Bzzzt! You fail Lit 101. More so, since there are whole chunks of the Bible that are basically poetry and / or parables, which are forms that are practically designed to have multiple layers of meaning.

I agree with a lot of what you say, though. GP is making the silly leap from "With no study of culture, context or historical understandings, I can't think of any interpretation of this 5000-year-old near-eastern manuscript except a claim about the scientific origins of homo sapiens" to "therefore, other interpretations either don't exist / are illegitimate / cannot be discussed rationally based on historical data."

I completely understand why people get impatient / belligerent about young-earth creationists. Or religious people in general when their religion leads them to ignore or deny actual real-world data. But when a religious person is behaving sanely and making the excellent decision to view their chosen holy texts as being about life's purpose rather than a scientific textbook... I don't understand why some people then get belligerent and try to force the issue with "No! Clearly you don't understand your own holy texts, because they are a science textbook! And a very bad one, at that!"...

Actually, with many (most?) encryption schemes used in practice, this isn't the case. Google "known plaintext attack."

Remind me not to hire you as a QA tester for my random number generator.....

Eh... not really. It's only fairly recently that you could reliably walk into a store or surf to amazon and just buy one. And that's only possible because of the biggest console production runs in history. On average, the Wii is selling slightly less than the 360 and PS3 combined, though that varies from week to week with the game release schedule. That's a weird way to put it, though, "stores have more than they can sell," when all you mean is "stores are able to keep it in stock"...

(source for stats)

Is it a surprise to any one that the manufacturing costs are not as much as retail?

Actually it's even worse than you're saying -- the analysis isn't about "manufacturing costs", it's about component costs (which is correctly described in the headline, and then incorrectly described immediately after in the summary). So, if you buy all the components, you've already spent half the cost before you start assembling them, testing them, shipping them, setting them up, packaging them, and shipping them again.

The confusion is somewhat understandable since even the article itself says different things in different places. But reporters love to take the otherwise interesting reports from iSuppli and sensationalize them by implying that popular electronics devices are 50% profit or more (they've done the same thing for iPods and such)... but ultimately it's just lazy reporting.