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.

I feel obliged to tell you that you far overstress the "peer review" process as a way of assuring scientific accuracy. ... Peer review serves to ensure that the community believes the subject of the publication is considered novel enough and important enough in its eyes, and to prevent publication of obvious non-academic garbage.

And yet, global warming deniers still don't publish in peer-reviewed journals. I wonder which of those filtering constraints they fail to satisfy...

(I know, I know, it's TEH CONSPIRACY)...

If you can point me to anything suggesting that anyone, let alone Al Gore, is actually advocating "zero gross carbon output" rather than "zero net carbon output", I will be very surprised. I'm sure you can find some quote where someone, speaking loosely, omitted the "net" qualifier, even though that's far from implying that they must have meant "gross" instead. My impulse would be to say that concluding they meant it the way you're saying, without more explicit evidence, suggests that you're deliberately misinterpreting them. But your most recent reply seems so fervent and sincere in the assurance that that counterintuitive interpretation is the only possible one that you may sincerely think that other people are that stupid. In retrospect, I think I regret feeding the troll.

Actually I called them "the most far-out authoritarian strains of liberalism". I don't consider Berkeley people to be "to the left" of me in a meaningful sense, and I didn't say they were -- political leanings are not a single right vs. left dimension. What bothers me about Berkeley culture is its authoritarianism, not its "liberal" politics, such as they are. I didn't use "liberal" with negative connotations anywhere in my post. Someone who considers themselves very conservative might similarly identify as far- right and yet still refer to "an extreme example of the most insane, Randian strains of conservatism" without implying either that conservatism was bad per se or that Ayn Rand was truly representative of a "conservative" philosophy.

If you think I'm misrepresenting the meaning of "net carbon output", by all means elaborate. As it is, you seem to be trying to claim victory by fiat. Do you really think that when people talk about someone's net carbon output, they include carbon exhaled when breathing, but don't include carbon intake from eating? And that everyone somehow overlooked this massive absurdity, until you finally pointed out in a web forum that the emperor has no clothes?

He suggested that you reduce your carbon output to zero. Since this means no breathing or decaying, it calls for you to take a trip to a permanently frozen location with a plastic bag to suffocate yourself with.

A bunch of fish lived in a tank. There was a faucet just above the tank, and some of the fish liked to leave it on. Scientist fish warned that if this continued, eventually the tank would overflow. Skeptical fish mocked the scientists: "You want us to stop adding water to the tank? Well, I guess you just want us to stop peeing!" Everyone had a good laugh, and the faucet was left on.

No matter how much a fish pees, it will not fill up the fish tank. That only happens when outside water is added to the system. No matter how much you breathe or decay, it will not add carbon to the atmosphere. (Unless you've been drinking fossil fuels.) That only happens when outside carbon is added to the system, such as the carbon that is present in most of our energy sources.

Pretending to misunderstand the concept of carbon output so you can make fun of the other side is not a good way to resolve this argument. Actually misunderstanding the concept of carbon output means you should think carefully about why you're so confident that you understand the situation better than climatologists. You can decide which of those two you were doing in your comment.