Re: Never mind the source of this box
When it was $7,500 no one seemed to have a problem. When it's $600K, woah, huge problem. Well golly gee whiz business and especially economically illiterate securobods, this is a perfect example of an unmet/pentup consumer demand (in ecology, unfilled ecological niche.) They just might get rewarded for this insight which, the last time I bothered to see anything non-geeky like a business news channel, is what's supposed to happen!
Hell, I might get one to drop a small reward in their laps. Crazy, but I do that about once a month just because, as hardware and especially app developers need encouragement sometimes.
In order to actually discuss this rationally you really need to expense each operational and logistical step, on a PER UNIT basis, and then perhaps compare that to historical R&D combined with FIRST-RUN expenditures on a RISK-WEIGHTED basis. I hate shouting at the group via the keyboard while foaming at the mouth. I usually reserve that for political and business news channels. But this is something that a LOT of people just don't get and usually stumps so-called experts.
Most (95+%) of these projects fail, miserably, even the enterprise level firms too. There must be a method to why anyone would build the first, let alone the first few, iteration(s) of anything. It's that when you do hit on something on the scale of an iPhone or perhaps this, the rewards are on a completely overwhelming scale.
To my fellow securobods. We've railed and torn our hair out over the NSA, 'hackers', etc., until most people are keeping a nervous eye cast our direction. The pieces were already there, hardware and software. Hell, the software is F/OSS! If you're so smart, where's yours? And if these people fall flat on their faces, they've identified a profit center. Otherwise, STFU.