first, he gives the British PM a stack of DVDs (ultra lame). next, he gives the queen of england a friggin ipod (i'm sure she is really suave on computers...probably has a 24" iMac all modded out).
Queen Elizabeth II already has owned an iPod for the last two years, given to her by one of her sons. She's not exactly tech illiterate.
this is so embarrassing. i would've expected it out of President Bush. i bet he got the queen a handgun (big ol' desert eagle), and he probably got Tony Blair a shot-glass set. but Obama? why is he pulling this crap?
I see nobody can miss a chance to bash whatever president is currently in office. Obama is getting a lot of tempest in a teacup moments lately.
Newsflash: All politicians and people that appear on TV use teleprompters... Deal with it; it's not news.
It's like the new guy showing up at the office Christmas party with PBR and dollar store gag gifts for the exchange when everyone else brought drinkable wine or liquor and a $15 gift... then cutting loose a giant fart and laughing loudly about it. Sure, it doesn't really affect business operations, it's just a stupid little party. But now everyone's looking at him kinda funny and thinking "hey, we thought he was cool, but this guy's a bit of an ass." In other words, it may not be harmful, but he certainly isn't doing us any favors.
Um, actually, I think an iPod pre-loaded with content that the queen finds entertaining (show tunes, video of her appearances) is quite relevant and a tasteful gift.
Compare and contrast this with GW Bush's near sexual assault of the German president trying to give her a "back rub". Obama has a long way to go before he stoops to Bush's level of diplomacy.
So their attitude is "Frak Boxie", as boxie is trying to DESTROY the brand of all the video sites to be replaced by the Boxee brand.
Why should Hulu play nice?
Have you ever used Boxee? It doesn't replace the brand of Hulu with it's own brand. In fact, you have to click the Hulu logo, to go to the Hulu channel where you get Hulu branded content.
Boxee is just a content aggregator. Think of it like an RSS reader that you setup with all your RSS feeds and it gives you a single interface to watch all your content.
Online print media seems to have approved of the RSS model. Ads can even still be displayed. Why are the broadcast TV content owners so outdated that they can't approve of an RSS-like model for their content?
But you're not reverse engineering. They're sending you their code, you're just running it!
Actually I wonder if the DMCA would apply here. I think in fact it might. A non-techie judge might decide that running their javascript code on any device that they don't intend you to run it on is a violation of the reverse engineering clause.
Clearly, the content owners (Hulu) intend for you to only watch their content on a web browser running on Windows, Mac, or Linux. By running their javascript on a 3rd party device like a Boxee box (not a web browser), the judge might interpret this as reverse engineering to defeat a copy protection mechanism.
I think the grandparent is very astute. This is probably setting up a legal argument that could be used in court to sue the makers of Boxee.
Do you really believe that all of this content is going to get less available over time? Note that this would essentially contradict all of history.
Actually, yes. Because Hulu is controlled by content owners, who seem to want to create tons of content and then keep honest viewers from ever watching it (see Fox scheduling sci-fi shows during the worst possible time slots), there have already been a lot of cases of Hulu removing content. The show It's Always Sunny in PA was pulled from Hulu by the content owners. Also, most shows only show a few episodes from the latest season, and when the season is over and a new season starts, the old seasons are removed.
There are a number of reasons why it might be nice to have an archival copy of the shows available on Hulu. Personally, I prefer to use a combination of Netflix + Handbrake/MetaX + iTunes + AppleTV for my video archival and streaming purposes. I get great quality with DVD rips encoded in H.264, and a nice menu system with cover art and tagging (thanks to MetaX) that works beautifully on my HDTV through the AppleTV. It's also a system so brain dead simple that normal people can use it.
Did you notice they also had two options: "Stay a while," and "Listen." This is clearly a nod to the first NPC you encounter in Diablo I, an old man that said "Stay a while and Listen," and was probably the first dialog you hear in the game. At the time Diablo I came out, it was revolutionary as a computer RPG that had actual voice acting, in a limited form. NPCs had a line of dialog they would say when you first clicked on them.
And thus, the entire atmosphere of the earth was evacuated onto the moon, destroying all life on earth, but starting life on the moon in the process...
Why is Boxee the real question? I'd never even heard of it until they got blocked by Hulu, I don't know anyone who has one, and nobody I know is even thinking of getting one. Sure it was a lousy decision, but is it really so world-changingly lousy that Slashdot CANNOT EVER post about Hulu without bringing Boxee up?
