Nearly everybody gets this wrong. Depreciation is primarily a fixed cost (due to time) rather than a variable cost (due to miles); consider how much difference you get on a 5 year old car driven the average of 12,000 miles per year versus, say, 6,000 miles per year. The difference in the value of the car at that point is negligible compared to the amount of value you lost due to the 5 years of time you had the car. http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/archives/000440.html

Try EVE Online, plenty of space combat, trading, etc. A lot of depth in the gameplay, and a whole lot of depth in the story.

I use both, and I'd say Java (and I'm a Windows developer). C# is fairly easy to learn coming from Java; and the people who say there's more developer momentum for it are fooling themselves - the amount of code you can look at, borrow, use, or whatever for Java is orders of magnitude more than for C#. A datapoint - I was looking for an open source toolbar replacement (Windows.Form control) for C#, and couldn't find squat. Try the same for Java and you'll find dozens.

And using Eclipse while writing Java code takes a lot more drudgery out than does using MS's Visual Studio for C# - they have a rudimentary "method completion" for VS, but almost everything else that Eclipse helps you with is lacking. The people who say that they're similarly helpful are obviously not using Eclipse to its potential.

I'd say it's very useful to know both, however - my company's actually using both on the same project right now. Despite the comparative paucity of libraries, many companies (and in my case, a part of the government) seem intent on using C# on the client-side even when talking to java on the server.