What if there's another backdoor lurking in your VPN software? Why are you more confident in your VPN than SSH? Of those two pieces of software, which do you think has more eyes on it?
I would prefer to see these things enforced by culture and norms rather than laws and licenses. I don't want to have to parse legalese as part of my role as an engineer. I don't want companies to have to hire more lawyers to verify they can use software I wrote. I want them to be able to just use it, then contribute back after they've experienced using it. I don't want a restrictive license may prevent them from ever even trying my software in the first place. I want culture and norms that encourage the company to contribute to the project, not laws.
I’m the founder of a startup that has eliminated the issue you mention. Our documents-to-database service handles arbitrary rotation, skews, and offsets.
Example of it handling a scan of a document that’s rotated ~100 degrees and physically cut in half with scissors here: https://siftrics.com/hydra.html
That already happened, basically. Anyone who talks about the CIA in anything but a positive light is a "conspiracy theorist" (their words).
It's a criminal organization that has perpetrated an endless list of crimes against humanity, sponsored by the American taxpayer and undocumented money from terror campaigns. Now they have a happy little venture capital firm that invests in new tech, like google and facebook. What do you suppose the ROI is for those investments?
Regardless of what the science says, Fauci believed masks worked, and he engaged in a deliberate misinformation campaign with the goal of preserving PPE for medical staff.
People who have admitted publicly to engaging in a misinformation campaign are now considered to be the authorities against which dissenting views will be judged misinformation.
Sure it does. But lying about that as the reasons and saying masks don't work is misinformation. And that is what the government health officials said.
They intentionally engaged in a misinformation campaign. And now they are considered the authority against which any other opinion will be judged misinformation.
This is not what happened, not in the US anyway. Fauci, after the recommendations changed, admitted that masks were discouraged to prioritize them for first responders[1].
So we have government health experts publicly saying they engaged in misinformation. But they are the experts against which every other opinion is to be judged as misinformation.
I am not in favor or against Fauci or his comments (I am not even american), and I am not a linguist either so perhaps you can help me:
Is "not recommended" == "discouraged"?
"He also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE."
As far as I understand, 'discouraging' is to saying publicly "Do not buy masks" and 'not recommending' might be just that, as in, not saying "Go and buy a masks or you'll spread the disease".
He actively discouraged mask use. Fauci and the Surgeon General said wearing a mask was more likely to get you sick because you would touch your face more.
"You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider," Adams said. "Folks who don't know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus," he added.
Thanks. I don't know the whole story, but I cannot find Fauci's name (ctrl + F) in the last article you linked. It mentions a Surgeon and a Vice President.
Surgeon General Jerome Adams and Vice President Mike Pence have urged people against buying and wearing masks.
This may be the only way to scale a service that is free to users. But once you are selling a product to paying customers, those customers need to be at a different tier with real customer support.
Those paying customers are already incredibly unlikely to be spammers. They cannot be handled the same way free accounts are.
This is a cultural problem as much as an economic imperative. Apple and Google both run app stores with distribution rules, but Apple will bend over backwards to try and get you in compliance with their rules, while Google will just delete your Gmail. I've also heard far fewer reports of Apple iCloud accounts getting summarily deleted compared to Google or Facebook.
What grounds would a slave, living in a time and place where slavery is legal, have to argue in defense of their freedom?
If you are willing to recognize that society has had an incorrect view of rights in the past, you must recognize that there is a standard beyond society to appeal to.
In the case of actual slaves living in such a time, they still appealed to society both directly and through government (another abstraction,) because not even authoritarian societies are absolutely uniform, and societal constructs are mutable.
Unless you want to invoke divine will as that "standard beyond society," humanity and its arbitrary social constructs are all you have available to deal with, and some problems can't be reduced to objective and absolute terms as a result.
You could invoke "nature" but nature doesn't recognize rights. No creature has a natural right to food, safety or property. Nature engages in warfare, cruelty, violence, rape and slavery with abandon, and without even the pretext of morality. Even anarchists wouldn't want to live in a world governed entirely by natural law.
Reducing the options to divine or arbitrary is a false dilemma. Math is discovered/invented by humans, but it is far from arbitrary.
A slave will appeal to society because society has the power. But if the society does not listen to the appeals of the slave, we can still judge that the slave is correct and the society is wrong. And that judgement is not arbitrary.
> What grounds would a slave, living in a time and place where slavery is legal, have to argue in defense of their freedom?
The same grounds that we use to argue against slavery today. Just because the society around you doesn't believe certain rights are real doesn't mean you can't personally buy into them. "Rights are a societal construct" doesn't mean that nobody has a right to believe different things from society. It just means that our conception of rights derive from societal consensus, not a higher power or objective source, and conversely that there is no higher power or objective source we can invoke to override society's mores.
> If you are willing to recognize that society has had an incorrect view of rights in the past, you must recognize that there is a standard beyond society to appeal to.
No, you can just criticize them using the today's moral standards. You can be sufficiently committed to your moral standards to be willing to impose them on other people without simultaneously believing that those moral standards are a objective property of the natural universe.
Hume's is-ought guillotine is a thing. A normative statement does not magically become an positive fact just because that normative statement is an extremely strongly held (e.g. slavery is bad). The notion of inalienable rights is a rhetorical trick that lazily conflates the normative and the positive.
> "Rights are a societal construct" doesn't mean that nobody has a right to believe different things from society.
Unless society doesn't recognize your right to believe differently, no?
The is-ought problem does not rule out the existence of normative facts. It simply states that they can't be proven by positive facts. You seem to be trying to rule out the existence of normative facts by appealing to positive facts.
Why does believing society had an incorrect view of rights in the past entail such a thing? It's compatible both with believing that society today has a correct view of rights and the opposite, believing that society today has an incorrect view of rights - even if that view is different than before.
Having an opinion doesn't make that opinion an objective fact!
Having an opinion doesn't make that opinion fact. But if you say that one opinion is in any way superior to another opinion then you are recognizing that there is something to measure those opinions against. There is some truth that we are trying to discover through reason.
Everyone who works on Linux must rebase and squash commits so that every commit builds and passes tests, and does a single thing. More about how Linux uses git:
