Hundred of thousands dollars for mere right to operate a taxi car is nonsense. Anyone who has such money has better things to do, like lending it to others. Such lenders are rentier and don't contribute useful work to society. It DOES make sense to test possible taxi drivers wrt safety concerns but medallion system doesn't achieve this goal. You can lend them to anyone and they can be inherited. Thus absolutely anyone can end up having one.

That's only one of possibilities. Also, just someone may crack VPN provider's systems and install a tap to record all logs(same is possible with tor, but it requires most of exit nodes to be compromised which is kinda hard). And you won't even know about it. You can use i2p for torrents.

Why is this modded insightful instead of funny? Pretty much all debian based distro's(like ubuntu) can be considered forks and there's ridiculous amount of those..

That might be fine in theory, but who knows in what agreements in the future those governments will engage in? Perhaps it'll even be secret and you won't even know it. I think tor is a better choice. It's distributed and not bound to any particular company or country.

VPN providers can and do share identity of their clients with the government.

Inventions like that are in the past for USA. Now they'll only develop creationism.

Because USA fails even more than Russia :P

I didn't imply that there's no damage to society in this case. I just don't trust their discovery methods. He could be either assisting real criminals or some people who want to avoid false positives, all sources here are too tendentious to make this determination. If he was just helping people to avoid false positives then there's no harm to society definitely.

This question is a moot one. If court, judge and jury can be made to believe in polygraph, they can be made to believe in anything. Why do you ask me this question when I even doubt that the deed in question have happened? You want to treat my answer as implicit admission that it did? Very clever sophistry, that! :P

That entire indictment could be a fabrication, they could easily do that given that they tolerate the polygraph sham(it's just a ploy to elicit an admission, and often results in false positives). Fabricating a case is nothing compared to that. Any government agency that condones frauds like that doesn't deserve any sort of trust whatsoever.

"illegal to lie to government official" - you generalize much. Lying itself isn't outlawed, only deception with the effect of damage to society. If there's no damage to society, there's no crime. It may be argued that fake tests like polygraphs don't serve the good of society and bypassing them doesn't harm it, thus it's not a crime.

"you" in this case being the lead developer. Anyone else who is doing this, is performing development work, and should be considered either a developer or an incompetent who is micromanaging something which is not his direct responsibility. For example, Debian's re-vote about init systems is definitely example of micromanagement, maybe not by a non-technical pointy-haired boss, but end result is the same.

Really? You really think you could tell them what tools to use building your house? Only by choosing a different team maybe. No matter if paid or no we're part of community, payments is just a way to manage scarce resources like time or materials.

In a proper community people's jobs are specialized. If you hire someone to build a house for you you don't tell him tools from which manufacturer to use in construction, likewise you don't tell which initsystem/DE a distro maintainer should use, or which IDE/editor/compiler a developer should use.

The problem is that users can't be allowed to decide which desktop environment or init system to use. They can only request particular features and then developers decide which DEs or whatever to use to implement them. That's the only way it can work. Otherwise you'll have no developers and maintainers, period. And who will implement stuff then?