America's founding fathers had extensive debates about what they called 'democratic despotism'
The prevailing point of view was that the phrase was a contradiction in terms and that the people would not vote for despotism.
After a few election cycles, the founding fathers were no longer so sure.

People voting for tyranny is not at all what Democracy was ever intended to be.

At around 1:30 into the video you can see this in the background: http://i.imgur.com/J2SZ1.jpg
I can't imagine what else passes for autism therapy in former Soviet bloc countries.

Delivery services consider those tickets just a cost of doing business.
Here's a nice article from 2007 about SF, delivery trucks, and parking tickets
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/24/MNGMPOAK521.DTL

Because of the sheer number of tickets, most big cities have special programs for the largest corporate offenders.
This keeps the court system from getting clogged up and streamlines collections.

Statistically speaking, you're wrong.

Wealth and education are the #1 and #2 predictors of future success.
(Your level of education (#2) is heavily influenced by your family's wealth.)
This is only true because of the extensive effort that has gone into narrowing the education gap between white and minority children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?pagewanted=all

Further, social mobility in America is probably not what you think it is
Only 8% of Americans move from the bottom 20% to the top 20% of incomes.

So in a sense, the biggest barrier to success is yourself, but only because of where you were born, who your parents were, and how much money they made.
I'd gladly see this whole line of discussion marked offtopic, but I hope that facts have some impact on your bootstrappy theory of social mobility.

Why waste the time of your grad students or TAs?
Turn the log files into an exercise for another professor's computer science class.

I had a back and forth, about taxes, in another thread with a /.er whose rebuttal was
"The founding fathers didn't institute a progressive income tax"

The fact is, consumption taxes (and/or tariffs) were enough to support the Federal Government's expenditures for the first ~85 years of its existence.
Now, a universal flat tax is just a massive giveaway to the richest Americans and a massive taking from those least able to afford it.
Not even Hermain Cain's 9-9-9 survived as a universal flat tax.

Don't forget that the US State Department is the de-facto sponsor of TOR.
TOR gets most of its funding from groups that get most of their funding from the State Dept.

[Citation Needed]

The nuclear industry is insured by the US Government.
The value of that insurance might as well be infinite, since no private insurer or pool of insurers will ever touch that kind of risk.

1. The Fukushima plant was up for a 10 year permit extension
2. The day before the Fukushima accident, the NRC granted a 20 year extension to the US Vermont Yankee plant of the exact same design

This decade is going to see a lot of nuclear plants, that built during the 70s, reaching their designed end of life.
I'm guessing the NRC is going to do what Japan's regulatory body was ready to do: rubber stamp the permit.

It's tragic because we now know how poorly maintained Fukushima was
If only most nuclear regulation wasn't based on self-inspection and self-reporting.