In my opinion, it's because Nintendo has cemented its status as a game platform for kids, while adult males from 30-45 are probably the most attractive segment of the gamer population because they're most likely to have a high attach rate (i.e., buy multiple accessories and software titles), and that group is more interested in the hard-core, multi-player shooter category of games that is largely lacking on the Nintendo platform, but exists in abundance on Xbox 360 and PS3. Adult males have a high disposable income compared to 10-year-old kids, but often have the impulse control of those same 10-year-olds, which is why a fairly sensible and fiscally responsible guy like me has two game consoles he practically never uses, and close to a dozen still-in-shrink-wrap games that I had to have but don't have time to play. What company in their right mind WOULDN'T target me over a 10-year-old? I personally own all three current-gen consoles (XB360, PS3 and Wii). I spend literally 99.9% of my time on the Xbox, bought the PS3 as an alternative to just getting a BD player (I admit that there are a few exclusive PS3 titles that appeal to me, but I just never make the time to put my XB360 controller down and play them), and the Wii has really been a novelty that hasn't been turned on in probably two years, except maybe when friends bring their young children to visit. As a 42-year-old guy, I have one key interest in the Nintendo brand - the Legend of Zelda franchise. I will probably eventually pick up a Wii U just to play the Wii U installment in the series... and when I finish that game, the console will sit quietly on a shelf for several years, untouched. I think highly of some of the other Nintendo licenses too, but I just don't find them compelling enough to tear me away from BioShock or Mass Effect or Borderlands or Halo or Call of Duty...

My guess is that the PULSB will be equivalent to an OEM copy in terms of cost, it just won't have that pesky legalese in the EULA that says that it's only to be used on a system that is intended for resale.

Also consider that trees are continuously exposed to solar and cosmic radiation, and can live for many hundreds of years, and it's not hard to comprehend that mutations could have this effect of creating a large, complex organism that displays genetic differences between very old tissues and very young tissues.

What if Inman's goal was to get Google+ to give him his very own, goofy URL pointer? Who punked who then?

Just don't forget to take your plasma TVs in every few years to have the plasma topped off.

Spot on. PC manufacturers have been giving us the same devices for almost 30 years. Sure the guts are faster, but it's still a big steel box under the desk, or an unwieldy laptop with a woefully short battery life. They're not prepared to collapse their hardware into this tablet form factor, and it's going to hurt for a while. Bottom line, though, is they can sit around and bitch about it, or get to work and design superior hardware. That IS their area of focus, after all. This is a paradigm shift, not unlike the digital media shift that has thrown the movie and music industries into a panic. So they can embrace it and recapture the market by building something that consumers will want even more than Microsoft's offering, or they can sit and dither while their companies cling to a dead business model.

I think this analysis only applies to real goods. As Black Parrot points out, models start breaking down when you factor in terms like infinite supply (because it costs nothing to "make" one more ad) and zero demand (because given the choice, everyone would opt out of advertising altogether). If the process of serving up the umpteenth copy of the same ad banner actually consumed something more than a practically infinitesimal amount of energy (as compared to, say, erecting a billboard, or running a print ad in a magazine, or even producing a TV commercial), this whole discussion would not be reduced to what is essentially the advertiser asserting its imagined "rights" to our attention. Kind of like how mp3s have forced the music industry to fight music piracy on a wholly intellectual level since music copying today does not typically involve the exchange of an real property - the value is solely in the "license" they provide a customer with which entitles that customer to enjoy the recorded performance. An internet ad is an ephemeral and worthless thing, in and of itself, and like the money used to pay for those ads, their value is entirely based on a fiction of worth. It is "worth" $50 per 1,000 ad displays if the advertiser is confident that those 1,000 ads will generate at least $51 in revenue. When the difference in the actual cost to serve up 1,000 ads from the cost to serve up 10,000 ads is negligible, the worth to the advertiser is similarly eroded.

So they created a new strain of dangerous bacteria that people have no exposure and inherent resistance to? Great idea.

You hit ANYTHING with a BB at 30,000 miles an hour, it's a catastrophic collision.

The problem is that actual scientists have now done actual science and determined that, in the Antarctic at least, there is no appreciable loss of ice mass, and that water temperatures have not changed appreciably as has been previously claimed by global warming/climate change nuts. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/antarctic_ice_not_melting/