Not true - numerous examples exist of civilisations large and small that have outgrown their resource base and crashed horribly. In fact, pretty much EVERY SINGLE CIVILISATION before ours has collapsed horribly. We would be different why?

(cf Jarad Diamond's book "Collapse" for a role call of civilisations and empires that have gone belly up - not all can be pinned on environmental collapse, but a lot can; just look at the sands of the middle east where the great empires of two thousand years ago were, possibly the Romans, the Maya, definitely the Norse settlements in Greenland and the polynesian settlement of Easter Island, etc. etc.)

I'd agree - except that the games I buy on Steam are not 'retail price'. DRM sucks, but if I can get Portal for $5, I'm prepared to do it as a throw away. There seem to be games on Steam for $20 or less that are sold (in Australia) at $US 50 or more.

I'm happy to pay a bit more to not have DRM (ta iTunes), but not multiples...

Some facts as I understand them snarfed from the web - corrections welcomed...

rough cost of (wholesale) energy per kilowatt hour (kwh): ~5c
CO2 cost per kwh: ~1kg (coal power: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html)
time for my (small) 1 litre (~ 1kw) kettle to boil when full is ~ 5 minutes which compares well with the theoretical energy for a 1litre at ~350kj, or 350 seconds time for 1kw . Hence power for a small boiled kettle is a killowatt for 1/10 of an hour, or 0.1 kwh

So I get...
Kettle boiling: costs ~.5c, and ~ 100g, ... the article says a kettle take 15g, which I don't get even close to; maybe clever people boil just enough to make single cups only?

If the article was true, Google doing "more than 200m" searches a day would spend ~ $20m a day on power, or ~ $7billion a year, consuming 100,000 megawatt hours, or a continuous drain of 4,000 megawatts (about the power output of a small US state). On the authors figures, total power consumption would be ~ 650 megawatts, which is still pretty huge, and would still be spending ~ $1billion a year.

Google use cheap, mass produced low power units in gigantic numbers - estimates are hard to come by, I will estimate 200,000 based on inflating some public estimates (e.g. http://arnab.org/blog/how-many-computers-does-google-have).

Energy cost of networking is significant, but I do not believe as great as machines; I'll add 50% for good luck. Utility server machines are dropping in power (~100-200w) but also require cooling, UPSs and network etc., so let's call it 500w all up (figures are difficult to get; everyone is selling something power center wise) - so I get 100 megawatts; or 1/6th of the author's estimate, or 1/40th of the true kettle figure.

I'd say that the author is overstating the case to make a political point - if I was cynical I'd point out the author has also just launched a business to 'green your web site' by installing monitoring software, estimating the energy cost of searches to it, and then buying carbon offsets on your behalf, so it is in his interests to overestimate such usage..

D&D 4th edition is a cute table top wargame.

It's probably more similar to 'squad leader' than it is to 3rd edition D&D though. Not sure why it got called D&D. Dungeons of DragonCraft might be more appropriate.

It's fun at the moment, but it feels a bit like fairy floss - there doesn't seem to be much depth.

Meanwhile I'm curious as to how wizards are going to go charging for 'virtual minitures' and stuff, and the jury's still out on their online subscription offering. Could be good, but I suspect the freeware stuff will be better - already we're seeing some pretty neat character generators out there.