How long until those suckers are out of the distribution channel? I bought one and although I haven't had any problems yet, I did make sure to buy the three year extended warranty from Best Buy. At this point I'm just waiting until I am sure the newer version of the MBP is in the channel and then I'm going to return my defective one.
Stay away from Exchange. It will scale and it will handle the demand, but it is probably overkill and more headache than you want to deal with. In your position I'd go with Google and let them deal with the capacity planning issues. Their integration with current systems won't be as good as Microsoft, but how much integration are you really talking about? Maybe allowing students to update a calendar with their class schedule? You can probably do that with RSS feeds and iCal out of Google.
Oh ya, he's serious. You should have seen his post the other day where he was asking how to get his "Friend of Blizzard" status back so that he can test the game.
But your math is WAYYY off. Most of their players are in Asia. Most of the players in Asia are playing in internet cafes where one disk is used to install the game on numerous machines. Most of the players in Asia are playing with game cards and therefore aren't monthly subscriptions. I also think that Blizzard counts accounts that have been played within the last 90 days. A person who never bought a copy of the game and is playing for 10 hours every 90 days isn't exactly the cash cow that your numbers would suggestion. Now I'm not saying that WoW isn't popular or that Blizzard isn't raking in the dough. What I am saying is that your math needs a reality check.
John Perkins is informative, but I saw him speak in San Diego and something about him just struck me as being off. He rails on about how corporations are the problem, then in the next breath talks about needing to work with corporations to change things. Maybe he agrees with the system itself but disagrees with the people running it.
Whoever moderated by post Offtopic can blow me. (Go ahead and moderate this post into oblivion. Oh no... not my karma.) The initial post was perfectly on topic. It dealt with the NSA eavesdropping on US troops overseas and possible reasons for doing so.
Lets see here... The United States government has sent thousands of troops to occupy and loot a foreign land. There weren't enough troops sent there in the first place to get the job done safely. As a result, many of the troops have faced extended Stop Loss orders that have kept them in the armed services for a year or more after they should have been done with their commitment. Meanwhile at home, the economy is falling apart and those soldiers are going to be coming home into harsh economic conditions where they will have a difficult time finding a job, paying their rent, car bills, child support and everything else. The economic hardship will be stacked on top of all of the PTSD cases from seeing their friends killed next to him, having to violate other human being's basic rights and a whole slew of other issues that arise in moral people put in positions where they are ordered to do immoral things.
If any group of individuals is going to get together and give Uncle Sam the middle finger, it is going to be the returning vets. Some of them actually believe that whole "protect and defend" the Constitution oath that they took. Some of them are even smart enough to realize that the country is being run into the ground by traitors intent on destroying the Constitution and completing the sell out of our economy and civil rights to international bankers in order to establish a single world government. Toss in the fact that those people are trained in urban combat and counter-insurgency operations and well... you have the tip of the spear for a full blown civil insurrection.
Given all of that, if you were setting up a surveillance program with the intent of keeping an eye on people with the potential to upset the power that you're so precariously clinging onto, wouldn't you put the troops under surveillance too? If I were PFC Iraqi-Vet just back from the sandbox with a Purple Heart for wounds sustained and a Bronze Star for operating under fire while my squad was absorbing rifle fire with their bodies and getting peppered with shrapnel, the fact that the government was eavesdropping on my phone sex with my girlfriend might be one straw too many on the back of an already staggering camel.
Given the efficiency of the PsyOps folks, the troops probably don't care. Maybe they already know that their conversations are being eavesdropped on. After all, they sold their bodies and souls to Uncle Sam. It all comes with the territory.
It may be that I'm too caught up in the particulars of this current case, or my own bias against the stupidity of drug law enforcement in this country and therefore I'm unable to be clearly objective in this situation. Having said that, driving a vehicle down the street is not probable cause for a traffic stop. It seems like the only reason the officers stopped the man in question was because they received erroneous information from their database. That is not acceptable. We are very quickly sliding down a slope into a complete surveillance society where the police can stop any of us at any time for whatever reason they feel like. It is in their best interests to make these "mistakes" because it makes their jobs easier. A friend of mine who is a Los Angeles Sheriff once told me that, "It's really easy to be a cop in Lynwood. Everyone there is on probation or parole." In other words, he never had to worry about guessing wrong or violating an innocent person's civil rights.