Because Boxee does a very simple thing: It takes the old school Xbox Media Player that was awesome, but only installable by geeks willing to hard or soft mod their Xbox and edit config files in a text editor, and makes it usable by mere mortals. What's more, relatively inexpensive AppleTVs and Mac Minis have made it almost an appliance type solution that is braindead easy to setup, and frees you from the $100+ a month cable bill. What's more, it's actually usable by mortals and has the patented WAF (wife acceptance factor).
For the truly geeky, you can easily take a refurbished 3 year old computer, get a $20 IR remote (Microsoft sells it even lol, the MCE remote), put Ubuntu on it, plug it into your TV, and have literally thousands of free (as in speech, cc licensed stuff like TED, etc) and non-free (Hulu, commercially copyrighted) shows, instantly available. It also supports Netflix, has a built in Torrent client and allows you to browse DVDs, shows, etc, online on certain sites (ahem, torrent sites), and will automatically grab the torrent for you.
In short, it's the media slice/dice killer app based on XBMC that mere mortals can use.
Consider this: You are sitting on a park bench reading SlashDot. Later, someone else comes over and sits next to you, and starts talking to you. You aren't interested in any products or services he's offering, and ask him to stop. He refuses. You again ask him to stop. He continues to refuse. You put on a pair of earplugs, the kind they use at shooting ranges, to block out the drivel you don't want to listen to. Is this wrong? Absolutely not. It may be a public place, but ignoring the stranger is legal, while harassing someone for a sale or panhandling, is not. However, one nations' laws cannot be enforced in another nation.
That's one analogy, but not a particularly good one. How about this: A new restaurant is opening in town. The owner of the restaurant wants to get some feedback from the public on how good his food tastes. He invites everyone in town to come to a free dinner, provided they fill out a little feedback card with their name, address, and answers to simple questions about the quality of the food. The only catch is that if you fill out this card, they'll have your home address so you lose a little privacy. He might even sell your physical address to other businesses that want to send you junk mail.
So, you hear about this, and despite your privacy concerns, hey it's a free meal. You go to his restaurant, eat free food all night, then when he comes around at the end of the meal and asks you to fill out the card, you say "No, I'm not going to do it," and walk out the door.
I personally find Adbusters pretty ridiculous. Most of the services we enjoy on the Internet, such as free Gmail, Youtube, Google Search, etc, are funded by ads. If they weren't, the services would either go away or you'd have to pay. Can you imagine paying 25 cents for doing a keyword search? The massive infrastructure that crawls the web isn't free.
Some people may want to go back to the Internet being only available on University computers and using gopher, but I sure don't.
I haven't owned a game console in a few years and I had become jealous of some of my buddies' XBoxes, so I decided to pick one up during the liquidation. I managed to pull 30% off, which actually is a pretty good deal on something like a game console, which usually will have a very strict price set by the manufacturer and is constant at any place you try to shop for it (including online).
You better hope you never have to return it to the store for a refund or ever get Red Ring of Death (RRoD) on your Xbox or you're screwed. Personally, I'd rather pay $199 for it at Amazon and know I can return it if I have a problem.
Seriously, anyone that would buy a major electronics purchase from a company that is going out of business tomorrow needs their head examined. I figure if they take 50% off the price, make it $100, just maybe I'll consider it.
I did the back of the envelope calculations and there was no way that I'd make up the $6000 price difference in the time that I am likely to own the vehicle. Even if gas goes back to USD 4.00 a gallon.
There are other cost factors to look at like the cost of maintenance. You should probably check the maintenance costs on a Prius because you might be surprised to learn that people with hybrids don't have to change their oil as often, due to the electric motor providing power a lot of the time. There are also other mechanical parts that tend to last longer due to not using an internal combustion engine 100% of the time.
I'm not saying it will pay for the $6000 difference, but if you're not comparing vehicle price, maintenance costs, and fuel prices all together, you're not doing a complete comparison.
So in order to work AT ALL, the supply of credit must grow exponentially every year to pay the interest on the previous year's debt. If it doesn't, there is a monetary collapse as the debt consumes the credit.
Sorry, but this is plain wrong. You assume that there is a finite amount of money in the system and that it never increases at all, yet new resources are constantly being mined, produced, farmed, and created.
The total amount of debt in a system does matter, but only as it pertains to a ratio of the world's GDP. If the GDP of the world goes up, which it tends to do as populations increase and more of the world is developed, the debt can also increase without causing systemic failure. Systemic failure is caused when the debt and credit far exceeds the GDP of the world, which in other words, is the very definition of a bubble.
