The sole amount of time spent playing a game doesn't consider the parts of the game that didn't entertain or were even frustrating. I guess you can't just substract these "wasted" hours either because a 20 hour game without any frustrating parts is likely to entertain you more than a 30 hour game that includes 10 hours of frustration. It depends a lot on how much your free time playing games is worth to you in the first place. It may even be worth so much that you enjoy a five minute Solitair game a lot more than going through five minutes of just learning the controls of any other game, as an extreme example. The location of the bad game parts is also important as five minutes of frustation every now and then are less likely to decrease your entertainment than a bad two hour part in one go, especially if that were your only two hours of playtime that weekend.

No, it's impossible. Once a government starts to censor a certain type of illegal content, the censorship will soon expand to include every other type of illegal content as well (warez, hacking tools, bombing construction manuals, all porn sites without youth restrictions,) followed by content considered harmful (islamistic and nazi propaganda, governmental uncontrolled gambling, information about drugs) and sooner or later include every website the current government doesn't like for any reason whatsoever (discussing loopholes in law, sharing speed camera locations, oppositional opinions.) This will happen because "the government has to protect it's people by all means possible" and once new possibilities are clearly available, they have to be applied due to political pressure.

Of course, in Germany, censorship is actually unconstitutional. It's not a coincidence that it starts with childporn even though it probably only represents a very small fraction of all illegal websites. It's the one subject nobody can argue against without commiting political suicide. Nazi- and antisemite stuff will certainly follow next, opening the door for everything else.
...and that's still not the end. As the list grows bigger, the process will get automated and imperatively include every website providing comments that are not pre-moderated. The crawler will repeatedly find posts with links to goatse on Slashdot, stored at different imagehosts that will all be banned one after another until Slashdot will finally be banned directly. The endresult will be a whitelist. The question is not if but when. It took ten years to get this far; give it another ten and we will be there.

The fact that these kind of extensive cuts to people's right of 'freedom of speech' is currently happening all the world, for many unrelated different reasons no less, should be alarming.

I used to buy a $2000 high end gaming PC about every two years and played the first year on the highest possible settings and already hated the machine, when I had to turn a few things off during the second year. Now, I just buy a $500-$800 PC every 3-4 years and I still play at the highest possible settings most of the time. Two things changed:
1. I just concentrate on a good graphics card and buy everything else for cheap; onboard sound, $30 case, etc. (yes, it doesn't really work for GTA IV. It seems to be the first game that needs a high end CPU and I hope it will also be the last.)
2. Back in the time, I didn't consider a game to be running fast, when it wouldn't run at >100 FPS. Today, 40 FPS is good enough for me. I don't know how this perception excatly changed but I guess I just got older and can't really tell the difference anymore.

Amazon is kind of doing the opposite for years now - placing ads on torrent-sites and the like, where you can buy the same item from Amazon you are about to download for free. Therefore 'parody' is indeed the right term to use for this plugin.

In the media business, remakes and sequels actually increase the sales of the originals prior to their release. HL1 and HL:Source should be directly benefiting from Black Mesa right now, which might even be one of the points for Vavle to still market those games.
They likely didn't discourage you to continue on your mod because of the original TF but because of their own sequel, TF2, already in the works, which would have had to compete against a similar product without a pricetag. "Nah, don't buy the lame TF2. Try that TF mod for Engine X over there instead. It rocks." is something Valve certainly wouldn't want to see on gaming forums.

Why would users put results to the top if there is no way of sharing those? It's not like users search for the same stuff every time in order to visit the same site that always happens to be on page 2 or something. ou could just bookmark that page.
Will people really use this at the slight chance that Google might one day use the information to improve their engine, even so they say that they won't?
User-tweakable SearchWiki... one might as well just use Wikipedia. I guess for 95% of all common searchterms, there is an informative Wiki-article anyway and those already have related peer-reviewed links at the bottom, excluding scam and parking sites. There is a good reason that most queries on Google provide Wikipedia as the first result.

Edit: sounds a bit more "flamebatish" than I wanted it to be but whatever.
Edit2: Yes, I can edit my comments, don't you?

Those questions only arise if you think of God as an entity that can be personified.
I like to think of God as the universe itsself; a greater thing made up of billions of smaller things, like galaxies, where each individual part is not aware of the greater picture. Just like a human is made of billions of cells that are not aware of the human and those cells made up of billions of atoms that are not aware of the cell. Maybe I just like the idea of being the God of my bodycells.
If a religion teaching that exists, please let me know. I'm happy to join.

Let's say our justice system was egalitarian - how would you expect the outcome of this case to change?

In order to find the answer, why don't we just forget those undoubtedly evil corporations, their holding companies and the million dollar cinema complexes for a while and imagine ourselves on a small independent island, inhabited by 20 people, to get a better perspective.
You are one them, and for a living you are making nice movies for the other people to enjoy. As this is kind of expensive for you, you don't just give copies of your movies to others but instead show them inside your home on a screen for an entry fee. 15 paying people are going to see your new movie every week. It works just fine, you love your job, people love you and life is good.

One day, however, one of your guests starts to record your movie right off your screen. At first, you don't have a problem with it but the next week only 13 people visit you. A week later the number shrinks to 12, then to 11. Of course, your earnings shrink as well and because you have bills to pay, just like everyone else, your budget to make movies has to shrink too. After some time, you get suspicious and start to wonder why this is happening. You decide to follow the guy that still comes to record your movies ever week to his home. There, you find out that he is showing your movies to your former audience for free. When confronting them on the reason they don't come to visit you anymore, they claim that the quality of your movies has gone bad and that they are not worth paying for anymore. You tell them that if they would just continue to pay in order to see them, that you would have a bigger budget to make better movies. They don't care, so you figure that if they had not the possibility to watch your movies for free in the first place, the problem would just solve itsself. You decide to sue the guy recording your movies.

Coincidentally, you are also the judge on this island - what is your decision and why?
Now tweak the varibles. Would you come to a different judgement if the recording of your movies wouldn't affect their quality? Would you come to a different conclusion if the guy earned money himself by showing your movies?
And finally, would it matter if 300 million people lived on the island and not just 20?