In a some what related situation, a friend of a friend of mine bought a car from a police auction. Within a one month period he got pulled over three times because the license plate was in the local police database as belonging to a drug dealer. The police departments of this country are great at collecting information. They aren't very good at going back and cleaning it up. Look at what happened in Maryland. A bunch of peaceful protesters ended up in the terrorism database. Exercising your First Amendment rights? Well, don't count on being able to fly anywhere anytime soon.
This situation isn't an easy one. Obviously the guy in question was a douche bag and despite having already been through the system once, still thought it was cool to cruise around with drugs and weapons. I don't want that guy on the streets and I'm glad the police got him. Despite that it sets a terrible President and points at the accepted lack of accountability in our culture. The President can lie us into war based on "bad intelligence" that he "believed" at the time. (Don't even get me started how the whole thing was bullshit from the get go.) The police can execute no-knock search warrants on the WRONG house, cause all sorts of damage and they aren't liable for it because they were "acting in good faith". We're seeing the gradual militarization of our police and a serious erosion of our civil liberties and very few seem to care.
In this case, however, police had probable cause to stop his vehicle and therefore grounds to enter anything they found within it as evidence against him.
That is a fallacy. They didn't have probable cause because the warrant was expired. They thought that they had probable cause. There is a very clear cut legal difference there. The criminal justice system makes people jump through hoop after hoop after hoop. After someone has been on probation, paid fines and done everything that they are obligated to do based on the ruling of the judge, that person should be able to expect that the justice system will uphold their end of the bargain and purge the warrants from the system.
Now granted, the guy should not have had drugs on him. He obviously didn't learn the first time and needs to go back to jail so that he can understand that carrying drugs on you is a bad idea. However as others have pointed out, just because he was guilty does not mean that the cops messed up. In this case, what should happen is that this guy needs to get off so that everyone else who IS innocent, but hasn't been properly removed from the system can avoid unnecessary harassment.
The other side of the argument is that once you have been convicted of a felony, you can never escape the system. Some people have the perception that the justice system serves the purpose of steering people who are on the wrong track back onto the right one. The reality is that once someone has been convicted of a felony, they are forever in the system. The system isn't there to reform them but to punish them for the rest of their lives. The idea of reform has been tossed out the window. The perception that someone can actually see the light and start living the right way has been abandoned.
The Federal Reserve encouraged the lenders to loan to people unqualified for the loans. Alan Greenspan's grand plan to reinflate the economy after the tech bubble popped was to securitize mortgages. The government facilitated it by removing a lot of the oversight and passing regulation requiring Fannie Mae to make loans to "sub-prime" borrowers.
Although I agree with you that the fault to a certain extent lies with the people who took out the loans, it also lies with the lenders and the government for allowing those people to have loans in the first place. In the end, the lenders felt comfortable making the loans because they believed that if things went south, the government would put the taxpayers on the hook for the losses. That is exactly what they are trying to do right now.
I didn't get a mortgage. Why should I have to pay for my neighbor who made a bad choice? Why should I pay for my co-worker who made a bad choice? What gives the government the right to take my money to cover someone else's bad decision? If my neighbor goes to the bookie and takes out $10,000 then blows it on a bad bet at the race track and can't pay it back, does the bookie come after me because I also happen to be an American? Why is it okay for the government to do the same thing?
The thing is that I'm not exactly ignorant. I've been following this issue for more than two years at this point. Economists who know what they are talking about have been warning about this for a long time now. There has been ample time to properly address the problem. Our financial system under the Federal Reserve is the problem. They inflate bubble after bubble and we pay for it in terms of market instability and inflation. If the government passes the bail out bill it will destroy the dollar because of inflation. The choice really comes down to some relatively short term economic hardship (oh noes... my credit card is at 20% APR even though I have a 750+ credit score), or the long term destruction of our currency. Hyper-inflation is no joke. I read a statistic earlier today that we're at 11% inflation just this year. What do you think another trillion dollars in circulation is going to do to prices?
There isn't any point in having direct democracy. It would just slow things down. For 99% of the legislative session, I trust my representative to represent me. On certain key issues, I'm going to speak up. If that makes me ignorant, so be it.
I'm going with the latter. Sooner or later someone has to stand up and tell Wall Street that there are consiquences for gambling wit people's money. If they make bad decisions, they will be held accountable for them. For me, that is what this comes down to. Maybe I put too much into The Creature from Jekyll Island when I read it. But based on that book, it seems like the Federal Reserve is perpetrating a huge fraud on the citizen of the United States (most of us here on/.). As long as "Wall Street" believes that the government will force the citizens of America to subsidize their stupid business decisions, they will continue to make those stupid decisions. I know that the bill will eventually pass, and if it does then I can justify my cynicism. Until then, I am going to keep leaning on my representative and pretend that they really should be representing me. That is the point of representative government.
