Suffice to say that I've acquaintances who refuse to work legitimately above ground (only under table) after expatriating. I have relocated myself and my business away from a tax happy, regulation happy, business destroying state. More than half a decade later, I'm still finding out there's another bureau I didn't inform I moved, I pay those fees, and fix that issue and there's another one. The DMV has three different branches who needed notifying and want to know my new address, my new business location, my new Drivers License, and everything else. And that's just the DMV!!!! Had a fleet of trucks there with DOT numbers. They tell me I'm still liable for the fees and taxes they come up with for the one truck that I kept, because I didn't re-register it in another jurisdiction and file an empty tax form for fuel taxes for the last half decade that I lived somewhere else. "But I don't run trucks anymore, I shut down that particular subsidiary and closed it down before I left." "That doesn't matter, we need forms, and a change of address form, with your new address, new truck registration, new title in the new jurisdiction, etc." "I'm not operating it as a commercial DOT numbered vehicle, its just sitting on a ranch and never sees highway use anymore, just a memento, really." "Well sir, I've told you what you need to do. Penalties will keep accruing until you file those forms and pay those late fees." (So not renewing your business in their jurisdiction is no longer enough, you have to notify every single department that might possibly conceive of a reason to nail you with a fee, especially in tax happy jurisdictions with fees for every leaf of toilet paper you might use.) So what I need to do is pay them another 200 bucks, plus get the vehicle retitled, plus pay them another 20 bucks to change my address in yet another of their computers, which apparently didn't match the regular DMV one, and pay yet another vehicle tax to license plate a vehicle that will never be on a state or federal highway (I pay to maintain the road the truck gets used on, private road and property.) All so it matches their regulations and rules. And they still find me "liable" for their taxes. Before that all got sorted out, they put a hold on my license so I couldn't get it replaced in another state. I fail to see how the feds would be any nicer in jurisdictions that are friendly to them. Hell, switzerland caved. Last I read in financial news some years back, US citizens aren't as welcome at swiss banks as we used to be. We're a source of unnecessary paperwork and compliance requests. So unless you moved to Zimbabwe, Russia or China (and Russia's kind of iffy) one has to wonder how far those guys could hound you, given their endless resources if they had a financial reason to dig into your pockets (i.e. you had a business here before you left and relocated abroad.)

Can you tell me its any different if you leave the country? Last I remember, if you fail to tell every single department that might nail you with a fee, that you've moved, and some of them want PROOF of your new location, so you aren't just vanishing from their system, they say you're still liable. Its not what I've heard from others, its what I've witnessed first hand. What I heard from others just served to reinforce what I already knew from my own experiences. So while the new state I moved to is tax friendly and does everything it can to encourage business to move here and flourish, the old state clings to every dollar it can steal from me, via all sorts of rules, regulations, and other bureaucratic loop holes. Given that DC passes 40 thousand new regulations and statutes every year (CFR's are getting ridiculously long) or more... I'd say they're far more paperwork happy than the last state I stayed in.

So when you call me a zealot... clarify. I'm only zealous in my disgust of unearned authority, undeserved authority and people demanding money from me by force and machination, without providing me with any service I desire or recognize. Far too many are cloaked in the form of authority which is rarely anything but a self granted license to abuse others to gratify their egos. Or did you leave the country for some other reason? The other guys had a prettier flag and a nicer pledge of allegiance, the police weren't brutal enough? Not enough secret prisons? What drove you to expat? Obviously you found this place far more odious than I do, or you wouldn't have left.

And if you follow the money, you'd notice that a vast majority (we're talking what, 85%??) of code and funding for Linux at large is what? Red Hat.

I suspected connections to the spooks ever since they were in Arlington (you don't work or base your company near DC unless you want to stick your hands into that particular cookie jar all the way to your elbows.)

That said, much as I used to like Debian, and Ubuntu, lets not forget that Ubuntu forks over your search terms for sale. Unity is shaite (at least from my personal perspective) Gnome 3 is hated (don't know why, Unity is worse) KDE 4 is still as unstable as KDE3 used to be, but at least it resembles Windows far more so users who hate Microsoft can at least stay interface luddites until the sun dies of heat death.

