It depends where you are, here in New Zealand satellite-to-satellite could offer significantly better latency to the USA than our ~150ms ping to California. A couple of hundred kilometers to orbit is nothing compared to the ~12,000 km distance. The direct light-speed travel time is ~40ms, which gives 80ms for a best case ping; in practice I'd expect to lose a fair bit of ping to routing etc., but it seems totally reasonable to me that the satellite-to-satellite ping will be more like ~100ms, which is a pretty massive improvement.

A lot of infrastructure is hosted in the US, so for New Zealand a 33% better ping to the US would actually make a fairly significant difference. Ping to Europe would obviously be improved even more, but I find it's pretty rare that I'm using a service that only has servers in the EU.

Your comments about bandwidth issues are accurate; it wouldn't really matter to me as an individual user though as long as the satellite provider wasn't over-subscribing the network.

And I had been planning on doing some study this morning... DAMMIT

And because around here broken bottles will seriously hamper your running speed :D

with a 1280 pixel wide or larger screen a 16*16 tileset will fit on nicely for most rougelikes, I like tiles /because/ they make it easier to distinguish between objects, using a character set when you walk into a weapons shop you see a lot of ///// all coloured gray or brown, not very easy to distinguish at all...

Its bigger then mum and dads basement (that I live in)