Ralf Goergens

The world’s biggest computer and video games exposition E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) will be held May 14-16 in Los Angeles. GameSpot has a list of the games to be presented there in various stages of completion. That a game appears at the E3 doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be finished soon, though. Some of the best games around were notoriously shown at several consecutive E3s, like Warcraft III, Black & White and Freelancer (five years in development!), just to name a few.

According to the Microenterprise Journal women own nearly half of all American businesses. Even better, they grow and expand faster than the rest of the economy. That shows that they have a lot of as yet unrealized potential, so that this positive trend should continue for a while longer. Since this is the Microenterprise Journal, the article also makes these points:

… the vast majority of the revenues and the jobs are coming from relatively few of these firms. Of the 3.9 million privately held firms in which women own at least 50% interest, 166,212 have revenues of $1 million, and 6,902 have 100 or more employees. That doesn’t sound too bad until you crunch the numbers. Only 4.3% of these firms have revenues in excess of $1 million a year. A meager 0.2% have 100 or more employees. … … while it might sound impressive to talk about firms that generate millions and billions of dollars in revenue, the reality is that the world’s largest economy generally chugs along on the backs of a lot of little companies that make a lot less money.

That last point illustrates nicely why even the strongest economies are so vulnerable to increased regulations and taxes.

Space.com has this very interesting article on the proposed interplanetary Internet. Found via Slashdot.org.

Silvio Berlusconi is defending himself in court against corruption charges.

Starship Dimensions is a great site that shows the relative sizes of starships from various Science Fiction series. I had no idea that the second Death Star’s diameter is five times that of the the first one’s, for example. I can’t believe that the Battlestar Galactica is only 600 meters long, though; it has to be at least a mile!