How cute, someone is feeling impotent about the problems in the world so they are turning to an internet forum to soothe their ego by berating others for not doing enough to alleviate their discomfort.
But you're not going to convince me that there aren't lots of smaller companies with decent leadership who can work hard but don't feel the need to march their employees to death. I have a few friends with jobs in IT like that around here, and this part of the country is by no means any sort of tech-wonderland.
You are spot on with your observation. Those companies are out there. For seven of the last eight years I worked for a small consulting firm run by a guy who speaks a lot of conferences. We had enough quality clients to keep us busy and more than enough overtime to make decent money. I was getting 15%+ pay raises every year. I eventually gave it up because I had other priorities and didn't like the feast or famine nature of consulting. The guy who has my job now is happy with it and thinks I'm stupid for leaving. So yes, those jobs are out there if you have the skills and the dedication to put in the work.
Here in California we have the proposition system. I wonder if we could pass a proposition to that effect. I wonder how much danger my life would be in if I did it.
As someone whose girl friend works for the state of California, I can tell you that those unions are there for a reason. Without those union contracts, the state would just lay people off for no apparent reason. Although the contracts do protect the slackers to a certain extent, that small amount of bad is seriously outweighed by the good of protecting competent employees from rash actions by state legislators. There are a lot of state employees getting paid jack shit to do some pretty important jobs. I know some of the IT guys there. They are limping along two decade old Novell networks because the state can't find the budget to upgrade them. They don't get paid much of anything, but at least they have job security. In this economy, that is worth a lot.
Absolutely nothing. Microsoft is a sinking ship. I have seen problems with Office 2007 that reveal such inherent flaws in the software that I am ashamed to even be associated with supporting it. I hope to have moved onto the next phase of my life by the time it implodes. There will be a time when the OSS world gets to the Windows XP/Office 2003/Exchange level of functionality. Once that happens, Microsoft is done. At that point they will fall back to the patents and try to sue any company that achieves enough market share. The world doesn't need Windows 2012. They need a refined XP free from security holes. I swear the best business strategy Microsoft could pursue would be to polish what works and then once it works, lock it down like Apple has.
But their products keep getting worse. I have been using Microsoft products since DOS 3.3. They have boxed themselves into a business strategy that requires forced upgrades. The room for serious innovation in the market place is petering out. There might be some new features here and there, but there isn't much that can be done with an entire office suite, or operating system. Just look at Vista and Office 2007. I've used both and they suck compared to XP and Office 2003. There isn't any value added for the consumer that would incline the consumer to purchase the newer versions. Microsoft has to force consumers into newer versions by end of lifing (EOL) the previous version. That makes for unhappy consumers when they are forced to replaced something that works just fine. In the long term, Microsoft is destined to fail if they keep up the same strategy. What they should do is freeze things where they are and refine them before they completely destroy them.
There are two sides to "enjoying" the game. There are the people who due to lack of commitments, can spend large periods of time playing the game. There are people who due to commitments, can only spend small periods of time playing the game. Both of them enjoy playing the game. They like running around in Azeroth or Outlands, killing mobs, PVPing and raiding when they get the chance. For the person without many commitments, they can grind and grind and grind and grind AND GRIND AND GRIND AND GRIND AND GRIND and... to get the gear that they need because lets face it, they have lots of time to play the game. For the person who does have commitments and can't... (I'll spare the GRIND rehash), what are they to do? Not play the game? Not enjoy the game because they don't have hours upon hours? Hell no.
I'll put it like this. I just turned 30. I work a full time job. I train martial arts. I have a girl friend. I like playing WoW. My g/f likes playing WoW. We play about 8 hours over the course of week (4-6 hours on Sunday and maybe a couple hours at night during the week). I can afford $100 here and there to buy some gold. I can't buy T6 gear, or arena gear because that takes time. I can buy an epic mount and some other things that I'd otherwise have to spend literal DAYS of playing time to get. Do you have any idea how long it takes to get 5000g if you only play 8 hours a week?
