A devil's bargain?

So today I was glancing over some articles and one -- talking about
rethinking what it means to be 'green' by embracing nuclear power and
genetic engineering -- had a line that said, "to win the war on global
warming may require slaughtering some on environmentalism's most sacred
cows." And though they're just being theatrical (well, maybe not; nuclear
power has had a bad reputation since before I was born) it made me think:
exactly how far are you willing to go to reach your goal? I meant it as
kind of a thought experiment, "in a world where..." sort of movie-preview
kind of way, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

Completely off-topic for anyone except for xiombarg or dikaiosunh, I'm playing a game (Butrning Empires) which purports to
tackle this same question. It's couched in a cool-in-itself "invasion of
the body-snatchers" sort of storyline, and some of the easiest things to do
are to directly contradict the player's character's stated goals, but I
think an equally compelling (if not more compelling, but not everyone is me)
tact might be to offer the character's what they seek at the cost of some
other similarly important goal or principle. But then, I've always been a
fan of the devil's bargain, where you gain the world but lose your soul. I
love that kind of faustian tragedy.

Napster serves mp3s again.

Of marginal interest: the bastardized son of the original Napster, the new
Napster is now offering
all it's songs as mp3 downloads at 256bps for 99 cents. Just one more
place to go, I guess, to see if I can find a song as a more-useful mp3
before crawling to iTunes and the drm'd m4a.

As a note, I've finally read up on what the FLAC music format is and would
really like to see that come into favor. It's a compression format in the
way mp3 is, but mp3 encoding loses a lot of information: you can't recreate
a CD-quality track from an mp3. The opposite is true for FLAC: no
information is lost and full quiality can be retrieved from the FLAC file.
Until then, though, mp3s work for me.