I'm sorry if this doesn't fit with some peoples' narrow-minded world view, but I'm tired of gay bashing being the last acceptable form of discrimination in the US. End rant.

Actually, atheist bashing is still a perfectly acceptable form of discrimination in the US.

For most cross-platform stuff, boost will do what you need. boost::thread will handle all of your threading needs.

boost::filesystem for manipulating pathnames; boost::datetime for date and time operations; boost::format for typesafe printf style I/O.

It also has boost::asio for sockets and boost::interprocess for IPC. I know nothing about them, but to judge from the quality of the rest of the boost library, they are probably very good.

For database, use Sqlite. It's a solid relational database stored in a single file, and you can even access the database from the command line for ad-hoc queries/debugging/whatever.

You have absolutely no idea how the US tax code works.

Isn't this because of laws, i.e., "governmental intervention". Which you claim is eroding our freedom. It's a bit hypocritical for you to be holding this up as a good thing only one paragraph away from deriding the government.