The concept of "effort" is a funny one to me. I put effort into the world outside of the game. One of the results of that effort is something called money. I am free to spend that money how I want. Here's something to think about. My salary works out to a little over $35 an hour (chump change among the/. crowd I'm sure). For one hour of work, I can purchase 1600 gold from the first WoW gold site I found with a Google search. http://www.wowgoldvip.com/news_list.asp How much time does someone have to spend in the game to earn 1600 gold?
We are all given a limited amount of time in life. We choose how to spend that time. If you want to value yourself and your time based on what kind of items you can get for a toon in a video game, that's fine. Just realize that there is more to life than video games, and there are numerous routes to the same goal. The people who take the most efficient route there are usually the smartest. Hell, there are probably people out there who look at me and think, "While that loser was wasting eight hours a week sitting in his apartment playing a video game, I was putting in extra hours at work to pay the mortgage on my house." We all make our choices in life. If your choices aren't giving you the results you want, or someone else's choices are letting them get the same results with less effort, just realize that is how life works.
The balance is the court system. 12 people in the box. Laws are worthless if the citizenry isn't willing to convinct the people who violate them because they recognize that the laws are ill conceived. It just takes an informed and compassionate citizenry to maintain balance in the country.
Slashdot Mirror
How long until those suckers are out of the distribution channel? I bought one and although I haven't had any problems yet, I did make sure to buy the three year extended warranty from Best Buy. At this point I'm just waiting until I am sure the newer version of the MBP is in the channel and then I'm going to return my defective one.
Stay away from Exchange. It will scale and it will handle the demand, but it is probably overkill and more headache than you want to deal with. In your position I'd go with Google and let them deal with the capacity planning issues. Their integration with current systems won't be as good as Microsoft, but how much integration are you really talking about? Maybe allowing students to update a calendar with their class schedule? You can probably do that with RSS feeds and iCal out of Google.
Oh ya, he's serious. You should have seen his post the other day where he was asking how to get his "Friend of Blizzard" status back so that he can test the game.
But your math is WAYYY off. Most of their players are in Asia. Most of the players in Asia are playing in internet cafes where one disk is used to install the game on numerous machines. Most of the players in Asia are playing with game cards and therefore aren't monthly subscriptions. I also think that Blizzard counts accounts that have been played within the last 90 days. A person who never bought a copy of the game and is playing for 10 hours every 90 days isn't exactly the cash cow that your numbers would suggestion. Now I'm not saying that WoW isn't popular or that Blizzard isn't raking in the dough. What I am saying is that your math needs a reality check.
John Perkins is informative, but I saw him speak in San Diego and something about him just struck me as being off. He rails on about how corporations are the problem, then in the next breath talks about needing to work with corporations to change things. Maybe he agrees with the system itself but disagrees with the people running it.
Whoever moderated by post Offtopic can blow me. (Go ahead and moderate this post into oblivion. Oh no... not my karma.) The initial post was perfectly on topic. It dealt with the NSA eavesdropping on US troops overseas and possible reasons for doing so.
If any group of individuals is going to get together and give Uncle Sam the middle finger, it is going to be the returning vets. Some of them actually believe that whole "protect and defend" the Constitution oath that they took. Some of them are even smart enough to realize that the country is being run into the ground by traitors intent on destroying the Constitution and completing the sell out of our economy and civil rights to international bankers in order to establish a single world government. Toss in the fact that those people are trained in urban combat and counter-insurgency operations and well... you have the tip of the spear for a full blown civil insurrection.
Given all of that, if you were setting up a surveillance program with the intent of keeping an eye on people with the potential to upset the power that you're so precariously clinging onto, wouldn't you put the troops under surveillance too? If I were PFC Iraqi-Vet just back from the sandbox with a Purple Heart for wounds sustained and a Bronze Star for operating under fire while my squad was absorbing rifle fire with their bodies and getting peppered with shrapnel, the fact that the government was eavesdropping on my phone sex with my girlfriend might be one straw too many on the back of an already staggering camel.
Given the efficiency of the PsyOps folks, the troops probably don't care. Maybe they already know that their conversations are being eavesdropped on. After all, they sold their bodies and souls to Uncle Sam. It all comes with the territory.
2020, are you kidding me?! I've had this DAMN song stuck in my head for the last two days!!!