Seriously... am I the only one who sees the hypocrisy here? Also, pulse audio sucks, great, wondrous. Am I the only one who notices that it makes no difference for VLC? I mean, I'm not exactly a netflix freak, but lets face it. There is NOTHING one can watch as videos online if one is a stickler to clean licensing. Neither Red Hat nor Debian off the bat are worth a shaite for the average consumer whom we as Linux IT people might want to lure away from Microsoft. Know why I renew my MS credentials each year? Because the average consumer wants Windows. They don't know anything. They couldn't navigate Microsoft Word. If the icons change? Pfffeh. They panic and freak out. Your phone is ringing that you broke their PC. "What's this fox thing? I want my "internet" back!!!"

And for the record, I had to sit and rebuild an entire set of apparmor profiles because Debian's Iceweasel doesn't come with them, and the firefox ones need combing through so one might as well make new ones. Ridiculous? Obviously. Does Debian ship updated profiles? Hell no. Make your own. How many users used to sandboxie and firefox in windows will go through the trouble to mess around with apparmor (or selinux, which at least comes configured in Redhat and Suse.)

Sorry to say folks, but Linux wasn't supposed to be neocommunism. Linux was supposed to be freedom.



On the other hand, look at sourceforge. Filezilla, which used to be fast and had very good support for crypto certs, self signed and otherwise, if one checks the herdfiles now, it is now published by some company out of Tel Aviv, and bundled with spyware and browser hijacks when downloaded from sourceforge. Now I'm stuck forcing IIS for my clients who run windows and need an FTP server, because I'm not willing to risk having to clean spyware off of mission critical machines if (more likely "when") a filezilla server update runs the risk of pulling down some crap like that. And this is Sourceforge. The place many people automagically associate with Open Source and Linux. So, Linux will not succeed at all in the market place if we're stuck having to find ways to not make it a profitable thing.

Bitch as we might. Cleaning spyware off of computers accounts for 75% of Microsoft computer shop revenues. Sales of hardware and software?? For every copy of Windows I've sold in the last 3 years I've cleaned a dozen trojans. On Windows copies I buy in bulk from my distributor, I make about 5 bucks a copy... 15 if I gouge above the price at Walmart. Cleaning trojans? Well, it keeps Best Buy solvent at rates so ridiculous it makes one wanna barf. Almost a hundred bucks to put it on the bench?! Profit indeed! You do the math.

Either way, bitching about systemd doesn't solve anything. I've run Red Hat servers since before there was a contract one had to sign and pay for before grabbing a copy (before the RHEL/Fedora split.) I've used CentOS and supported myself. Hasn't let me down. I've also run properly pruned and configured Microsoft servers. I haven't been let down by that, either. Hell, I put together the Microsoft security team at my old shop. So, far as I can tell, to each his own. Nothing but that. If something speeds up the boot cycle, I'm all for it. How can someone sell Linux to a Windows client, or chase off a Microsoft shop if you're a linux shop, if all you can show them is that your OS starts in 2 minutes to desktop. The Windows 8 AMD A4 desktop starts in 5 seconds. The Windows 8 Intel Atom tablet starts in 4 to 8. Nevermind server startups. Once past the slow ass firmware, if your stuff starts faster I'm all for it. Bitch all you want, but Windows is eating up big market share. Either sharpen up, or end up like the Church. Having to make concessions to the scientists, even though you disagree with them, can't disagree with reality. But you can sell a different color of rosy colored glasses to the suckers. Is that what the Linux folks want to be? I don't. I couldn't care less if its SystemD or Upstart, or whatever. I remember when the only serious Linux around were RedHat and Debian and everything else was half assed crashy shit that needed five weeks of tweaking if one wanted to so much as watch a flash video or maybe an mpeg.

I just don't want to sell a product to people that starts slow and tell them "hey, your stuff will be more secure... mostly because you'll need to pay me to work for 2 days straight just to get the apps tweaked enough that I can emulate your windows apps. Viruses will definitely not run, but neither will your print drivers! And forget about scanning. Most vendors outside of HP, Brother and Canon won't even touch Linux until a product is a year old."

