I just read a few articles, and thought I’d share them with you, and some brief thoughts.  Feel free to comment on one or all of them.  Some of them are fairly old, but that’s ok

• Orson Scott Card finally came back from a hiatus writing his WorldWatch column.  I no longer agree with his political views.  He’s gone from “I don’t like Obama for his policies” to “I don’t like Obama because I’m accusing him of breaking every single promise he’s ever made, and some he hasn’t.”  OSC used to provide support for his arguments.  Now he makes unsubstantiated claims.  One quote that shows OSC’s viewpoint (which I disagree with):

Now [Obama has] shown us that he’s a radical leftist at heart and all his promises — every one of them – were lies. But he’s still relatively harmless domestically because he’s such an incompetent leader, unable to hold his course or persuade even his followers.

• This opinion column in the Wall Street Journal compares global warming to a religion – and I agree completely.  Supporters of the idea of global warming don’t seem to care about the evidence; to them, any and all climate changes are evidence of global warming, even if that evidence is global cooling.  One choice quote:

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

• A commentary in the LA Times on the continual Democratic accusations that the Bush administration lied about Iraq.  The summary?  Democrats conveniently forget that the word lie implies intentional deception; nobody has ever shown that to be true of the Bush administration (and in fact, in 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found the claim to be false, as did the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report a year later).  One choice quote:

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

• A blog post about moral consequences.  Politicians of all colors seem to claim that if they were in charge, things would be better, but they all forget that the things they don’t do carry their own consequences.  Personally, I think (my) religion drives that into us fairly well.  This blog post is not inherently political in nature (that is, the poster does not claim any particular political viewpoint), but is instead simply an examination of moral consequences, and uses various real-world examples.  One choice quote:

If you adopt the notion of “doing no harm”, aren’t you then responsible for harm that comes because of what was left undone, or done some other way?

There’s an article on IncGamers in which the author adds up all the money he and his wife have spent on World of Warcraft over the years, and then complains about how expensive it is.  Now, I’m not a fan of MMOs, but I happen to disagree with his conclusion, for one very important reason: cost per hour.

If we assume he and his wife each play World of Warcraft ten hours per week, then his $1700 over four years and eight months works out to $0.35 per hour of play time.

Let’s compare that to some other games.  You know those $50 games you play once and never look at again?  The ones where the whole game lasts 10 hours if you’re lucky?  Those cost upwards of $5 per hour.

So realizing this got me thinking.  How much have my favorite games really cost me?

Counter-Strike: Source cost me $19.99.  I’ve played countless hours, surely more than 200 hours.  Heck, just in the last two weeks I’ve played 14 hours.  If we pretend that’s accurate over three years, that’s just $0.02 per hour.  In reality, I used to play CS:S a lot more than I do now, so the cost is likely much lower.

I bought the Orange Box (with Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and TF2) for $49.99.  According to my Steam account stat tracking, I’ve played TF2 a total of 34.7 hours (half of that in the last two weeks).  I only played through Episode 2 once or twice; I’ll call it 10 hours (though it may have been more like 12).  Portal, while entertaining, probably only racked up 8 hours of gameplay.  So the Orange Box has cost me $0.91 per hour, but as I ramp up my TF2 gameplay that cost will slowly go down.

I preordered Left 4 Dead for $44.99 last year.  Steam tells me I have a total playtime of 96.25 hours, putting its cost at $0.47 per hour.

My dad bought StarCraft for me years ago.  I’d guess he paid $49.99, because the game was still fairly new.  That was over a decade ago.  I have played a lot of StarCraft.  During middle and high school, I’m sure I played something like 8 hours a week (more during the summer, less during school).  Looking at those six years, that’s just $0.02 per hour; I’ve played a fair amount since then, too, so the price is lower.  (Seems like more of a bargain now, doesn’t it Dad?)

Obviously, I can’t go over every single game I own; the list is too long.  I’ll also admit to buying some games and never playing them (or only playing through partway).  But overall, it looks like gaming costs between $0.01 and $1.00 per hour, depending on the game – and despite both up-front purchase costs and monthly fees, MMOs are nowhere near the worst offenders.

…Hey guys, look! I made the black hole generator we were theorizing yesterday! See? I just have to press this button and

This comes from a comment someone made on Slashdot earlier today.

The idea is that bad programmers sometimes come up with clever ideas, often without thinking through the consequences.  (Alternatively, good programmers sometimes come up with clever ideas but use them maliciously.)

For Reddit, the consequence was merely a slew of self-replicating comments on their articles.  For an engineer working on the Large Hadron Collider…

It looks like my daughter has developed a bit of an attitude problem:

A recent Bruce Schneier blog post got me thinking about boycotts.  Specifically, the user “AwesomeRobot” made the following comment in response to another user who said they plan to forever boycott Sony due to the rootkits they put on music CDs in 2005:

Boycotts don’t work unless you say you’ll buy from them again when they clean up their act. What’s their incentive to change if you just say you’ll “never” buy from them again?

I boycott Eidos because of their deliberately poor customer service.  The trouble is, how am I to know when they’ve cleaned up their act, if I never interact with them again?

I boycott 1&1 Internet (my former web host) because… well, because of lots of reasons.  But if I avoid them in perpetuity, how am I supposed to know whether my boycott has worked?

Another thought that occurred to me relates to the infamous Left 4 Dead 2 boycott.  Now, I disagree with them about almost everything, and I’ve always maintained that the only way Valve can meet all their demands is to give away Left 4 Dead 2 as free content.  So, AwesomeRobot’s comment applies here, too: if the only way to please the boycotters is to give them stuff for free, what incentive does Valve have to please them?

Boycotts only work when the target has a possibility of earning money from the boycotters by meeting the boycott’s demands.  In my case, I’ll be keeping tabs on Eidos; if they appear to have improved, I’ll end up buying Batman: Arkham Asylum, and everyone wins.

As for 1&1, personally I won’t be going back, because their service simply isn’t a good fit for me anymore; but if they fix the glaring problems that made me leave, I’ll start referring people to them again (and stop telling people to avoid them like the plague).