Actually, there is no government agency that is responsible for helping employees in disputes like this, unless there is a job safety issue, in which case OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Association) would step in.
I'm afraid a job is just an agreement between two consenting parties to exchange money for services. You need a private employment attorney to resolve your disputes. The government really doesn't care unless laws are being broken.
An AC says before if these marks are still on the records for the kids. Well why wouldn't they be? Just because the sentencing was wrong doesn't mean the crime wasn't committed.
It's called a mistrial. You can bet that anyone who was convicted by this judge and has enough money to hire a lawyer is preparing their appeal right now. The ones with really good lawyers are going to get a lot of money for wrongful incarceration. Just because an injustice was done in the past doesn't mean you can't get a new trial in the future.
Mac Pro: comes standard with 2 x 1GB sticks of memory - 800MHz, DDR2, ECC. Let's try 2 extra 1GB sticks of memory. Apple price? $500. NewEgg price for 2 x 1GB sticks of Kingston 800MHz DDR ECC memory? $67. So only 650% markup there, after all, Apple's gotta make money somehow, right?
How in the hell did this get modded up? If you got to Dell or HP's website you'll see similar pricing. Put together a complete system with all the components and then compare price.
Parent is just another of the million "Apple is too expensive" trolls.
Gee, that's nice that you link to a Dell Mini 9 computer sold on Walmart.com that runs Linux, but did you read down the page a little bit where it said:
Not Sold in Stores
To the vast majority of the buying public, a computer that isn't in stores will never be purchased.
Normal people don't buy computers online from a website. If they had the ability to do that, they wouldn't need a computer. Normal people go to the physical Walmart or Best Buy store and buy whatever computer the sales droid convinces them they need.
A game company asks people to play the game before it is released and then uses their input to adjust the game?
It's not new and it's definitely not open source at all.
This is a closed source game copy, Acclaim, that finds grindy, asian-themed MMOs made by small studios. They buy the US rights to the game, and use the beta testing community to do their translation for them, because they can't even be bothered to spend the money to localize their own content...
I played one of these terrible, terrible games called 9 Dragons for a couple days. It's an asian-themed martial arts based MMO, which sounds like it could be very cool, but when you realize it's like World of Warcraft but with 10x the grind and half of the dialog is in Korean, it makes you want to scrape your eyeballs off with a cheese grater just to stop the pain.
Acclaim releases free to play shovelware, asian grind themed MMO games for dirt cheap in the US, and basically admits that they don't want to spend money to do localization and voice acting, so they just let the community do their work for them for free.
Why is this story news, when last week, Steve Wozniak becoming chief scientist at a flash storage company isn't? Frankly, Slashdot has really become terrible lately. Badly formed javascript that makes what used to be a quick loading mostly text page take minutes to render on slow systems and mobile browsers. Stories that are more tabloid than news for nerds.
Slashdot, it's very obvious you have new owners. Quit trying to "monetize eyeballs" or whatever stupid Web 2.0 jargon you're trying. Just go back to the news stories you used to have and quit sending us all this crap.
In short.. They can spend $2T if they like, and it will do little to nothing to stop the current problems from advancing. When you are a nation that is 70% consumption and have a 400% GDP debt ratio, there is little you can do to 'simulate" the underlying fundamentals. Meaning, the problem was overstimulation to begin with..
The way I look at it, they have two ways to handle the economic crisis:
1. Do absolutely nothing and let the economy continue to deflate until we get back to pre-housing bubble status. The problem with this approach is that you'll have 25% unemployment, soup lines that are worse than the great depression, and the entire world will take 10-20 years to pull itself out of the mess, if people don't riot and burn the world down first.
2. Dump money into the economy and continue to prop up the housing bubble by buying failed mortgage debt, hoping for a soft landing. This approach is doomed to failure as well because you can't keep pumping money into a bubble hoping to sustain it forever. The bubble is going to either pop quickly or deflate slowly. This approach only kicks the football down the field another 5-10 years for the next generation of politicians to deal with it.
Guess which approach our government is picking? I guess I'd choose option 2 also but either way we're fucked.
I'd like to write software knowing that when an object is instantiated, it persists until explicitly deleted - without having to awkwardly save state to something as non-orthoganal as a file.
I can see a huge problem with this. If every object ever instantiated becomes persistent until deleted, what happens when you have a memory leak? Bad code could easily fill your hard drive and destroy your entire computer. How would you delete millions of objects with broken pointers?
