> 1. When you go to a restaurant, do you consider every dish for which you
are not given the recipe + the right to modify and redistribute it a "maybe
poison"?
That's not quite the same thing. When you're given food at a restaurant,
you're not given a recipe that you're not allowed to change; you're just
given the result of a recipe. Visiting a restaurant (or eating processed
food) is more like SaaSS than proprietary software. Proprietary software is
like if they give you a recipe, but in a form that you can't read; you have
to insert the recipe into some sort of complicated machine that makes the
food for you, using processes that are nothing like the ones you would use to
prepare food.
> How do you know 6*8=48?
Math is purely a human invention; it's just that this human invention is
useful for understanding quantities. 6*8=48 because that's the rules of math:
add eight to itself six times. With that rule, you get 48. It's the same with
every number, and no, you don't have to verify them all. You can verify for
yourself that the rules and methods yield consistent results, and that's one
of the things math classes are supposed to teach. It's actually kind of
lamentable that when faced with the hard stuff, we resort to calculators
without even teaching students about the manual methods.
