No, it's more like, "pull your head out of your ass, and pull funding from something that isn't utterly anemic."

Like, y'know. The military that takes up 20% of the United States federal budget. But I guess bullets are more important, huh?

Hey, asshole. If you want to whine about resources squandered on NASA, why don't you take a quick peek at the US budget and take a look at how a military communications satellite costs 13 billion, yet somehow NASA doesn't even get twice that to do interplanetary missions.

To be emphatic, fuck you.

You've actually played EVE, right?

It's entirely different from how it works in direct RMT, because there is a market for PLEX, between individual players/characters/whatever. The PLEX is bought and then sold on the in-game. There is no currency created, just an exchange of goods.

That means it follows the following flow: REAL MONEY -> PLEX -> Naturally gained ISK->in-game goods produced by players

The big thing about the whole Aurum debacle and the (ig)Nobel Exchange is that all goods are poofed in from nothing. That fancy monocle that I could actually pay a bill with? It came from nothing, and the money came from nothing. The awesome ammo that's horribly OP, so as to promote Pay-to-Win? Nobody produced it. From nothing.

The Aurum/Nobel Exchange economy thus follows this flow: REAL MONEY-> MAGIC -> MAGIC -> MAGIC -> MONOCLES

Now, how is that similar, again?

Is it just me, or weren't the numbers already this hugely skewed? Wait, too. Am I honestly the only one who on a busy day might send/recieve four or five SMS messages toal in one day?
 
No, really. Am I? Also, frist psot!!!

Well, yes, to be exact it's a bitmap of room numbers, but that's just splitting hairs on the note of levels and areas.

I'm probably a bit alone on this thing, but I may as well post my .02c

I am a seventeen year old high school student and this struck a chord or ten. I always had a love of the technical and the arcane, from when I disassembled and reassembled everything I got my grubby little hands on. I've had to work with my similar-aged, and it just keeps on ringing in my head just how this vast network of loosely connected fiber and copper with the rare bits of 3.2GHz in the short haul is taken so for granted by every other person near my age. Never did I really look at anything without at least some bewilderment and awe at just how far technology has advanced in my two short decades of life.

My first computer was an 80386 running MS-DOS, and I think I am not alone here (at least with the C64 crowd et al.) with how what I did mostly with it was spending hours and hours in the BASIC implementation, crappy as it as, it was definitely a thing I had a blast on, even if it wasn't a real programming language in all honesty. I remember just how astounding it was to look at the numbers when I migrated to a Tualatin Celeron with a jaw-dropping 1.2 GHz of raw processing power compared to something that didn't break the hundreds. And a GUI? And this strange mouse? What just invaded my desk? And... where did my system's guts go, over everything?!

That old jalopy still held quite a bit of good times and memories, especially when I managed the impressive task of making a bouncing square on an NES with it or a loud and high pitched 25% duty cycle pulse wave that'd wake up the whole family with a press of A. I never did any concerted efforts to make any homebrew for it, that said. I even remember after reading this one guy's paper on the inner workings of Metroid's engine and spending more time in hex editors altering the the levels slightly. Hell, my first connection to the internet was a blazing fast 28.8k!

Words can't describe how shocked I was at how carefree people were to the machines I studied so endlessly when I discovered in middle school most of the kids my age didn't even know what the NES is, let alone nifty little tricks like breaking the 10NES or bank-switching to deal with the low ceiling, or how I still can't understand how someone of any age has such a weak sense of wonder and amazement that they cannot care the slightest in how something works or why it works or why when you remove this little cylindrical thing the pretty pink smoke starts to puff from the magical box of P and N doped silicon. I couldn't leave anything alone and I made sure I knew what the hell happened in the appliances I used, simply because a black box is just dull and inviting to be pulled apart and (hopefully) put back together.

Nor can any words put just how much I enjoyed studying the computers of older times, and just that same wonder once more when I realize that the PDP-8 at its most expansive configuration can be fully emulated on a CPU and its cache these days, or spending a few weeks with my father's tools making a mechanical turing machine (with an impressively large tape - 80 spaces made from a notched meter stick), the days I'd spend just learning, learning, learning. When I discovered Wikipedia in 2007 it was as if the world was opened to me, a compendium of all human knowledge (or at least the "relevant" part of it *cough*) at my fingertips, and I'd only have to wait a few minutes for an in-depth explanation on any topic I'd ever think of. The world-wide web is the reason why I had any chance at all to really get so deep into computing before even reaching the age of majority.

And with this, I can say I really was born in the wrong generation. To get the chance to see the computing explosion and the rise of the internet as it happened than in retrospect is something I would kill to get, and it's a sad thing that nobody my age can give even a quarter of a damn about the engineering marvels they have in their homes. (I Am Not An Adult(tm), so YMMV on this statement and all that.)

It looks like you are trying to masturbate.

Would you like help?

You're horribly naive. The difference between a victim and a criminal is who did what; they're still human, they're still breathing, and there's still a few slips of paper in the framework of most nations that say that rights are something called unalienable. You're born with rights and you die with rights. Such harsh punshments, not only are cruel and unusual, but also fling themselves against probability issues. What if you were wrongly convicted of (for sake of example, et cetera) murder and sentenced to 120 years of "State-endorsed labor" or some other euphism for legalized slavery of criminals and innocents-deemed-criminals, and what of the scapegoat? The victim of circumstance? Or what if it was someone you knew? And what of the precedent? If we can take away the rights of convicts, why not suspects? And who really is a suspect? I don't want to sound like I'm spreading FUD here, but that's fire and playing with fire is going to get you burned badly. I'll stick with treating criminals like they're human so I can make sure I can be treated like a human too.