I'm going to have to call BS on this one. Utah's state legislature is comprised of both Mormon and non-Mormons. Stating that they always meet with church leaders before deciding on legislation like this is ridiculous.
It's not that they always meet with church leaders. It's that they already are church leaders. Utah may only have a 50% mormon population, but the legislature is more than 90% mormon, and the vast majority are church leaders, either Bishop level, Stake President level, or above. Many are "quorum of the 70" which are the 70 top leadership officials in the church.
It would be the equivalent of having a catholic state where 90% of the government is run by Bishops and Cardinals. Sure, they might not directly consult the Pope every time they pass a law, but chances are the law will look and sound an awful lot like the church policy.
The closest thing to an appropriate analogue I can think of is that this is like someone not only stealing everything from the guild bank, but also causing a situation that engenders a huge likelihood of all the people in the guild losing all of their personal epics and gold, setting them back to stock level 60s(70s/80s, whatever the cap is) with absolutely NO recourse available.
That's a good way to describe it to your average WoW player. Now, I can tell you that I play MMOs quite a bit (maybe more than I should), and that's exactly the reason why I won't play EVE. This is also the reason why EVE will never be much more than a "niche" game.
I love PvP, and I like killing other players, but I draw a line at hacking their guild bank, sharding their purples and/gkicking their entire guild. EVE is a game that not only allows this, but encourages it.
With the rampant account theft by keylogging gold farmers, Blizzard probably would have lost the #1 MMO crown a long time ago if they allowed anything approaching what happens in EVE to happen to their players.
$30,000 on the fringes of a city in SC when you have next to no health benefits and are on the brink of bankruptcy because of medical bills for your family. Credit for ANYTHING is no longer an option. Throw two young children and a wife who developed some health issues after 2 kids and a car accident into the mix.
Maybe, just maybe, you should have gotten a job with health insurance before popping out two kids on a $30K a year salary. It's called family planning. Don't have kids until you can actually afford them. I know, it may be a foreign concept to you, but it's not your god given right to keep popping out little brats regardless of your ability to financially support them.
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Queen Elizabeth II already has owned an iPod for the last two years, given to her by one of her sons. She's not exactly tech illiterate.
I see nobody can miss a chance to bash whatever president is currently in office. Obama is getting a lot of tempest in a teacup moments lately.
Newsflash: All politicians and people that appear on TV use teleprompters... Deal with it; it's not news.
Um, actually, I think an iPod pre-loaded with content that the queen finds entertaining (show tunes, video of her appearances) is quite relevant and a tasteful gift.
Compare and contrast this with GW Bush's near sexual assault of the German president trying to give her a "back rub". Obama has a long way to go before he stoops to Bush's level of diplomacy.
Have you ever used Boxee? It doesn't replace the brand of Hulu with it's own brand. In fact, you have to click the Hulu logo, to go to the Hulu channel where you get Hulu branded content.
Boxee is just a content aggregator. Think of it like an RSS reader that you setup with all your RSS feeds and it gives you a single interface to watch all your content.
Online print media seems to have approved of the RSS model. Ads can even still be displayed. Why are the broadcast TV content owners so outdated that they can't approve of an RSS-like model for their content?
Actually I wonder if the DMCA would apply here. I think in fact it might. A non-techie judge might decide that running their javascript code on any device that they don't intend you to run it on is a violation of the reverse engineering clause.
Clearly, the content owners (Hulu) intend for you to only watch their content on a web browser running on Windows, Mac, or Linux. By running their javascript on a 3rd party device like a Boxee box (not a web browser), the judge might interpret this as reverse engineering to defeat a copy protection mechanism.
I think the grandparent is very astute. This is probably setting up a legal argument that could be used in court to sue the makers of Boxee.
Actually, yes. Because Hulu is controlled by content owners, who seem to want to create tons of content and then keep honest viewers from ever watching it (see Fox scheduling sci-fi shows during the worst possible time slots), there have already been a lot of cases of Hulu removing content. The show It's Always Sunny in PA was pulled from Hulu by the content owners. Also, most shows only show a few episodes from the latest season, and when the season is over and a new season starts, the old seasons are removed.
There are a number of reasons why it might be nice to have an archival copy of the shows available on Hulu. Personally, I prefer to use a combination of Netflix + Handbrake/MetaX + iTunes + AppleTV for my video archival and streaming purposes. I get great quality with DVD rips encoded in H.264, and a nice menu system with cover art and tagging (thanks to MetaX) that works beautifully on my HDTV through the AppleTV. It's also a system so brain dead simple that normal people can use it.
