Yes. And that doesn’t excuse it; a moderator should be better than the community they moderate.

“childish trolls in this community”, “this community is full of trolls”, “90% of folks here dont get the issue and rather troll”

The people who coined the term “open source” are the same people who founded OSI. If you don’t like their term, don’t use it.

It doesn’t actually contribute to the discussion.

Yes. You are free to distribute it in any way you wish. Some methods, like printing books, have a raw material cost. You can choose to pay someone to distribute via that method, or if you really want to, you can do the printing yourself at no cost but your own time and effort.

If you don’t want to give it away for free, then just don’t make it FOSS. It’s that simple. People use free-libre licenses because they want to use that license model. If you don’t want to, then don’t.

Depends. What are you planning on using a VPN for?

The employer doesn’t claim any intellectual property rights over my work product. I’m not able to find anywhere that the proprietary vendor does either.

You’re probably in the clear. Legalese isn’t so opaque that you would miss a section about this.

Of course, that doesn’t stop them from suing you if they decide your work could be very profitable for them.

Even at big companies, devs get flexibility because they need to run a bunch of random stuff that can look sketchy to security software.

Sometimes it can’t connect to the server (which is a completely stupid necessity).

That’s where it does the voice processing. The only processing it does on-device is the wake word and taking commands. Actually figuring out what you mean is done in The Cloud. Doing that on-device would not only make the devices significantly more expensive, but they would also rapidly become outdated.

The rest of your complaints are valid and I’ve experienced them all myself to boot.

Overkill and overpriced. If you’re on Windows, bitlocker is enough. If you’re on Linux, LUKS is enough.

I’ve used Apricorn drives at previous jobs. They’re cool and very much fit for purpose, but I’d have a hard time justifying the significant price premium when software is nearly as good, free, and works with any drive.

It wouldn’t be significantly different from any other access method.

yet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Sounds like a weak argument. They’re not going to be inclined to operate a local ML system just for one or two people.

I would see if you can get a quote for locally-hosted transcription software you can run on your own, like Dragon Medical. Maybe reach out to your IT department to see if they already have a working relationship with Nuance for that software. If they’re willing to get you started, you can probably just use that for dictation and nobody will notice or care.

What, exactly, are your privacy concerns about this?

I would expect any browser to properly render a page, regardless of platform. Are you sure the page is mobile-friendly? Why do you say it’s “not great”?

That’s not busy work. Busy work, as explained in the article, is work that doesn’t really accomplish anything, like re-folding towels that have already been folded. Or as I’ve had to do before, sweep a perfectly spotless sidewalk. Data validation is valid work.

How confident do you need to be? I don’t think I’ve seen any convincing evidence of any firmware spying in PC components.

Well, except the NSA’s Clipper chip, but I don’t think that really ever got implemented.

Long story short, I can’t use multiple monitor RDP because I have different resolution monitors and they are stacked 2x2 instead of all in a row.

Did you try setting them up as one big display across all four, instead of four little ones? I think that’s something you can do.

Does the multi-mon RDP thing work from a Windows client too? I’d be surprised if it did, Windows’ multi-monitor support is fairly lacking in my experience too.