Then perhaps it is time to speak with your financial power, instead of just words. This guy seems to be pretty keen on standing up to Big Brother invasions of privacy. http://www.swissbanking.org/en/20080918_5720_refmkpmi_d_tsu.pdf
In a some what related situation, a friend of a friend of mine bought a car from a police auction. Within a one month period he got pulled over three times because the license plate was in the local police database as belonging to a drug dealer. The police departments of this country are great at collecting information. They aren't very good at going back and cleaning it up. Look at what happened in Maryland. A bunch of peaceful protesters ended up in the terrorism database. Exercising your First Amendment rights? Well, don't count on being able to fly anywhere anytime soon.
This situation isn't an easy one. Obviously the guy in question was a douche bag and despite having already been through the system once, still thought it was cool to cruise around with drugs and weapons. I don't want that guy on the streets and I'm glad the police got him. Despite that it sets a terrible President and points at the accepted lack of accountability in our culture. The President can lie us into war based on "bad intelligence" that he "believed" at the time. (Don't even get me started how the whole thing was bullshit from the get go.) The police can execute no-knock search warrants on the WRONG house, cause all sorts of damage and they aren't liable for it because they were "acting in good faith". We're seeing the gradual militarization of our police and a serious erosion of our civil liberties and very few seem to care.
That is a fallacy. They didn't have probable cause because the warrant was expired. They thought that they had probable cause. There is a very clear cut legal difference there. The criminal justice system makes people jump through hoop after hoop after hoop. After someone has been on probation, paid fines and done everything that they are obligated to do based on the ruling of the judge, that person should be able to expect that the justice system will uphold their end of the bargain and purge the warrants from the system.
Now granted, the guy should not have had drugs on him. He obviously didn't learn the first time and needs to go back to jail so that he can understand that carrying drugs on you is a bad idea. However as others have pointed out, just because he was guilty does not mean that the cops messed up. In this case, what should happen is that this guy needs to get off so that everyone else who IS innocent, but hasn't been properly removed from the system can avoid unnecessary harassment.
The other side of the argument is that once you have been convicted of a felony, you can never escape the system. Some people have the perception that the justice system serves the purpose of steering people who are on the wrong track back onto the right one. The reality is that once someone has been convicted of a felony, they are forever in the system. The system isn't there to reform them but to punish them for the rest of their lives. The idea of reform has been tossed out the window. The perception that someone can actually see the light and start living the right way has been abandoned.
Although I agree with you that the fault to a certain extent lies with the people who took out the loans, it also lies with the lenders and the government for allowing those people to have loans in the first place. In the end, the lenders felt comfortable making the loans because they believed that if things went south, the government would put the taxpayers on the hook for the losses. That is exactly what they are trying to do right now.
I didn't get a mortgage. Why should I have to pay for my neighbor who made a bad choice? Why should I pay for my co-worker who made a bad choice? What gives the government the right to take my money to cover someone else's bad decision? If my neighbor goes to the bookie and takes out $10,000 then blows it on a bad bet at the race track and can't pay it back, does the bookie come after me because I also happen to be an American? Why is it okay for the government to do the same thing?
Fear teh mistype.
The thing is that I'm not exactly ignorant. I've been following this issue for more than two years at this point. Economists who know what they are talking about have been warning about this for a long time now. There has been ample time to properly address the problem. Our financial system under the Federal Reserve is the problem. They inflate bubble after bubble and we pay for it in terms of market instability and inflation. If the government passes the bail out bill it will destroy the dollar because of inflation. The choice really comes down to some relatively short term economic hardship (oh noes... my credit card is at 20% APR even though I have a 750+ credit score), or the long term destruction of our currency. Hyper-inflation is no joke. I read a statistic earlier today that we're at 11% inflation just this year. What do you think another trillion dollars in circulation is going to do to prices?
There isn't any point in having direct democracy. It would just slow things down. For 99% of the legislative session, I trust my representative to represent me. On certain key issues, I'm going to speak up. If that makes me ignorant, so be it.
I'm going with the latter. Sooner or later someone has to stand up and tell Wall Street that there are consiquences for gambling wit people's money. If they make bad decisions, they will be held accountable for them. For me, that is what this comes down to. Maybe I put too much into The Creature from Jekyll Island when I read it. But based on that book, it seems like the Federal Reserve is perpetrating a huge fraud on the citizen of the United States (most of us here on /.). As long as "Wall Street" believes that the government will force the citizens of America to subsidize their stupid business decisions, they will continue to make those stupid decisions. I know that the bill will eventually pass, and if it does then I can justify my cynicism. Until then, I am going to keep leaning on my representative and pretend that they really should be representing me. That is the point of representative government.
