[shogunmike]

Yes, I have heard of Eve Online, but didn't realise all of these dynamics had been put in place.

I'm sure I can dig answers out to these questions elsewhere, but I thought I'd ask how the economy is balanced. For instance, mining new materials obviously increases supply. To what extent is this activity capped by the game mechanics in order to keep demand at a reasonable level?

I've heard of space stations being bought and sold, but I think this was a separate MMO. Not far off restoring houses and flipping for profit in the real world!

[stuhacking]

I'm afraid I can't personally provide a detailed run down - I played the game for about 6 months near the end of university and after that I never really found enough free time to justify continuing the subscription.

The Wikipedia page seems to be comprehensive though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Online#Economy

I would take a look at the development section also. They use a Python variant called Stackless (http://www.stackless.com) which provides lightweight threads and message passing. I actually started using this as an alternative to regular CPython.