Actually, there may be a confounding factor (this is a hypothesis, anybody who has real numbers is welcome to step forward to argue for or against):

Assuming you aren't inimically opposed to the concept of the welfare state (whether because you think that it's actually a good idea, or whether you think that it's relatively cheap insurance to keep a fundamentally capitalist economy with slightly higher tax rates to buy off the proles, irrelevant), the state basically has two options for 'redistribution':

1. Actually comparatively high taxes on individuals and corporations, used to fund a variety of not-directly-cash public services(eg. national health system, cheap or free education, etc.).

2. Avoid the flack associated (in the US) with robust public-sector offerings, and sneak in your social welfare spending primarily in 'emergency' programs (WIC, etc. which pay in scrip; but have nontrivial USD value once you discount them for being able to purchase only certain classes of goods) and in 'hand up for the virtuous poor' type things ("earned income tax credit", assorted subsidies for small business loans, edging up to programs that are basically a sop for the middle class, like mortage related deductions).

Now, lest anybody misinterpret me on this point: I Think It Is A Bad, Bad, thing that nontrivial swaths of the US population are basically so damn poor that the only cash worth squeezing out of them is sales taxes and check-cashing joint fees. However, barring a solution to that problem, it would be my contention that (like our absurd 'We should really have universal health care; because our current system is an utter clusterfuck delivering bad results for crazy high prices, and tying workers to their jobs; but universal health care is commie socialism, so let's have a crazy arrangement where the government 'launders' universal health care(at a tidy markup) through the incumbent private insurance companies!') our 'let's see if we can get some of the benefits of a welfare state without courting the unpopularity of calling it that, and without the clout to do anything about the ever-widening wealth gap' approach has left us with a singularly dysfunctional creature, neither fish nor fowl.

Contractors.

Some of them also do independent work; but others (in terms of customer base and income) are basically federal employees in all but name and price.

There are no false positives, comrade citizen, only people who harbor unpatriotic doubts about the accuracy of our Intelligence Community. Surely you aren't one of those?

Is it not more unreasonable that we have five million people (out of a total of just under 320 million, with labor force size ~155 million, unknown percentage of that with characteristics that make them getting a clearance rather unlikely) involved in Super Secret Uncle Sam Stuff?
br> I'm less interested in crying for the poor, poor, clearanceholders and more interested in why a touch over three percent of the US labor force spends its time pushing classified paper.

The one major difference between (contemporary) ethernet and wireless scenarios is that, now that switches have pretty much 100% replaced hubs, 'shared media' issues tend to occur only between a computer and its switch, so there really isn't as much pressure for research on elegant coexistence. Yeah, a bit of QoS algorithm tweaking; but 'How can we allow 1Gb, 100Mb, 10Mb, and 4800bps transmissions to coexist on a single hub and set of cables?' just isn't a relevant question. Everybody hates shared media, and switching got cheap, so we just skipped it.

With wireless, ye olde luminiferous aether is all you get, barring waveguides which are unlikely to be a big hit in the mobile device market. It isn't so much that Joe User's cellphone needs to be able to download super l33t fast, it's that there is a strong incentive to wring as much total bandwidth out of the spectrum available as we possibly can, not primarily to support silly stunts by single devices; but to get more devices with moderate performance running in the same area without falling in a screaming heap.

Especially on batteries, you hit diminishing returns pretty quickly as you increase data speed for any single device(a few oddballs with better power supplies and historical options that basically came down to 'bring an entire damn satellite uplink truck' probably do want realtime 4K streaming back to the studio...)

However, if the techniques used are suitably clever, technology that can be used to demonstrate impressive-but-irrelevant peak speeds is likely also of use to provide endurable speeds to ever more devices in the same area(and may specifically include, in addition to pure advances in signal-wrangling, more explicit definition and standardization of latency critical endpoints(voice mostly) vs. latency sensitive (cellular data cards) and lowest-cost latency insensitive (embedded sensor widgets dumping a chunk of data to HQ)).

They probably do want NSA fingerprints all over it. You don't think that they let us run the "Dagger Complex" right there in the open because they are still just that terrified of the commies, or their economy is desperately dependent on our foreign aid or something?

Don't get too complacent, though. Even in the worst cases, the chem labs always send you home to mommy in a finite real number of small boxes. That...isn't always true... after certain classes of mathematics accident.

These are 'journalists', in the dreadful contemporary sense. If they thought that 'quiet, eccentric, mathematician brutally murdered in suspected cyber-revenge' would have an ROI greater than the legal exposure, they'd probably kill him themselves just to be first to the body...

It's pretty spartan, hey got caught up in the trains themselves. Each set of cars is arranged in a very specific sequence that he really gets worked up about, and I've noticed that it takes him longer and longer every time to decide on and add a new car to the end of the train....

Write and maintain bitcoin-protocol compatible clients, care for and feed mining hardware, provide the bandwidth for continued distribution of the block chain, and (maybe) actually use bitcoins for something so that they aren't just a pile of uninteresting solutions to difficult-but-totally-banal math problems?

There is no specific Bitcoin Commissar; but (not unlike most OSS projects, wholly aside from your view of the... exciting financial infrastructure that exists between bitcoin and the broader world) only software projects that are either 100% dead, or so perfect that no coder since the Heroic Age has felt worthy enough to soil them with his changes, work without some sort of team, often fairly heavily skewed toward a few core people with a (sometimes more helpful, sometimes mostly passive) cloud of peripheral users and smalltime contributors. Whatever else it may be, it is a software project, a peer to peer network, and a distributed computation setup, all of which don't exactly keep themselves running. He, presumably, is no longer interested in dealing with any of that.

"Taking The System Down From The Inside?" or "The Man's Ultimate Long Con?"

We ask vague, hyperbolic, questions; you fight it out in the comments section!

Given the sorts of weirdos who end up stalking ordinary celebrities, I'd flee this gravity well at relativistic speed if I were The Celebrity among some of the more... peculiar... elements of bitcoin fandom.

How dare that consumer act as though Apple's intellectual property was something she could just 'bequeath' because she's all dead or some sentimental rubbish? She should be grateful that they deigned to permit her a limited license!

It's more about science getting approval. LSD is one of those compounds that is next to impossible for researchers to get access to and test in humans. For reasons I don't care enough about keeping kids off drugs or something to fully understand, some drugs are so wicked and dangerous and illegal that it is necessary to prevent any research (even about how dangerous they are; but definitely nothing suggesting that they aren't as dangerous as previously believed), even under hardass conditions, on terminal patients, and so forth. As quoth noted toxicologist and psycho-pharmacologist Jacqui Smith: "You cannot compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one." Why? Because one is illegal, of course!

I wouldn't really call this 'ancient knowledge' (if the first synthesis was in 1938, it probably isn't shamanic lore); but it was certainly an active area of scientific interest pre-ban. That somebody would want another crack at it isn't even remotely news. That they managed to fill out the paperwork, on the other hand...