Huh, I recall it was easily worse during the 90's, especially worldwide (it's must been over a decade since I last remember a controversy where I live in Sweden). In fact, I can't recall any recent media frenzy, especially after Jack Thompson lost his credibility even amongst the "think of the children" groups.

The last notable media frenzy was easily the hot coffee controversy, and as far I can tell that was US-centric controversy.

Games tend to self-censor themselves a lot. You rarely see children in games for example, I think the only FPS you can kill them in is in Deus Ex and that game is a lot about moral choices anyway. Well, and that you can "kill" the little sisters in Bioshock but that's discouraged, and the game rewards your for rescuing them.

It's trickier to add co-op in modern FPS games, mostly due to ingame events and such that can cut you off etc. It's usually a deliberate design choice by the designers so they don't feel limited by it.

Sometimes people mod in coop though. Like with Half Life 2 see http://synergymod.net/ (although HL2 gets ridiculously easy when four-eight players are plowing through it).

Actually beds in Swedish hospitals costs a fee if I recall. It's relatively cheap and depends a lot on the municipality and region (see as a example http://www.lj.se/infopage.jsf?childId=9131&nodeId=36221 although prices are quite bit cheaper than in my city ), but expensive enough to discourage people using it as a hotel.

The problem is that some hospitals hadn't really expanded fast enough as some cities grow, or people don't distribute themselves correctly (going to a large hospital when their local clinic is fine).

Game remakes are more faithful to the original than Hollywood is with it's movie remakes, usually just some bonus content and adaption for the device/handheld in question. In a way,a game remake is more like a directors cut of a movie with a couple of removed scenes added etc...

Still, I do admit I remember being disappointed over SM64 DS being the launch game rather than a all new original Mario game (it was a good remake with a twist on the original gameplay, with trickier controls than the original).

The game industry always had sequelitis, nothing new. Look in the 80's and 90's you can see a quite few sequels to very popular games.

Releasing a Metroid, Mario and Zelda game on each new Nintendo platform is more of a Nintendo tradition at this point. For both good and bad though, they aren't afraid to try something new while mixing in the old (Super Mario Galaxy comes in mind).

Your SNES have two "microprocessors" S-SMP, it's fully programmable but it's output is obviously just sound. :) I remember seeing the rare SNES game that would freeze as the main CPU crashed, but have music keep playing cause it was kept track of by a separate processor.

Same thing with Nintendo DS which have two ARM processors! And I think the Gameboy advances capable of playing the old Gameboy (Color) have two processors (one ARM, one Z80 for backwards compatibility) as well. And there is probably a couple from your list I forgot.

So does this mean we get to see more "strong" HTML? ;)

Yes, Notch got his money. :)

So is apparently cosmic rays. ;)

Actually it was partially from his guilt of what his invention could be used for that got the whole Nobel prize thing started.

I nearly bought Starcraft 2. I saw all kind of fun things done with it, mods etc, and gameplay videos and all that. I was avoiding it for the same reasons as you, but at some point I wondered if I could try to oversee those things.

Then I found out Starcraft have a region restriction in it's multiplayer. As a European with a lot of American friends... it's a no buy for me.

Supposedly Microsoft had interest in acquiring Nintendo but Hiroshi Yamauchi former president of Nintendo and also the largest shareholder of Nintendo refused any offers. This could just been a rumor of course, but judging a few old news articles Microsoft seemed to have the interest.

I think it's unlikely Nintendo gets bought up by anyone. Judging by the last few years successes (even if they had it a little slow lately), it's more likely they buy someone else up.

As much using acronyms in situations like this annoys me, the acronym is more known than the full name.

Or you insist calling it "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"? ;)

http://twitter.com/georgeb3dr/status/27283945396

And indeed. The best way for the blog to prove itself would be to post something that would only be known in Valve internally. Now the blog could have made by someone who had a dispute with Icefrog in the past, but I doubt it's by someone in Valve.

Other might not necessarily be desktop operating systems. Infact, I have a feeling it's various smartphone devices, consoles, etc. Infact I'm curious how large part of other is Android, which is based on the Linux kernel (but is unlike any other Linux distro, and did fork the kernel...).

Considering the amount of computers around, I actually find 0.77% impressive since by those stats Mac is only "seven" times bigger than Linux. And Macintosh is widely advertised and have the whole brand thing, while there isn't much the case for Linux.