I want clean code. I want a solvent business plan. I want to do more than just have an OS that the users can mooch off the builders. If that's all we end up with, then we're doomed to the trash heap of history, as are all other insolvent ideas. If you can't produce enough to at least sustain yourself, you end up prey to those who can pay you... or in this case, your OS becomes the prey of those who can pay off the devs. For what its worth, Red Hat is solvent, and a solid company. That they have to sell out to the government, sure, the government has money to spend. Regardless of how they get it, both Microsoft and Redhat make money off of government sales. Until Linux users want to PAY for a product, rather than mooch... nothing will change and linux will remain a curiosity. Just like the Sharp Zaurus was, back in the day.

You said: Libertarians don't admit that because they typically don't admit to voting republican in the first place.

Ironically, corruption isn't needed on an "outside the system" basis, because the system is rigged so only the two main parties can really make a serious showing (except maybe New Hampshire because of the extremely strong libertarian presence there due to the freestate project, and take by difference, Wyoming, which also had its "free state project" but which only has one party, the Republicans, if you don't want to vote hard core socialist, you vote republican. Any other registration in Wyoming is just a political statement of no actual efficacy.)

The original statement is full of ignorance about how the US political system works. For elections, in most states, you are FORCED into "republican" or "democrat." In some jurisdictions they occasionally offer "independent" which basically just means your votes are discarded at count time.

The way to run for office, aside from funding issues is to get on a balot. Which means A, your party has to be endorsed by the state government (another term for it is accepted) and then you have to be approved by the state. Then you have to find a way to reach your target demographic and then persuade them to actually show up at primaries, otherwise you'll never even be remembered by November 5th. Most states don't recognize libertarians, constitutionalists or even a vague label like independent. As a result, when the election process starts, you're given the list of candidates for a "pre-election" voting process in which you ONLY vote for your party and are ONLY given their candidates to choose from, for any seat.

(Example: where I live, the only District Attorney to be voted for was a Democrat. There are less than a thousand registered democrats in an area with around ten thousand eligible voters, just by virtue of two wolves and one sheep voting on dinner, the man should have suffered a crushing defeat.)

So while many people may vote "no consent" (a little known "against all these guys" type thing that registers you're being taxed without representation) it didn't unelect that guy or block him from office. He was the only one running, so he got elected. For those of us who weren't Democrats, we saw an EMPTY District Attorney box/menu.

So in the primaries you get your "registered voter" party's list of candidates. Libertarians end up going republican because often times most actually libertarian candidates cannot run anything but republican. In most other places they can't get ON the ballot and very few people register as independent voters as they know despite the nobility and merit of the word "independent" what it actually means is "discarded before count."

Once the primaries are over (which most American voters don't know are also LOCAL elections), by virtue of two wolves and a lamb voting on dinner, you end up with a single candidate for each party, voted by the aforementioned majority rule, and all your local offices are also settled in the primaries.

I've seen some terrible candidates get elected over the years, all because a multitude of folks thought the local and candidate election was Nov 05 rather than primaries. Come 4 or 6 years later. They forgot. What's that saying about a nation of sheep begetting a government of wolves?

Remember, your primaries are state, county and city elections and national candidate selection. Rarely will a good candidate put on as good of a show as the authoritarian, tyranny loving psychopaths out there, and for good reason. Psychopaths know how to manipulate simpletons and get psychological and monetary rewards for successfully doing so (in english: they get off on it and get paid, double payday!)
There's a reason Nigerian scammers are rich enough to drive Ferraris.

Note: The author does not endorse the practice of voting to restrict other people's freedom (which is all this boils down to, these days) the author does endorse attempting it once in your life (after meeting and researching the candidates yourself) so you can see just how many EXCELLENT people get discarded either by voter ignorance or by system being rigged to keep them out.

You said:

How about this example: there's no law against me running a web server from my home, but Comcast won't let me. Nor will AT&T. Are they "quashing my right to free speech?" When the police show up and tell me I'm free to protest...over there, are they quashing my right to free speech?

