There definitely must be some approval mechanism because otherwise cops will query personal details to track their wives' lovers and what-not, but their current mechanism sounds way too unwieldy, so not only cops were lazy but also bureaucrats.

You're just wrong and being obstinate about it. Why should I buy into artificial Russia - West conflict when it's already long obsolete? There's one humanity and there's no reason for any national states to exist. We can be one unified Humanity now, thanks to Internet that largely abolishes barriers to communication. There may be different viewpoints on governance, but it doesn't map to nationalities. But pretty much all what Putin's government does would be ignored if he was, say, French president. And such double-standard is what I abhor. PR efforts like demonization of Putin are part of political infighting between national states and are harmful for humanity as the whole let alone for poor sods that happened to be citizens of Russia.

Western countries constantly stir confrontations with each other. So Russia is no difference. In fact if you look closely there's no such thing as unified west, only some groupthink Putin attempts to became part of.

Where do you see apologism? I called him a western parrot without own vision. No apologism of Putin here. He's just a figurehead of various business elites. Which are prone to infighting like above article demonstrates.

But practice shows that they're making enough money to make games that have multi-million budgets and less play value than average Tetris clone. So I'd say they get more than they deserve, even with piracy..

Emotional nonsense like this is exactly the thing I'm tired of. Way to put out fire with gasoline, bro!

They already got rewarded with their salaries, duh.

All those 'businessmen' tend to dump all results of their incompetence and infighting on government. Always government at fault in Russia, even for things it's not remotely involved in. Local cultural flavor. Pretty much everyone has proven and detailed theory that the government is after him personally! It's easier to pretend to be Sakharov than getting actual work done.

Also Dunning - Kruger effect applies to selection of government officials too, especially elected ones. Anyone remotely skilled would stay out of government and procrastinate. Putin is a lot better than he could be(at least he's not near senile like Yeltsin), but mostly parroting western ideas of governance.

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