Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 10:41 AM by Gene

So! eBay has stopped auctions of those non-existent "implements" in digital war-and-witchcraft games. That $100 billion number sounds like a "Hi Mom!" moment (Ed Castronova? Meet PERFESSER THOMPSON!), but no doubt lots of people spend inordinate time playing these games that go in circles and lead nowhere. When archaeologists look back at this sad and shriveled age they will scratch their heads and wonder how so many could have wasted so much time in make-believe.

One thing's clear: if they ever get to the level of a real scam the Congressional hearings will be ridiculous.

And this, of course, largely involves SONY, the company that proudly gave the world ATRAC and ROOTKITS, and that seems managed with its head firmly up its behind.

P. S. PERFESSER CASTRONOVA is an economist, NATCH, and apparently he's spent lots of time making Hi Mom! moments:

His paper on Norrath, a fictional planet in the EverQuest universe, Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier (2001) is available on SSRN. It claims, for example, that Norrath has a GDP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria, higher than that of China and India, and that a unit of EverQuest currency is worth more than the Yen or Lira.

Now what this guy needs is a special cell phone surgically stitched to his face, with immediate access to every news hack -- just like PERFESSER THOMPSON.