Is there a organization dedicated to exploring and inhabiting all the different environments of the world and developing materials to make it easier? I'd fund them before I funded NASA.

All the money we spend on getting off our planet could be used to further explore the planet and the advancements made applied to space travel. If we could develop materials, method, and technology to the point that we could easily live on the bottom of the ocean (extreme pressure and temperature), I think it might be easier to get that same rig adjusted to work on Venus. If we can easily inhabit the (Ant)Arctic, I think it may be easier for us to check out that same tech on Mars, etc. If we can get a self sustaining flying environment, it might be worthwhile to send it to Jupiter.

In addition, someone else mentioned that it would be impossible to get the materials back from wherever we went. Well, I'm sure exploration of our own Earth and the ability to safely occupy any of it's environments would give us a wealth of resource exploiting opportunities, or at least experience in resource harvesting under adverse conditions, which is what we would need to get those resources from whatever planet/moon we visited in the first place.

You gotta crawl before you walk. Putting man on the moon was novelty, and now we are too hung up on going back. Putting man on the bottom of the ocean in a self sustaining environment has practical applications. In addition to the research and advances from getting there, I'm pretty sure the bottom of the ocean is safe from any cataclysmic event save tectonic motion, which provides another level of certainty that our species survives things that may otherwise destroy most life on the planet. /ramble

Though it may be the first time that people are trying to draw general population attention to it. I believe the first place I saw this sort of concept revealed was by Cory Doctorow. Though the below article isn't necessarily where I saw it, it recants the same message.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/20/rare.events

Damn.. wall of text... It's kind of entertaining to read, honest. I'm just not good with /. posting. Sorry. :(

It seems to me that there are very few games that award advancement based on skill, as the summary seems to indicate. To do so would imply that there is a test of some sort before the character advances (after having proved said skill is possessed). I actually can't come up with any. The skill needed to play a game comes from knowing what you can do, and how to use those abilities to most effectively achieve an end. It's not used to literally advance a character as much as it is used to simply play the game and gain experience (not the level up kind, the life's lessons kind). To remain on pseudo topic, a skill based advancement, such as in UO, would be great if it could be combing with the vision of the WoW dev team in that 'every character should feel powerful'. Imagine taking each of the talent trees in WoW and turning them into a set of skills. Now take another, more basic, set of skills that would determine the type of armor you could wear, the schools of spells you could cast (if any), the weapons you could use, and combine it with the talent 'skills' to give you a mesh of player class creation that provides a wide berth of possiblity and customization. Of course, you'd have min-maxer combos, but properly balanced you'd only have a few real powerhouses (and that would be expected). Still, the devs would be able to nerf or buff abilities to taste. The players would be able to drop the abilities they didn't like or didn't want, and take the abilities that were needed for the actions they wanted to perform (pvp, pve, whatever). I picture a balance concept in this case similar to the way the colors are set up in magic: the gathering. You'd probably get 3-7 top performing 'builds' with counter-talent/skills for the other top builds, and still have others sacrificing 'top 5 power' for their preference. Who knows, maybe player SKILL (as in the ability to play a game) would allow one who played a style that fit them to triumph over one who picked a build purely because it was one of the 'top 5'.

Man, I wish I had mod points. I'm going to have to memorize this post because it's what been going through my head regarding all of this 'terrist' talk and BS patriot act hullabaloo, but just couldn't put it into words. Thanks. Keep up the good fight.

'Insightful's, all the way down.

I agree with this. I want something that can play the games and not be a pain in the butt to install, much less troubleshoot. Windows is the de facto gaming platform and though I've no doubt I have the knowledge and understanding to get my games working on Linux, it's time spent that could be playing if I had just remained on windows.

http://professional.webcity.com.au/suspended.page/

as you play. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE