Borderlands does this. Gaining experience while holding a weapon gives you experience in that weapon. Leveling up on a weapon grants the player things like accuracy, damage, and reload bonuses.

The Hunter class can put skill points toward reducing sway when scoped in.

Mod parent up- this is the correct description of moral relativism.

Screw that, I'll just move to Africa.

Spore had barely been announced when flOw was released.

A different vision of a musclebound future.

Very possibly still Hell on Earth.

Blizzard is basically trying to replicate all of the major features of a service like Steam, all in one go- and no, WoW expertise will only translate to the development slightly, if at all, since the Battle.net team is completely separate from the WoW team. It's not as if they just reassign all of their programmers (which likely don't even specialize in the kind of things a battle.net programmer would have to do), and put WoW expansions and updates on the back burner.
While there are undoubtedly other factors at play, I believe you are grossly overestimating the effects of those factors. Development time for a new service is more than sufficient a reason for a delay.
If I recall correctly, they were talking about Battle.net 2.0 features in a "we're going to have it but it's not implemented yet" way at this year's BlizzCon. That was three months ago. Considering the fact that is Blizzard we're talking about, a four or five month development time for anything is fast.

Your reply seems to imply that their great market position automatically gives them the ability to poof complex software into existence.

If they decided to ditch running the beta on Battle.net 2.0, and start it today, it would still take another five-ish months before you would see the game in stores, simply because the beta is expected to take that long. There wouldn't really be any reason to ship it without Battle.net 2.0, as it would almost certainly be completed before the beta is completed.
On top of that- they consider Battle.net 2.0 to be an integral part of the StarCraft 2 experience, so StarCraft 2 isn't done until Battle.net 2.0 is done, and Blizzard (notoriously) doesn't ship their games until they're "done".

Blizzard has already stated openly that the delay of SC2 (to mid 2010) is because they misjudged the time it would take to develop Battle.net 2.0. They consider a functioning Battle.net 2.0 to be a prerequisite for the beta. There is no reason to believe that it has to do with market entry timing.

Or the option to be placed on a public list of generous members.

It's a widely-held social taboo. Incest has been a no-no since before anyone knew anything about a "gene pool" and before it was widely-known that it led to increased rates of deformities. It's not a big deal in some cultures, but in our Western, historically Judeau-Christian culture, there are strong social rules against it. It's more of a religious thing than anything else.

While I don't deny that there are likely actual biological reasons for people actually not preferring mating with family, the actual reasons for the laws have nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with history.

Since the dawn of time... what? Any person with a basic knowledge of world cultures throughout history knows that, while common, the "family" as you describe it has not been anything like a "fundamental" unit.

And, as some of my sibling posters mention, even granting that, just because it has has been the case, does not mean that it should be the case.

Completely ignoring the fact that this isn't the actual reason why marrying your sister isn't legal.

The argument was never discredited, only the application of the argument. We could fire all of our nukes into the sun, with no noticeable, not to mention ill, effects. It's the same argument, still being applied correctly.
Heavy or organic pollutants which radically alter metabolism, and heat, are two completely different things. One can kill a lot of stuff in small quantities, the other is pumped in by the sun, all the time, and is considered part of the status quo.
You can kill all of the bacteria in a pot of water by adding a couple drops of bleach, but you have to add a huge amount of energy to achieve the same effect.

(I worry that you barely read my post, because I did prefix that statement with "when it comes to energy" specifically to keep you from wasting a line on mentioning something like interplanetary travel =/ )

When I said "human scale" I meant, "within human capacity to change." Right now, we could (and have) overheat medium-sized lakes with our coal, nuclear, "hot" power plants. We overcool other bodies of water with the reservoirs of hydroelectric power plants. Chemically, we can take out small to medium-sized ecosystems, physically, we can chop down, drain, or otherwise displace bigger ones. But heat? Even if we dedicated the whole of human activity to (directly*) heating the oceans, we'd be completely incapable of making a dent.

This post makes the basic point rather vividly: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1376893&cid=29497453
5.6*10^24J is not the kind of energy humans, as a species, can hope to move from the land to the sea. And that's for 1 degree.
As it stands, our current means of cooling uses the atmosphere, in a less-efficient process. As the same post mentions, the atmosphere is less massive and has a much lower specific heat. If you're worried about screwing up the environment, using ocean-based cooling is exactly the kind of thing you'd be into, as it is more efficient, and is placed into a system that is very capable of dealing with it.

*Directly, as in the thermal result of combustion or electrical resistance (or giant orbital doom-mirrors), as, indirectly, chemically, it appears to be very much within our capacity (read: atmospheric hydrocarbons.)

This sounds a lot like the arguments about microwave radiation from radio towers and microwave ovens: it seems to overlook the massive amounts of energy arriving from the sun.

Every square inch of ocean (minus those under clouds at a given moment) is constantly absorbing radiation. The fact that there are even oceanic currents- huge, fast-moving masses of water, moving for thousands of miles, is a testament to the kind of energy the ocean deals with all the time. If there's ever a problem with humans overheating a patch of water, it's because they're not spreading the heat far enough, or placing it somewhere where currents can move it off. When it comes to energy, "human scale" and "planetary scale" are still quite different from one another.

Somewhat related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion
If deep, cold water is pumped up, you could actually achieve a local net cooling, if you wanted.