Does that make it a little more clear for you?

Personally that may be true. On a bigger scale, we (the United States) provided helped them deploy the chemical weapons.

We certainly should have known what Saddam had and was capable of. First, we helped put the Ba'ath party in to power. During the Iran / Iraq war, we helped them financially and with intelligence information. Then, we sold the precursors of chemical weapons to them and provided reconnaissance intelligence that was used in their deployment. Why else would Donald Rumsfeld be smiling as he shook Saddams hand in 1983?

And here is more evidence supporting that supposition.

This can also be seen as the ever-decreasing value of the USD. The Federal Reserve has been been buying $80+billion in Treasury Bonds every month since the third round of Quantitative Easing started in September 2012. Lets see if they follow through on the tapering program this time.

Outside transaction fees, let look at some of the advantages bitcoin has over this theoretical googlecoin.

• Chargebacks. I expect any googlecoin is going to work more like paypal than bitcoin. If transactions are not reversible, why is a vendor going to accept googlecoin over bitcoin? They can already accept credit cards or paypal, which have this feature.
• Distributed accounting. Is google going to run the entire accounting system? Why should I trust them any more than the Federal Reserve to not inflate their currency? If the accounting system was truely distributed, why would I participate without compensation?
• What happens when google or one of their friends don't like your politics or actions? See wikileaks and how Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and other payment processors stopped processing payments to them.
• Do you think you are going to be using googlecoin without providing government issued ID? We already know they are giving your personal data to the US government and cannot tell you about it. Transaction data for googlecoin will be going right along with your email, IM, and text messages.

You might want to spell out the acronym in that context.

And this doesn't happen with Sony and MS platforms? I'm sure we'll see new incarnations of Madden, Battlefield, Halo, Call of Duty, Gears of War, Need for Speed, Forza, etc soon enough

Except that Silk Road, or any other user, can create an effectively infinite number of addresses to send and receive the coins. A user doesn't have to give their SSN, drivers license, and proof of residency to get a new address. Knowing how many coins are at any given address is indeed part of the bitcoin protocol. Knowing who controls the keys for that address is not part of the protocol, and it requires additional work to find the data NOT in the blockchain to understand.

So User A sends coins to a unique address at SR, where it gets thrown in the pool, sliced, diced, and chopped, and reconstituted, then goes out from another unique address to User B.

Granted, if you capture a wallet, you now know a group of address and CAN backtrack through the blockchain to understand who some of the players were in previous transactions. Is bitcoin anonymous? No. Does it allow a user to make it difficult to keep track of what they are doing, and with whom? Yes. Does some three-letter agency have a tool that tries to map those associations, I'd bet a bitcoin on yes.

It can be. Services exist that allow you to put your bitcoins in, have them mixed repeatedly with other users bitcoins, and get back different bitcoins. Silk Road had this feature built in, the user didn't have to ask for or configure it.

What is the IP address of a piece of paper?

All the ranting of Theo de Raadt doesn't seem so paranoid anymore.

I would suggest that significant advancements have been made in all of those areas.

I am not a meteorologist, but it seems like the ability to significantly alter any particular weather event could come from the ability to selectively heat a specified area of the atmosphere. That seems right in line with the claims in the patent.

Seriously, to add some content to my snark. Until internet speeds reach parity with access to local resources, web apps will always be second class compared to a similar application running locally.