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Gamer Behavior Categorized
Vodoo Extreme has the results from a recent study that looks into the spending and playing habits of gamers. From the article: "Gamers spend more than $700 a year: $341 on console titles, $233 on PC games and another $140 for accessories."
14 RPGs/year = ~1400 hours of gameplay/year = ~58 days spent on gaming/year.
If a gamer also works a total of about 83 days/year, sleeps another 121 day/year, and spends 20 days watching TV, then there are 365 - 58 - 83 - 121 - 20 = 83 days left for experiencing real life. Unfortunately, another 40 of those days are spent in the bathroom or eating, leaving only 43 days to do the laundry, yardwork, house cleaning, errands, and finances. Oops, I forgot to mention the family!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
She Who Must Be Obeyed
Firefox comes with an Urban Dictionary quicksearch. Type "slang foo" to get a definition of "foo".
"There are hundreds of game theorists at the gates, sir, and they want to hold an election!"
Go read Game Over by David Sheff. It's quite a bit better than the information provided in the current Wikipedia articles, which frankly reads like an "urban legend" version of events. The titles per year restriction was instated long before the chip shortage, as a reaction to how Atari managed to bust the market by flooding it with low-quality games in 1983 and 1984. Nintendo used the restriction as a selling point with early retailers who were skeptical of the NES.
It's obvious that Nintendo eventually parlayed this tactic into a strategy to enforce their hold on the market, but arguing that Nintendo did it purely to enforce their monopoly is simply not correct. It's also worth noting that it has been long since proven that Nintendo did not orchestrate the chip shortage, although they had some unfair sway over who got chips and who didn't; the chip shortage is a well-documented event that cause big impact in electronics industries in that particular year. However, Nintendo did some things that intensified the shortage's impact on video games in particular, such as turning down any alternate source of chips that wasn't from a Japanese manufacturer.
As for the antitrust actions, they were tainted from the beginning by a questionable influence from Atari, whose business practices regarding Nintendo had been declared illegal several times in civil courts. Most notably, Nintendo had no direct representation at the meetings that lead up to the antitrust hearings, but Atari did... frankly, I think this questionable motivation on Atari's part is why Nintendo ended up getting a mere slap on the wrist, even though some of their business practices at the time were rather monopolistic. Any harsher ruling would've prompted counter-action from Nintendo regarding Atari's role in events.