When I play video games, I can't choose the bad guy. I even have trouble being the Russians in Bad Company 2 (no offense to Russians, but they are the bad guys in the campaign, and I grew up in the USA during the late cold war). Even in total fantasyland, Star Wars games, I can't do the dark side, which made The Force Unleashed particularly troubling for me (fortunately, I had a suspicion about how the game would end). So Bach's conclusion is an imperfect generalization, when given the choice, I wouldn't kill civilians in game, and I'd hope that there are more like me than not. I think having killable civilians in game could be a good realism feature in the urban warfare environment. For gameplay, it would have to be hard to confuse a combatant for a civilian, and of course, the penalty for killing a civilian should be steep. I'm looking forward to Battlefield 3.

That is definitely a downside to ebooks. With a paper book, you can lend it, sell it, give it away, or save it for ever. None of this is really feasible (legally) with ebooks. You might be able to save it forever, but as we've seen with music, the DRM can make it difficult to move to other devices, or from one computer to another. You can share books with kindles on the same amazon account, but then again, you'd need more than one kindle in the house!

The Kindle is something that neither of us would have bought for ourselves, but I know that my wife really wanted an ebook reader, so I gave one to her as a birthday gift. The good thing about gifts is that it doesn't have to make economic sense, the point is to bring joy to the gift recipient. When thinking about it, I thought that I could have bought her 20 - 30 books for what the kindle cost me, but it didn't take me long to realize that that wasn't the point.