Did you notice they also had two options: "Stay a while," and "Listen." This is clearly a nod to the first NPC you encounter in Diablo I, an old man that said "Stay a while and Listen," and was probably the first dialog you hear in the game. At the time Diablo I came out, it was revolutionary as a computer RPG that had actual voice acting, in a limited form. NPCs had a line of dialog they would say when you first clicked on them.
And thus, the entire atmosphere of the earth was evacuated onto the moon, destroying all life on earth, but starting life on the moon in the process...
Because Boxee does a very simple thing: It takes the old school Xbox Media Player that was awesome, but only installable by geeks willing to hard or soft mod their Xbox and edit config files in a text editor, and makes it usable by mere mortals. What's more, relatively inexpensive AppleTVs and Mac Minis have made it almost an appliance type solution that is braindead easy to setup, and frees you from the $100+ a month cable bill. What's more, it's actually usable by mortals and has the patented WAF (wife acceptance factor).
For the truly geeky, you can easily take a refurbished 3 year old computer, get a $20 IR remote (Microsoft sells it even lol, the MCE remote), put Ubuntu on it, plug it into your TV, and have literally thousands of free (as in speech, cc licensed stuff like TED, etc) and non-free (Hulu, commercially copyrighted) shows, instantly available. It also supports Netflix, has a built in Torrent client and allows you to browse DVDs, shows, etc, online on certain sites (ahem, torrent sites), and will automatically grab the torrent for you.
In short, it's the media slice/dice killer app based on XBMC that mere mortals can use.
It's not too hard to justify a
I see these "brain exercises" don't help your language skills much...
That's one analogy, but not a particularly good one. How about this: A new restaurant is opening in town. The owner of the restaurant wants to get some feedback from the public on how good his food tastes. He invites everyone in town to come to a free dinner, provided they fill out a little feedback card with their name, address, and answers to simple questions about the quality of the food. The only catch is that if you fill out this card, they'll have your home address so you lose a little privacy. He might even sell your physical address to other businesses that want to send you junk mail.
So, you hear about this, and despite your privacy concerns, hey it's a free meal. You go to his restaurant, eat free food all night, then when he comes around at the end of the meal and asks you to fill out the card, you say "No, I'm not going to do it," and walk out the door.
I personally find Adbusters pretty ridiculous. Most of the services we enjoy on the Internet, such as free Gmail, Youtube, Google Search, etc, are funded by ads. If they weren't, the services would either go away or you'd have to pay. Can you imagine paying 25 cents for doing a keyword search? The massive infrastructure that crawls the web isn't free.
Some people may want to go back to the Internet being only available on University computers and using gopher, but I sure don't.
You better hope you never have to return it to the store for a refund or ever get Red Ring of Death (RRoD) on your Xbox or you're screwed. Personally, I'd rather pay $199 for it at Amazon and know I can return it if I have a problem.
Seriously, anyone that would buy a major electronics purchase from a company that is going out of business tomorrow needs their head examined. I figure if they take 50% off the price, make it $100, just maybe I'll consider it.
There are other cost factors to look at like the cost of maintenance. You should probably check the maintenance costs on a Prius because you might be surprised to learn that people with hybrids don't have to change their oil as often, due to the electric motor providing power a lot of the time. There are also other mechanical parts that tend to last longer due to not using an internal combustion engine 100% of the time.
I'm not saying it will pay for the $6000 difference, but if you're not comparing vehicle price, maintenance costs, and fuel prices all together, you're not doing a complete comparison.
Sorry, but this is plain wrong. You assume that there is a finite amount of money in the system and that it never increases at all, yet new resources are constantly being mined, produced, farmed, and created.
The total amount of debt in a system does matter, but only as it pertains to a ratio of the world's GDP. If the GDP of the world goes up, which it tends to do as populations increase and more of the world is developed, the debt can also increase without causing systemic failure. Systemic failure is caused when the debt and credit far exceeds the GDP of the world, which in other words, is the very definition of a bubble.
Actually, there is no government agency that is responsible for helping employees in disputes like this, unless there is a job safety issue, in which case OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Association) would step in.
I'm afraid a job is just an agreement between two consenting parties to exchange money for services. You need a private employment attorney to resolve your disputes. The government really doesn't care unless laws are being broken.
The ACLU does not care about your employment law case. They are far more concerned with constitutional rights that are being eroded away.