How cute, someone is feeling impotent about the problems in the world so they are turning to an internet forum to soothe their ego by berating others for not doing enough to alleviate their discomfort.
You are spot on with your observation. Those companies are out there. For seven of the last eight years I worked for a small consulting firm run by a guy who speaks a lot of conferences. We had enough quality clients to keep us busy and more than enough overtime to make decent money. I was getting 15%+ pay raises every year. I eventually gave it up because I had other priorities and didn't like the feast or famine nature of consulting. The guy who has my job now is happy with it and thinks I'm stupid for leaving. So yes, those jobs are out there if you have the skills and the dedication to put in the work.
Here in California we have the proposition system. I wonder if we could pass a proposition to that effect. I wonder how much danger my life would be in if I did it.
As someone whose girl friend works for the state of California, I can tell you that those unions are there for a reason. Without those union contracts, the state would just lay people off for no apparent reason. Although the contracts do protect the slackers to a certain extent, that small amount of bad is seriously outweighed by the good of protecting competent employees from rash actions by state legislators. There are a lot of state employees getting paid jack shit to do some pretty important jobs. I know some of the IT guys there. They are limping along two decade old Novell networks because the state can't find the budget to upgrade them. They don't get paid much of anything, but at least they have job security. In this economy, that is worth a lot.
Absolutely nothing. Microsoft is a sinking ship. I have seen problems with Office 2007 that reveal such inherent flaws in the software that I am ashamed to even be associated with supporting it. I hope to have moved onto the next phase of my life by the time it implodes. There will be a time when the OSS world gets to the Windows XP/Office 2003/Exchange level of functionality. Once that happens, Microsoft is done. At that point they will fall back to the patents and try to sue any company that achieves enough market share. The world doesn't need Windows 2012. They need a refined XP free from security holes. I swear the best business strategy Microsoft could pursue would be to polish what works and then once it works, lock it down like Apple has.
When a company owns, what... 80%+ of the desktop computer market, the lack of desire to be "anything more" might not exactly be considered failure.
But their products keep getting worse. I have been using Microsoft products since DOS 3.3. They have boxed themselves into a business strategy that requires forced upgrades. The room for serious innovation in the market place is petering out. There might be some new features here and there, but there isn't much that can be done with an entire office suite, or operating system. Just look at Vista and Office 2007. I've used both and they suck compared to XP and Office 2003. There isn't any value added for the consumer that would incline the consumer to purchase the newer versions. Microsoft has to force consumers into newer versions by end of lifing (EOL) the previous version. That makes for unhappy consumers when they are forced to replaced something that works just fine. In the long term, Microsoft is destined to fail if they keep up the same strategy. What they should do is freeze things where they are and refine them before they completely destroy them.
I'll put it like this. I just turned 30. I work a full time job. I train martial arts. I have a girl friend. I like playing WoW. My g/f likes playing WoW. We play about 8 hours over the course of week (4-6 hours on Sunday and maybe a couple hours at night during the week). I can afford $100 here and there to buy some gold. I can't buy T6 gear, or arena gear because that takes time. I can buy an epic mount and some other things that I'd otherwise have to spend literal DAYS of playing time to get. Do you have any idea how long it takes to get 5000g if you only play 8 hours a week?
The concept of "effort" is a funny one to me. I put effort into the world outside of the game. One of the results of that effort is something called money. I am free to spend that money how I want. Here's something to think about. My salary works out to a little over $35 an hour (chump change among the /. crowd I'm sure). For one hour of work, I can purchase 1600 gold from the first WoW gold site I found with a Google search. http://www.wowgoldvip.com/news_list.asp How much time does someone have to spend in the game to earn 1600 gold?
We are all given a limited amount of time in life. We choose how to spend that time. If you want to value yourself and your time based on what kind of items you can get for a toon in a video game, that's fine. Just realize that there is more to life than video games, and there are numerous routes to the same goal. The people who take the most efficient route there are usually the smartest. Hell, there are probably people out there who look at me and think, "While that loser was wasting eight hours a week sitting in his apartment playing a video game, I was putting in extra hours at work to pay the mortgage on my house." We all make our choices in life. If your choices aren't giving you the results you want, or someone else's choices are letting them get the same results with less effort, just realize that is how life works.
The balance is the court system. 12 people in the box. Laws are worthless if the citizenry isn't willing to convinct the people who violate them because they recognize that the laws are ill conceived. It just takes an informed and compassionate citizenry to maintain balance in the country.