For readers from outside the Buddhist context, it's worth noting that the above comment is written from an entirely Mahāyāna perspective. For example, it isn't true that "every Buddhist tradition agrees that all living beings possess Buddha nature," that's a very specifically Mahāyāna idea that arose centuries after the death of the mendicant Gotama who is known as the Buddha.
The concept of "religion" as it is meant in the modern context is only a few centuries old, as is the idea of "Buddhism", but to the extent that we can think of the teachings of the Buddha as a religion, it's probably most helpful to think of Mahāyāna and Theravāda as different "religions." I frankly think that the Vajrayāna subset of Mahāyāna probably is best thought of as a different "religion" as well, but it's not my area and I wouldn't suggest anyone take my thoughts on that topic with any great heft.
Your reference, NextDNS's discussion of their approach and how it differs from others, is from 2019 and no longer correctly represents how pihole works. Pihole has handled this since release 5.0.
Have you ever actually looked at the Schrödinger equation? [1] It's pretty simple. If you've had freshman physics, you can learn enough to derive it in a matter of days or at most weeks. There's not a lot of room in there for the kind of thing you are suggesting.
It's much more plausible that the uncomfortable human-centric thing we need to let go is the idea that our perceptions about macroscopic reality should be indicative of how things actually are.
> open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free
but since you seem to actually be trying to discuss this in a thoughtful way, please note that we're not given a choice between free software that takes time and expertise to use and maintain vs closed software that takes no time or expertise to maintain. To mimic your original phrase, Windows 10 Pro is only $199 if your time and expertise is free. Going further, in my experience it's often been the case that the free software takes less time and less expertise to use and maintain.
Also, it's worth mentioning that you are conflating two different things, open source software and free software, a distinction that often doesn't matter but is central when the point at hand is the ethics of free-as-in-freedom software vs non-free software, a distinction the term open source was deliberately created to elide. You are also conflating free-as-in-freedom with free-as-in-beer by opposing the "software is only freedom-free" with "your time and expertise are free-as-in-beer free".
Finally it's not clear to me why you went on to address the pragmatics of non-free hardware or the fact that human effort is necessary to build computers, maintain distros, write kernels etc. Is there a claim that it's unethical to try to run free software on the hardware that you have, or that free(dom) software must always be provide without cost on hardware that is both free(dom) and without cost? If not, then computer users can still spend a small amount of money, relative to utility, to buy a computer that runs free(dom) software.
I'm not disputing your claims that accessibility software on Windows or iOS is better than that on Linux, because I don't know the space. It's an unrelated argument, afaict. To illustrate this, simply imagine that some government or corporation had decided to make high-quality accessibility software available under a free license. (I am reminded of Intel's work supporting Dr. Hawking.) You wouldn't conclude from this that all your previous thoughts about free and open source software vs closed/commerical software were wrong, I assume.
You seemingly make a strong, baseless, and unscientific ontological claim, saying that we have one set of mathematical formalisms in our theoretical model that are "really real" and others that are not "really real". Surely the word "virtual" can no more be used to support this claim than the word "imaginary" can be used to distinguish the reality of real and complex numbers.
>Copyright holder could give someone else authorisation to sue on their behalf, e.g., through a license.
They can't assign the bare right to sue. To have standing the plaintiff will need to hold at least one of the exclusive rights in 17 U.S. Code § 106 aiui. Cf Righthaven cases, Silvers v Sony Pictures
> Charles Babbage recognized the performance penalty imposed by ripple-carry and developed mechanisms for anticipating carriage in his computing engines.
It's not at all unusual for loanwords to get different meanings when they are adopted. Wikipedia gives this lovely example:
The English word Viking became Japanese バイキング (baikingu), meaning "buffet", because the first restaurant in Japan to offer buffet-style meals, inspired by the Nordic smörgåsbord, was opened in 1958 by the Imperial Hotel under the name "Viking".
