A fluffy metaphor, to be sure, but that's the whole of it. Your basic angle of attack sits on a flawed premise.

And a perfectly valid, logical assumption it is; for to lend credence to, and to posit the supernatural would be to assert a positive claim for which no evidential support can be provided on behalf of the claimant. Failing to accomodate for the insubstantial is not a misguided assumption--it is a rational, sane default.

While I enjoyed your unique perspective on the subject, we're hardly nomadic worshippers roaming the open teal plains of the Windows 95 desktop, paying devout, pious tribute to the seemingly stochastic methods of an almighty oversized mouse cursor. O, the tumbleweed of questionable JPEGs adrift in the sandstorms of this barren, biblical expanse. Truth is, our registers just aren't being rewritten. The inexorable march of scientific advancement has been successfully unraveling alleged "miracles" for nearly as long as they've been purported, with no hallelujah of divine tampering left unrattled to this date. Drawing up images of some cosmic debug session is disingenuous and superfluous, at best.

If you were able to approach this post with a checklist of seemingly random phenomena analogous to the passing whims of a desktop user, totally unapproachable and inexplicable through our established fundamentals, I would quite frankly not be tapping out this reply.

However, the reality is that your post, well not inflammatory, and certainly well composed enough to warrant its superficial, positive moderation, is just another passive aggressive manner for creationists to rudely interject at the dinner table with a new spin on perverting the scientific method. "But, but, but, He's outside science and reason, don't you get it? Assuming He's not is just sooooooo presumptuous of you! And gee-whiz, I thought you guys were the scientists!"

I'm sure you had good intentions, but honestly, that's just not how it works.

Then you zoom out a bit and realize you've been goatse'd by the Creators.

lastgoatse.com - goatse from the grave. Seem like a stretch?

Bringing the wrath of Allah down on heathen infidels with a fiery inferno? There's an app for that.

IE users?

Do I spy a thinly veiled allegory for DRM?

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but Microsoft's compiler targets multiple architectures as well.

Many new users generally just assume that you're just turning the iPod/iPhone on and off when you're really just toggling standby. Oops.

And with HD-DVDs failure, retailers dumped their stock cheap. HD-DVD players, HD-DVD discs, all for next to nothing. People picking up that new HDTV, being advised by a sales rep that they'll need an HD source? Probably going to snag that cheap "get rid of all this crap as fast as possible" HD-DVD package. There are many deceptions within these figures, if the figures themselves are not suspect to begin with.

Well, who knows? It certainly couldn't hurt your grammar.

A chum of mine swore by running his computer "naked" in a somewhat modified Walmart mini-fridge for some unconventional cooling. Well, until he spilled a 1L of pepsi on his motherboard.

What we're really seeing here is a rapid progression towards a sort of unified, multi-platform "PC-lite" phenomenon. As you've mentioned, the line of distinction between Sony and Microsoft's offerings has blurred significantly in this past generation, but it's a line that's only going to become less and less defined from here on out. Game developers are simply refusing to commit to exclusivity (and why would they? When engines like Capcom's MT framework have been built from the ground up with ease of portability in mind, there's very little monetary enticement either Sony or Microsoft could feasibly offer that would outweigh the profits of a multi-platform release) and gamers are quickly coming to expect the same lineup from both Sony and Microsoft.

Additionally, the ancillary features of these modern consoles mimic those of home theater PCs. Microsoft and Sony are continually embracing the fact that future game consoles may simply be modern gaming PCs with an accessible, simplified, sleek user interfaces to wrap booting games, watching movies, and other trivial PC activities. For those major players, the divide between console gaming and PC gaming is rapidly vanishing. I've kind of gone off on a tangential rant here, sorry.

On the other hand, whether it's with respect to control gimmick or platform, Nintendo still lives in its own slice of alien world - and it's thriving there. Does the Wii provide a watered down experience? Well, technically, yes, but practically, it's just providing a different game experience. If you're trying to compare and contrast it with a beefy gaming rig or a 360 or what have you, you just have to remember where Nintendo is coming from - part of its design ethic is to take dated hardware, twist out a new spin on it, and make it relevant (and fun) today. Truth be told? Nintendo does a damn good job of it. Let's consider the following: at E3, Nintendo and Microsoft both showcased 2D platformer offerings for the coming year; Nintendo displayed New Super Mario Bros Wii, while Microsoft displayed its Metroid-inspired Shadow Complex. Which do you think is going to sell more, by millions? Which do you think will be more technically and visually appealing? Lastly, which will be the more *fun* "game experience"? These questions provide some real insight into the question this story is asking.