***** Lets address Comcast first:

Comcast is a private company run by private people providing a voluntarily purchased service. You sound like you purchased the cheapest option and are upset that it is of less quality and permissiveness than their higher end service (for example most big ISP's now block port 25 so ignorant users won't end up running spam relays or intentional spam gateways.
(The fact that government with such excessive coercive power exists for Comcast to abuse and lock competitors out of certain areas is not Comcast's fault. The company's directors merely used all the fancy government tools that other control freaks created and made themselves rich using the tools. Government exists precisely so one group can dominate another. In ancient times, when the new roving marauders ruled a place they called taxes tribute, and didn't pretend to be as nice as governments do today, but be assured those positions of power over others attract the exact same psychology. More on that in the cop section.)

Oftentimes if you were wise enough to purchase from a smaller company, you can talk to the techs and tell them you run a webserver for business and they upgrade you to the business service, or you can tell them you run a webserver for fun and games and need them to lift the restriction. Often times, they will. Occasionally they'll talk to you long enough to figure out you know what you're talking about and remove the port block. DSL companies are well known for letting people do whatever with their specific line or otherwise dedicated bandwidth, unless it results in lawyer calls.

The main issue here is that you are free to walk away and they won't raid your house with paramilitary troops or take half your stuff as an exit tax. Its a tossup between people who are equally as likely to not even return the leased cablemodems, unless the company nailed them with an extra refundable fee upon receipt of used/old hardware.

***** Lets address the cops and government in general:

First off, you likely never got to CHOOSE a government, and one was thrust upon you before you were even born, merely by virtue of which fiefdom (now called "jurisdiction") you had the fortune or misfortune of being born upon... some won't even let you leave, others just track you wherever they can and extract more tribute from you. USA does this to you. If you expatriate and thus no longer derive "income" from US sources, they still hunt you down for ten years to tax you some more... in effect they nail you with a serious exit tax.

Either way, I strongly doubt you got offered a menu of services, a fee schedule and other options you likely got from Comcast but were too busy to read after they said "residential service comes with 50% off cable TV and HBO while business service costs twice and comes with nothing but the ability to run your server."

So in effect, with cops and governments, you are NOT free to walk away, or to switch to a government with better rules, or shop until you find one with better rules or acceptable rules. There aren't any. They, to some degree, all take your stuff and give it to their friends or preferred class of people. Some are more forceful than others.(See Taliban, See ISIS, see pretty much every authoritarian regime from China to the NYPD and LAPD.) Some pretend to be nicer than others.(See the nordic countries.) Government is always, and foremost, a purveyor of force, which most people religiously obey and assume is correct. (See "divine right of kings" taken to its logical conclusion.) Occasionally only as a "they did it to me, so I want it done to everyone else" syndrome. When the corrupt cops or thug cops show up and bully you into compliance, or curb stomp your neighbors and come over to confiscate your surveillance cameras after they screw up in a wrong address drug raid (very common these days) you are NOT free to walk away, free to refuse or free to prove your point and walk away. You are faced with armed strangers who may or may not be reasonable, but whose profession accords them about the same level of responsibility as a soldier in a combat zone. "You and your buddies first, rules and laws be damned." You are free to get detained for 30 minutes or arrested for 3 days, after which they officially have to charge you with a crime (the legal definition of which changes with the winds these days.) You cannot hire different cops or fire a scumbag cop. They can kill you and walk away, and they'll be put on leave with pay while it is investigated by their workout buddies or friends from the police union, after which a "acted according to departmental policy" will be the norm. If you bother to keep up on police abuses, they're becoming far more common in the west these days, and people are becoming far more willing to publicize them.

So the whole thing boils down to this:
ARE YOU FREE TO WALK AWAY?
Can you change the service level?
Are you free to dispose of this group's unwanted services and hire a different one?

Comcast = yes.
Cops and Governments = no.

Period. Mass graves and secret dissenter prisons are full of people who thought it was the other way around.

A note about the author:
Anyways, please note that I do not like governments and coercive mafias, nor Comcast and corrupt telcos. That's why I do my best to avoid doing business with corrupt telcos whenever I can. I don't have that luxury with governments, but I do my best not to cross paths with them except at property tax time and living in places where they minimally impact me while still maintaining a semblance of a decent life.