I've never heard of Biodiesel being 50% worse... Are you thinking of a petrol substitute? Even Ethanol isn't nearly that bad.
Also, some biodiesel, notably Palm/Coconut based not only has 1/100th the emissions of normal diesel, it also has 20% more energy...
That means for the same tankful, you get 20% more range, 20% more power or 20% more torque...
Do some research before you go talking about facts...
I've used the stuff, bought commercially, in an unmodified Jeep. (Same diesel engine it came out of the US factory with in 1982)... The only drawback is that it's a little harder to start in the cold.
On the positive side, it provided better lubrication and smelt better too.
But I got sligtly improved fuel economy so the stuff I was buying was probably slightly better than normal diesel.
GrpA.
Actually, most salt-affected land is inland and it's completely dead... No plant life exists there at all...
Salinity kills the plants... All of them... It's all just salt-encrusted mud with dead tree branches sticking out of it...
And they already use dead salt-lakes to produce algae-based biodiesel for about half of the current price of diesel.
GrpA.
FTA: Since biofuels frequently lead to greater emissions than either diesel or gas,
That's not really true... Using Biodiesel can result in 75% less CO2 emissions, at the exhaust pipe.
Some Biodiesels, eg, based on Coconut oil, are incredibly low on emissions.
People who claim biodiesel releases more CO2 are making an argument industry wide, including the converting of existing land not used for agriculture to produce biofuels.
Which is a little dishonest, because there are other technologies being developed that make use of badly salt-affected land to produce Biofuel. (Algae based production)
These technologies actually improve the situation and make use of land that otherwise cannot be used at all.
GrpA
Easy solution... I did something like this a long time ago.
We used to split our upstream into "Priority" and "Non-priority" and all users went into "Non-Priority"
When we gave them a real-time "price" meter... It had a button and a small display that showed how much your bill was for the month.
Use the service at non-priority and the $$$ ticked over slowly.
But hit the "Turbo" button, it added your IPs to the priority stream and the $$$ scream over and you get a big speed boost. Great for businesses who used it.
We only ever tried it in beta while we had significant oversubscription due to limited availability of bandwidth at the time, but we noticed a few strange effects.
First, people just liked pressing the button. They would go on, off, on, off while waiting for anything.
Second, it was instant gratification - you hit th e button and your download speed goes straight up... Very effective and you know it's going faster because the $$$ tick over faster.
Thirdly, the level of satisfaction was directly influenced by the speed the $$$ ticked over... We accidently released a buggy version under Beta where the $$$ ticked over at ten times the rate.
It turned out to be the most popular and people started requesting it after we fixed the bug in the subsequent version... Seems that if they got charged more, the mental connection was that it was faster.
Anyway, then bandwidth prices came down and we just got more bandwidth, and all the beta testers moaned when we turned off their turbo buttons...
We weren't actually charging the beta testers for the button at the time, but they were all willing to pay for the service, because they loved being able to see at all times (through a small widget-like interface) exactly what they were spending.
GrpA
The defendant had better hope never to see:
Officer Vaughan Ettienne's MySpace "mood" set to "vigilante"
GrpA
Seems you have to stand spread-eagle and shout "Power Extreme" to start it up :(
GrpA
I see you've played Knifey Spooney before.
GrpA
I've seen this done differently.
An image created as millions of radials. The image itself was on the computer but it was optically captured.
Also, the distance from the origin to each point was captured, so each pixel had a distance from the origin, a vector and a color.
The result was a 3-D image that could appear exactly as someone would view it. You could even adjust for optical properties of photographic equipment (including our eyes).
I suppose you could even project it back onto a curved surface if you wanted to.
The only thing it lacked was resolution, but the results were pretty good. It was being developed at a local University about 10 years ago.
I suppose the credit is due to the guys who did it, but since your criteria for the Nobel prize is only suggesting it, I guess I qualify. Please send me your prestigious award! :)
David
I worked for a company like that once. It had a 1-week notice period so it didn't have to wait to get rid of people.
That tells you something about the company.
So when I gave in my notice, they dropped a new project on my desk and told me to have it completed by the end of the week. Basically they were angry that I dared to leave them when they refused to give me a raise they promised me.
