Technically, you owe taxes even if you don't convert bitcoin into 'real' money. Barter transactions are still taxed. For example if you get paid with goods (say bitcoin, or camels) for some work, you are getting taxed on the fair market value of those goods.

Right, because there are no government agencies other than the NSA who might have made those requests. Most of those requests were made by local police departments and are related to ordinary crimes, missing persons etc and nothing to do with national security.

Slashdot is not anti-authoritarian. Majority of slashdot posters, and certainly modders are liberal, which is as authoritarian as it gets.

What on Earth are you talking about? Education in America has been handled by the (local) government going all the way back to the settlement of the new colonies.

Obviously, I forgot to spell it out.. federal and state government as in the government. Local governments dabbled in public education but it wasn't consistent or always available in every city.

Also, America is exceptional in that it always had high literacy rates, but in other countries, literacy has increased directly proportionally to the amount of involvement by the government, and higher standard of living is directly co-related to the participation of government with the "big-state" countries of Europe such as Germany and Scandinavian countries consistently outperforming the "small state" countries such as the US (yes, by developed world standards the US is a low taxes, small government country).

I'm not sure how higher standard of living is connected with adequate food, shelter, and education for the majority of the population. I'm sure with a base line, the rest will follow but you have missed the entire point.

So offensive appellations are okay if enough people (who are not the people being referenced) use it?

I know you were making a different point but your wording leaves me to point out that it isn't ok. Otherwise the terms wetback, niggar, spic, would all be common and acceptable in today's society.

  The fact of the matter is that the term Teabagger is a derogatory term and only caught on after someone went to a protest with the intentions of degrading people calling them teabaggers and those protesters had no clue about what the term meant.

What you say should be paid attention too. But the problem is that most Americans no longer know their history or the reasons is happened. We constantly find people claiming the constitution is a 200 year old document that has no relevance to modern time (this usually comes out when talking gun control).

The founding of the country, the whys and whatnot simply aren't being taught in any significant ways in schools now. When they are, they are brushed over with political slants mostly leading to conclusions used to shape the next generation of voters for a political party.

People claim the federalist papers are meaningless but they go a long way in explaining a lot of the hows and whys the constitution of the government was in such a way. After all, it was a public discussion that expressed the concerns of people as well as explaining the intent and reasons of some parts of the constitution. Yet, I'm not aware of any high school that has it as part of the curriculum and people who bring it up are often dismissed as kooks.

I guess my question is how long will this continue before something is done and if and when something is done, will anyone like the results. A lot of political power is spent making the state we are in today and a lot of power will be spent on keeping it that way.

Congratulations on finding your little safe corner of the world. I have never felt unsafe in the US and while I do own firearms and encourage everyone possible to carry, I actually do not carry a weapon myself.

I've been to Compton, NYC, Chicago, Miami, as well as many Midwest areas and never once felt unsafe. There was one time in Compton CA where a gang gunfight broke out near me, but I ducked behind a car with 2 or 3 others and waited for the shooting to stop. They weren't shooting at me, I didn't feel unsafe. It wasn't like I was in a war or anything.

I'm not sure why people get scared because guns happen to be around or they go off. But I have learned that people are different all across this country and some are completely scared of the idea of guns while others like me could care less.

I think you miss his point. Homosexuality is ancillary to the problem it was just an example, it's that something- anything- could be discovered and used against the politician or anyone else for that matter. Replace homosexuality with a stay in a mental hospital, a car accident that killed people, a juvenile crime of some sort (property damage or perhaps assaulting someone in high school), an affair with a biographer or anything that the politician thinks will make him unelectable. That is what the point was about, having some sort of dirt over the person that was discovered through this cache of information that was thought to be personal and private.

lol.. Hoffa was the leader of the teamsters union that allowed the mob to be part of it. It helped in their so called fight against the big corporations to have a little mob backup. The mob would in turn use the retirement funds to launder money.

Anyways, the senate started investigating the mob connections and the unions and Hoffa disappeared without a trace. No one has found a body, he is presumed to be dead. Several mobsters have claimed they killed him and lead investigators on wild trips looking for the body but it has never been found to date. There is a lot more involved and is actually a somewhat interesting story if you find yourself bored one of these days. Hoffa was one of the original anti 1%ers so to say, but he did most of his work attempting to unionize America in the 70's which more or less lead to all the downsizing in the 80's and outsourcing in the 90's. Most of what the unions demanded back then has been codified into laws now making them more or less a bullying arm for wages and benefits.

I hate to bring this up but the idea that government provides adequate food, shelter, and education for the majority of the population is really one reason why a government fails to do so.

Seriously, in the US, before the government handed things out or got involved in education, people received enough education from the local communities to function in society. Before government got involved in providing housing and food, the vast majority of people were able to find it and live- even if they were working just for subsistence. Now enter education- kids graduate from high school knowing less about more things then a high school graduate in 1860. I spoke with someone just today who told me that going off welfare and working has actually cost him an average of $40 a week in income because he now has to pay for his transportation to work and childcare. Of course he expects this to be made up within 6 months when he gets his evaluation and raises.

We have gotten away from a large agrarian society and a lot of the gold old past simply isn't practicable or applicable any more. But expecting government to provide something is really harsh on someone trying to provide for themselves. That is how a country becomes wealthy- when the population provides for themselves and the government only keeps the social economic environment that makes it possible to do so.

I guess Irony means a description of a Ferric object right?

Comedy Central, which I'll admit has some left leanings, but in case you didn't know, has been known to roast Obama, as well
 
The problem with Comedy Central is not that it has obvious left leanings but that it is a political news (or rather political opinion) channel that attempts to influence public opinion as much as any other political news outlet, but without any fact checking requirements of a real news organization. You can catch, say, Fox News or MSNBC reporting a story in a blatantly biased way, even misreporting or ignoring important facts, and you can say so, and in theory their reputation should suffer. If you do the same with Jon Stewart, he will just laugh and say, hey it's just comedy, ha, ha. But it's obviously not just comedy. He is having it both ways.

Sometimes I wonder it Obama's support of NSA domestic spying is just a clever way to get Republicans to come out in favor of personal privacy.
 
Gee, how much kool-aid did you drink?

You are part of the problem. You are comparing an idealized version of the best part of your side (and giving them every possible benefit of the doubt and making up excuses for them) with a cartoonishly exaggerated version of the worst of the other side. Let me guess, ALL your information comes from watching and reading liberal media?

The only party in favor of personal privacy are the Libertarians and a small but growing libertarian camp within the Republican party. Mainstream Republicans and Democrats don't even consider it an issue worth thinking about.

It's too late once you already bought the thing. There should be a message on the box in big bold letters, "this device may be used to watch what you are doing in your own house" or something, like on cigarette packs. If you don't mind, sure buy it but you should have the information ahead of time.

I wouldn't say there is no value as Justices may need to have a chance to clarify something etc. It is vastly overrated though and it is one of the reasons most Justices do not want cameras in court during oral arguments. As Scalia said, if the media is willing to follow all the relevant details of a case from beginning to end and devote a large amount of time to it (such as on CSPAN for example) then cameras would be fine, but just focusing all the attention on few soundbites and back and forth between judges and lawyers during oral arguments would be entirely unrepresentative of what the court actually does.