You have entirely failed to prove your point. The OPs claim was that "No bank or financial institution will ever be able to do as much harm to a population as a bad government", not that banks cannot ever do harm. In order to prove that, you'd have to show that the Panic of 1857 was more harmful that attrocities
  like these.

What actually happened, from the article: she thinks a colleague forged results, and spent 14 years and $200,000 voluntarily pursuing court action, which repeatedly found there was no wrong-doing. She was not fired, was not fined, was not imprisoned.

The summary's deliberately phrased to be inflammatory, and imply that she was persecuted for whistle-blowing.

Obviously, this only emphasises the need for more surveillance.

That's due to selection bias. The nations that China won against aren't nations any more, and you therefore don't consider them when looking at China's war record.

That was always going to be true.

Persecution increases pressure, which drives evolution. Criminals are under a survival-pressure to avoid detection, which means they will actively be looking for/experimenting with ways to avoid detection. The general population is under no such pressure, and so adopts more slowly. I'm willing to bet that child pornographers, or other criminals whose crime is generally one of communication, adopted encryption before the rest of the general population, too, for the same reason.

They received 90% of their total income from Google. By any reasonable definition, they were funded by Google.

What obligations that funding puts them under is a separate question. There may be no strings attached to that money, but even so, it gives Google leverage, even if that leverage isn't utilised. The question is whether you can be considered "independent" when one of the main actors in the market has that much leverage over you.

90% funded by Google doesn't really scream "independant" to me.

Personally, I think Google keeps the money flowing out of fear that if the Mozilla Foundation shuts down, somebody with a clue might turn Firefox into a competitive browser again.

Here is the patent in question. Please show me the "many" claims other than the rectangular shape that demonstrate the OPs "gross mischaracterization".

Once you spend them, your transaction (and your pseudonym) become part of the blockchain, and you are no longer anonymous (but are still pseudonymous). That is, anyone who checks the blockchain can find the id of who sent the coins. Anonymity relies on whether you can stop anyone making a connection between your blockchain id (pseudonym) and your actual identity - and you're correct, this is where things like Tor come in.

Cracking bitcoin wouldn't help the feds track down anyone. All it would let them do is print free money, which they can pretty much do anyway. Bitcoin isn't anonymous; it's pseudonymous. The NSA can, with no effort at all, find out your Bitcoin pseudonym. Then they just need to associate your that with your real identity, which they can do via their traditional means of spying on everything that happens.

Because although they gave it the NSA, they still don't want the Chinese government to compromise it?

Also, not.

Sadly, you're reaping what others have sown. The mainstream content industry fought so hard against electronic distribution, that it normalised piracy. I'd bet if iTunes had predated Napster, you wouldn't have half the problem you do.

On the other hand, I do know companies that have made money from electronic content; they ran Kickstarters, and by the time their product was available to pirate, they'd already been paid for their time developing it. Not a model that will work for everyone, but it seems to be a more workable model than the current one, which relies on unenforceable laws.

Yeah, I'm sure it's because they have free childcare, and not because don't they send in a SWAT team every time someone lights up a joint.

Australia would like to talk to you about ANZAC Day.