In an effort to get ever more taxes for doing absolutely nothing

This is an ignorant remark. Compared with most governments and their institutes, the United Nations receive relatively little money compared with what they actually do. Read a few pages from http://www.dhf.uu.se/publications/development-dialogue/erskine-barton-childers-for-a-democratic-united-nations-and-the-rule-of-law/

But about the actual article: Of course it is a very bad idea to tax the Internet, certainly taxes on trafic since this can only affect net neutrality.

WTF? I am from another country than the United States of America and I am offended by this statement. What about using the phrase world citizen or human being? You watch too much 24.

DHS? TSA? Please, write out these acronyms. Not all /. readers live in the USA or have Wikipedia plugged into their brains.

Don't twist the words, the exact quote is:

So he does not say "funded by the public", but "funded [...] for the public good", etc.

Based on the actual quote you can give an argument for that this person is still an ass. Indeed, large parts of the funding are from the public, and therefore any inventions^H, ahum, discoveries(!) should be "returned" to the public immediately. There is still a market, medicines can be made from non-patented discoveries. If this is not possible, we are even in deeper shit that I thought.

Nevermind, the desktop variant is indeed not Linux based. (I should have read the FAQ before I posted.)

At least the server edition is based on the Linux kernel according to the about page.
Furthermore:

So it is also, at least for a significant part, GNU based.
(Note that people often talk about GNU/Linux if they say Linux, so to be certain I show that it is also GNU based.)

Even though there are more obvious problems, I believe that the freedom to study and test the system is essential to any democratic voting system.

From the article:

I do not see how this would be ironic. I think the author does not understand that when people talk about a "Linux-based server" they virtually always mean a server with GNU/Linux.

This might be so, but this is not just about having the source code. It is about user freedom, as Stallman would put it. You might make a similar argument for free software, but that is less trivial. Then you will touch upon something fundamental like user freedom, which more people might care about than you now presume in your current argument.

Indeed, in any discussion where probability is relevant, people tend to say stupid things. Think for instance about insurances, the lottery, gambling, the weather, or the injust use of the word 'coincidence'.

The definition of truth is not the only problem with the GP's vision. If companies would be as truthful as they can, they wouldn't look like the best anymore and people would buy from another company, one which is less truthful. Capitalism, regardless of how you feel about it, is about trying to be the best by lying. The only alternative which is compatible with the GP's idea is something else than capitalism.

It might just be a convention, or netiquette, but I wish that people would adhere to these kind of conventions, instead of less important things like minor copyright infringement.

Say $1 is too much for a song for me, if I then download is for no money at all, this does not affect the profit.

For a car this is different, because a car is a physical object. If I take a car for free, it cannot be sold to another person.

That is indeed an overstatement. I do not like Flash anyway, but do have gnash installed, which does not display the movie.

The fact that one can get it working on GNU/Linux by installing proprietary software is not an advantage.