It's called a mistrial. You can bet that anyone who was convicted by this judge and has enough money to hire a lawyer is preparing their appeal right now. The ones with really good lawyers are going to get a lot of money for wrongful incarceration. Just because an injustice was done in the past doesn't mean you can't get a new trial in the future.
How in the hell did this get modded up? If you got to Dell or HP's website you'll see similar pricing. Put together a complete system with all the components and then compare price.
Parent is just another of the million "Apple is too expensive" trolls.
Gee, that's nice that you link to a Dell Mini 9 computer sold on Walmart.com that runs Linux, but did you read down the page a little bit where it said:
To the vast majority of the buying public, a computer that isn't in stores will never be purchased.
Normal people don't buy computers online from a website. If they had the ability to do that, they wouldn't need a computer. Normal people go to the physical Walmart or Best Buy store and buy whatever computer the sales droid convinces them they need.
It's not new and it's definitely not open source at all.
This is a closed source game copy, Acclaim, that finds grindy, asian-themed MMOs made by small studios. They buy the US rights to the game, and use the beta testing community to do their translation for them, because they can't even be bothered to spend the money to localize their own content...
I played one of these terrible, terrible games called 9 Dragons for a couple days. It's an asian-themed martial arts based MMO, which sounds like it could be very cool, but when you realize it's like World of Warcraft but with 10x the grind and half of the dialog is in Korean, it makes you want to scrape your eyeballs off with a cheese grater just to stop the pain.
Acclaim releases free to play shovelware, asian grind themed MMO games for dirt cheap in the US, and basically admits that they don't want to spend money to do localization and voice acting, so they just let the community do their work for them for free.
Why is this news?
Why is this story news, when last week, Steve Wozniak becoming chief scientist at a flash storage company isn't? Frankly, Slashdot has really become terrible lately. Badly formed javascript that makes what used to be a quick loading mostly text page take minutes to render on slow systems and mobile browsers. Stories that are more tabloid than news for nerds.
Slashdot, it's very obvious you have new owners. Quit trying to "monetize eyeballs" or whatever stupid Web 2.0 jargon you're trying. Just go back to the news stories you used to have and quit sending us all this crap.
The way I look at it, they have two ways to handle the economic crisis:
1. Do absolutely nothing and let the economy continue to deflate until we get back to pre-housing bubble status. The problem with this approach is that you'll have 25% unemployment, soup lines that are worse than the great depression, and the entire world will take 10-20 years to pull itself out of the mess, if people don't riot and burn the world down first.
2. Dump money into the economy and continue to prop up the housing bubble by buying failed mortgage debt, hoping for a soft landing. This approach is doomed to failure as well because you can't keep pumping money into a bubble hoping to sustain it forever. The bubble is going to either pop quickly or deflate slowly. This approach only kicks the football down the field another 5-10 years for the next generation of politicians to deal with it.
Guess which approach our government is picking? I guess I'd choose option 2 also but either way we're fucked.
I can see a huge problem with this. If every object ever instantiated becomes persistent until deleted, what happens when you have a memory leak? Bad code could easily fill your hard drive and destroy your entire computer. How would you delete millions of objects with broken pointers?
It's not that they always meet with church leaders. It's that they already are church leaders. Utah may only have a 50% mormon population, but the legislature is more than 90% mormon, and the vast majority are church leaders, either Bishop level, Stake President level, or above. Many are "quorum of the 70" which are the 70 top leadership officials in the church.
It would be the equivalent of having a catholic state where 90% of the government is run by Bishops and Cardinals. Sure, they might not directly consult the Pope every time they pass a law, but chances are the law will look and sound an awful lot like the church policy.
That's a good way to describe it to your average WoW player. Now, I can tell you that I play MMOs quite a bit (maybe more than I should), and that's exactly the reason why I won't play EVE. This is also the reason why EVE will never be much more than a "niche" game.
I love PvP, and I like killing other players, but I draw a line at hacking their guild bank, sharding their purples and /gkicking their entire guild. EVE is a game that not only allows this, but encourages it.
With the rampant account theft by keylogging gold farmers, Blizzard probably would have lost the #1 MMO crown a long time ago if they allowed anything approaching what happens in EVE to happen to their players.
Maybe, just maybe, you should have gotten a job with health insurance before popping out two kids on a $30K a year salary. It's called family planning. Don't have kids until you can actually afford them. I know, it may be a foreign concept to you, but it's not your god given right to keep popping out little brats regardless of your ability to financially support them.