Just another nerd.
TVShowsOnDVD.Com has a copy of a press release announcing the May 8th release of Jason of Star Command on DVD.
Jason of Star Command was a live-action, Saturday morning cartoon that debuted in 1978 on CBS. It featured, among others, James Doohan of Star Trek fame. The first season mimicked the old movie serials, with each episode ending in a cliffhanger that formed a complete story over the course of the entire season.
I must have this Jinx.Com t-shirt,
The Ultimate Getting Things Done Index aggregates the last 5 stories from dozens of GTD-related sites.
This LiveJournal page is filled with very colorful paintings of traditional monsters of myth and legend, such as this Minotaur,
Blues News had a thorough summary of the controversy that hit EVE online a couple weeks ago.
The short version is that employees of CCP, the company that publishes EVE, also play in the game. Some of the employees were part of a corporation called Band of Brothers that allegedly were using their position as developers and game masters to cheat by giving their fellow alliance members items that they hadn’t actually earned.
There is an obvious tension and conflict of interest where a company clearly might want its developers to actually play the game to experience issues that players face. On the other hand, developers and game masters obviously have access to inside information and, in some cases tools, that give them advantages over other players that could be easily abused.
In a game like World of Warcraft, the developer could ameliorate this problem somewhat by having developers play on servers where they don’t have any special privileges or access. In a game like Eve, however, this isn’t possible because there is only one world/server.
CCP didn’t do itself any favors by opening a thread on the controversy explaining its position and asking for feedback and then closing that thread the same day as players pointed out that the CCP statement didn’t really address most of their real concerns.
San Jose State’s Thayer Watkins has a fascinating account of hyperinflation during the early years of the breakup of Yugoslavia (no, really!)
At the end of December the exchange rate was 1 DM = 3 trillion dinars and on January 4, 1994 it was 1 DM = 6 trillion dinars. On January 6th the government declared that the German Deutsche was an official currency of Yugoslavia. About this time the government announced a NEW “new” Dinar which was equal to 1 billion of the old “new” dinars. This meant that the exchange rate was 1 DM = 6,000 new new Dinars. By January 11 the exchange rate had reached a level of 1 DM = 80,000 new new Dinars. On January 13th the rate was 1 DM = 700,000 new new Dinars and six days later it was 1 DM = 10 million new new Dinars.
That was bad enough, but of course like other regimes before it, Yugoslavia tried to counter this hyperinflation with a series of price controls. But the result, not surprisingly, was simply to make the situation much worse since the hyperinflation was occurring far faster than the government could update prices even on government-owned goods, so it was essentially giving many goods and services away free,
James Lyon, a journalist, made twenty hours of international telephone calls from Belgrade in December of 1993. The bill for these calls was 1000 new new dinars and it arrived on January 11th. At the exchange rate for January 11th of 1 DM = 150,000 dinars it would have cost less than one German pfennig to pay the bill. But the bill was not due until January 17th and by that time the exchange rate reached 1 DM = 30 million dinars. Yet the free market value of those twenty hours of international telephone calls was about $5,000. So despite being strapped for hard currency, the government gave James Lyon $5,000 worth of phone calls essentially for nothing.
And so on. But, of course as Watkins notes, the Yugoslavian government’s position was that all of its economic problems were due solely to Western sanctions.