or alternately, and probably more common, "cleaning."

If that's true, then it's one of the biggest perversions of justice I've seen in a long time; I'm not a lawyer, and I realize double jeopardy laws may not cross over from civil to criminal cases, but it's ridiculous to be able to send somebody to jail for stealing your imaginary property, and then be able to sue in another court for the same reason.

There's a precedent for this in the computer security world, as well; it's not an uncommon practice for software vendors to prosecute or threaten to prosecute people who discover security holes in their products, instead of simply fixing said security hole. The problem is that in a lot of cases the flaws don't get fixed until they're out in the open; the thinking of the big software firms is that if nobody knows about it, then it's not worth the cost to fix it. This may seem like a legitimate action on the surface, but eventually somebody of a less savory character will rediscover the security flaw (especially if it's made known that a particular type of flaw is out there), and that's when legitimate users get burned.

I think the confusion is in the meaning of the word applies; most people are reading it as a passive verb, but it is meant to be read as an active verb.

You can have the most brilliant ideas in the world, but if you convey them like an uneducated buffoon then that's exactly what you will appear to be. Proper grammar may be optional in casual conversation (LOL wuzzup d00d), but in a setting where the conveyance of knowledge is the primary goal you should strive to do your ideas justice by relating them in an intelligent way.

So, let's clarify your point of view: Americans can't do math, and any American's who can do math aren't really Americans. Did I get the gist of it? Bigot.

I use Facebook ironically.

And how exactly will turning the prison system into an adult daycare promote rehabilitation? IMO, this is why the number of repeat offenders is so high. Give them high school and college courses, or let them otherwise learn a useful life skill; do anything but make prison an extended vacation for them.

Racism implies an erroneous stereotype; its no secret that law enforcement tend to single out the lower class and minorities, simply because the police themselves observe stereotypes of their own (i.e. if you don't have a lot of money, you're more likely to steal). A lot of police use these stereotypes as justification to bend the law, as long as they think they're sticking to the spirit of it.

What's the alternative? the knowledge that is the cornerstone of modern physics, knowledge that has been tested time and time again and found true, is upturned by one experiment? Sorry, my money's on a measurement error.

This isn't a fundamental difference between macroscopic and microscopic; what it boils down to is human perception. We exist in the macroscopic world, so we perceive things thusly. Quantum "weirdness" doesn't just happen on the microscopic scale, but the odds of a quantum event being observed macroscopically would equal the odds of the same quantum event happening simultaneously to every particle of a macroscopic object (quantum tunneling is the event that comes immediately to mind). The world doesn't change just because we're in it, regardless of what new-age pseudo-scientists would have you believe.

Some people are willing to shell out more money for a faster processor, while other people are not. It costs more to produce genuinely different CPU's than to just cripple one CPU, so the idea is that they make a large profit from the people who will pay for the faster CPU, and a lower profit from those who won't.

If the connection was routed solely inside of the United States, I would say you're right; however, the connections are routed around the world, and would require the concerted efforts of several countries to even begin to trace the origin. Even if they do monitor every packet going across a backbone provider in the U.S., TOR packets are encrypted. The NSA may well have technology to crack encryption that we don't know about, but unless you've seriously pissed somebody high up off, I doubt you have anything to worry about.

While what you say about IP addresses being included in every packet is true, it's possible to mask your identity by going through proxies. If I, for example, use TOR, my connection can be routed all over the world before reaching my final destination; this makes it at the very least impractical, and most of the time outright impossible, to trace the origin. Anonymity is possible on the internet if you have the right tools and the intelligence to use them properly.

Statistics show this to be the opposite. People with lower income (and thus having a lower tax burden) tend to reproduce more than those more well off. Moreover, people with a lower income are more likely to gamble away what little they have (high rollers are a minority). Online poker has lower buy-ins than brick and mortar card rooms, making it even more likely that lower income populations will play. I am a firm believer in personal responsibility, so I don't believe that online poker should be banned for this reason; however, it should be regulated to prevent money from funneling to unsavory endeavors (terrorism, human trafficking, etc.)