I completed the project in one week and left on Friday, thinking pulling off a design project (encrypted pin-pad that ran of scavenged power from a serial port) in my last week would leave me in good standing.
Two months later, they were still unable to find a replacement to do the next project and asked me to come in on a weekend and help them out.
They even got my friends who worked there to make the call.
I asked my friends to get me an invoice number. (Why? So I can bill them....)
My friends called back that night and said the manager was furious. He expected me to do it for free (ie, if I didn't ask, he didn't have to pay was his attitude)... Seems he had been vilifying me in the intervening weeks too.
Four years later, I had some important email come to me regarding them and passed it back to them.
Spoke to my friends again. The manager was still vilifying me to the employees and several of the employees who knew it was all lies were threatened into silence.
Bottom line? Anyone who will threaten you like that is bad news.
The term is Sociopath.
You can't bargain with a sociopath. You can't win. No matter what you do. They already hate you just for leaving and nothing will remedy that - not even staying.
So just meet your legal obligations and go.
And be glad that you found out the truth.
GrpA
2035, US budget cutbacks, shuttle still in use...
Sounds like they've brought in experts to make their new game seem plausible :)
GrpA
Take a long length of cable (or fiber, but cable is fine) and turn it into memory...
Give them an appreciation for how much of an ethernet frame is actually in transit over 100m of ethernet at any one time. (about 33 bits). Teach them to take Ethernet cards apart and use the circuits in them to build a complete memory unit.
Make them develop their own memory - enough to store their name, using common components, eg, using sound waves or similar to store data. You can even store data as mechanical waves in a spring with transducers.
Use high frequency programmable pulse generators to gate image tubes so you can use light to build a three dimensional image (like LIDAR) with a camera. (You can build LIDARs too, but that usually requires complex mechanical components).
Having a concept of how dynamic things can be can be useful. Most people tend to have static minds - eg, we see things in a fixed state.
Thinking of things as dynamic can be a useful skill to gain.
Also, don't forget practical recreation of physics experiments, such as measuring the speed of light with rotating mirrors and lasers (or even a candle)....
Reproducing an old experiment can also be incredibly valuable. Or better still, use modern technology to improve such an experiment to make it "classroom" sized.
GrpA
The premise was that the smaller pieces were as much danger as the larger pieces. A piece of copper wire 2mm in diameter and 5mm long travelling at just 10 times the speed of sound has as much kinetic energy as an M16 round and many times the penetration capacity.
Needless to say, the speeds involved are MUCH MUCH FASTER than this, so that little tiny piece of wire is more powerful than a 50 caliber round in reality.
But as you'll recall, they couldn't clean up everything, so they tended to tackle whatever was the biggest threat.
GrpA.
Have a magic show... Have your assistant "Show" two padlocks to the audience and demonstrate how they are both solid...
That's closed-source.
Now pass the padlocks around for everyone to test them... Suprise, one of them opens with a little effort... And you can see the lock has been filed back.
That's open source.
In a closed source model, you don't get to verify the security yourself, so you're trusting the vendor. In this case, the magician, the assistant, or his plant in the audience.
In an open source model, you can make up your own mind based on being able to actually see what's going on. You can test the padlock.
If someone mentions that even with proprietary software you can "inspect" things with an agreement, point out others who don't have the same agreement might spot things you missed, then give the better padlock to an "outsider" who has a "standard" key for it... This demonstrates that not everyone knows where to look
for the vulnerabilities and only when many eyes work together can you be sure that it's really secure.
Real-world analogs work particularly well :)
GrpA
Why do they call it the sixth sense?
Wouldn't tenth sense be a better claim? (albeit marketting)
What really annoys me about this is that there are already nine recognized physical senses, two interoceptive ones, six exteroceptive and two feedback senses.
I still can't understand why some who claim to be scientists still think in terms of the limited "5 senses" model which has been outdated for more than a century.
GrpA
Why make the decision yourself?
Send an email to the directors just confirming this is what they wish to do and that they don't want you to take any action on this matter.
Then it's not really your problem anymore.
Passing the buck works both ways :)
GrpA