That's a hefty charge to be leveling against climatologists without any proof.
And that's a non-argument. On the contrary, any scientist who doesn't attempt to deal with the fact that they have biases and these biases may influence their conclusions is not worth the paper their degree is printed on. They generally try to get that through your skull even before you get to grad school.
I would say that you are basically right, with a corollary: if you're influential and wealthy enough - a rockstar game designer like Cliff B. or Shigeru Miyamoto - you can still be pretty creative.
It's not like this is a new or novel phenomenon, either. I mean, most of the movers and shakers of the art world throughout history have started with a fairly conservative style and moved to the fringes gradually. Picasso did not start doing cubist drawings. The reason that this is now incredibly apparent in the games industry as opposed to twenty years ago is partly the amount of labor and craft necessary for one game to be produced, and also the fact that a great number of idiots buy things like Madden 2008. The industry is effectively clogged by those nothing blockbuster titles, and huge channels of distribution and advertising and production are built around them. Just ask any Best Buy employee how many units of The Burning Crusade they recieved at their store - it's probably in the thousands. And even if you distribute via the internet, Verizon and Sprint are fighting to put a toll booth at your data connection, and huge amounts of promotional labor, from viral marketing to professional blogging, are devoted to making sure that people are talking about the games that the industry wants them to talk about.
Just as a side note, the biggest problem with rooting out or finding child sexual abuse is that children under the age of 10 can be made to say anything if goaded long enough, and eventually they will fabricate elaborate false memories to supplement these statements. If you put any determined adult in a room with any 8-year old, given enough time, they could eventually have that kid saying up was down or Uncle Benny touched him this way or that way, which, ironically, could be classified as abuse. Many law enforcement agencies have done exactly that, because at best the officers or attorneys in question were simply convinced they were right and that the kid had repressed memories or some other such bullshit, and at worst they were corrupt jerks out to catch bad guys - who cares if they have to brainwash a few little shits in order to catch em?
Mind you, I have no special knowledge in this subject beyond some college psychology classes.
The goal is not to make a secure system. The idea of securing a system from its owner (who has physical access) while maintaining usability is absurd and approaches impossiblity. They just want to make a system which 99.9% of users cannot crack, make it so that the crack cannot be generalized across different systems, and prosecute the remaining 0.1%.
Really, the only way to defeat DRM is to prove to companies that they will make more money without DRM than with, or, failing that, make the preceding true via strikes and public awareness.
Often even in webmastering people skills and business skills are required, and they have nothing to do with technical ability.
I would say that in the field of design (any design), people/business skills are far more important than technical skills.
I remember a 5-page magazine layout I did for someone. It was just some pictures that needed to be scanned and edited (cropped, redeye removed), some text inserted, and a graphic or two drawn. All told, I could've done a really professional job - just myself - in about two hours. This job took over 30 hours because the client was that persnickety. Or how about the fairly bare-bones website I did for a nonprofit group? That took 10-12 hours for 5 pages.
Yeah, and how many people played Streets of Sim City? 10?
Applying common sense to this situation, the only reasons why a developer would write for DX 10 are because DX 9 is technically incapable of materializing their desires, because the company in question is owned by Microsoft, or because Microsoft is giving them a hefty bribe.
In the case of the former, well, this person is probably a hobbyist, because no sane person in today's gaming industry would sacrifice revenue just so they could have 128-bit textures on the barbie doll female boss's metal bustier. This all but rules out releasing an exclusive for purely technical reasons. No doubt, DX 10 is the cat's pajamas - but even so, most games will probably just have multiple rendering paths for maximum compatibility.
Ownership could be a tricky matter, because I'm not sure how many companies MS has by the short hairs. However, I think it's pretty safe to say that they would have to have a massive controlling interest to be able to force a decision which in no way benefitted the company and in every way benefitted MS.
In the case of the bribe, they would only take the bribe and go through with it if they thought the potential revenue sacrificed by requiring a bleeding-edge and thoroughly buggy OS that has everyone in the industry scared shitless is smaller than the bribe. This is pretty much just the C- titles, such as Streets of Sim City, where it is mostly clear that the game is a piece of shit, but they do a release to maybe recoup some of the development costs.
Furthermore, textbooks are (in my opinion) a racket, and are entirely inappropriate to entire disciplines. They're an effective tool for sciences and engineering, where there is a body of knowledge and methodologies that you have to learn to become an effective scientist or engineer - even if you ultimately grow to question those assumptions. Of course, the best professors do more than teach from the book in any field, but there's not really any question as to, for example, whether L'Hospital's Rule is something you learn in the study of Calculus.
In other fields, such as history and the humanities, textbooks chain you to learning what some editor thought was the best thing for you to learn, and chain the professor to teaching that material. Then, on top of that, you have to buy a $100 course reader (which is a racket in and of itself). You end up being taught the same material over and over again, and either risk a low grade if you go outside of the course boundaries and write on something that's not in the textbook which the professor may not be familiar with, or are doomed to write the same dull essay your peers are writing. It's actually anti-research. You're not building any knowledge, you're just making weak points based on a weak body of knowledge given to you by the instructor, and fighting with your peers for source materials in the library. In an age where everything in public domain can be put online, why isn't it all online? Why do we have to even buy the freaking books, other than to keep publisher's wallets fat and for our professors to grease their palms so they get published in turn?
Same for me. Citing encyclopedias is for high school freshmen who don't know any better. Adults should be learning to do research from primary sources and in-depth secondary sources.
There are a variety of reasons for this, but the most important (in my mind) is that the encyclopedia is meant to be a shallow repository of general knowledge. That's not to say it's bad or potentially inaccurate, it's just a crappy support for a scholarly argument. If I have to write a 2000-word paper on an historical figure, wouldn't I be better informed by reading a 300-page book instead of a 500-word encyclopedia entry?
Furthermore, they potentially have political omissions which, if you knew about them, could sway your argument one way or the other. This is especially true of history. After all, how many editors would quietly strike out things like homosexual relationships in historical figures? How many would print this poem from the 1600s, which wouldn't be read on television without bleeps, to give you an idea of just how vulgar the Earl of Rochester was? I bet most people don't even know those words were in use 400 years ago.
Just because Wikipedia is often more in-depth or more neutral than other encyclopedias does not elevate it to the status of a good primary or secondary source. And like it or not, Wikipedia's greatness will always be balanced against the fact that the person editing it could be a lunatic fringe scholar, a historical revisionist, someone will a reality-distorting mental illness, or just a well-meaning person who's misinformed. Call it an ad hominem attack if you will, but there's so much information out there - and so much of it which you cannot possibly verify in the time you have - sometimes looking at someone's sources and making sure there are no intellectual troublemakers/quacks on there and a few people you like are is the most efficacious way to see if something is worth reading and citing.
The town where I grew up in the Peninsula area just south of San Francisco is a little of both. The lower area of the town, which is older, has a higher latino population, and more commercial/industrial zoning (though it is still essentially a bedroom community), is fairly friendly to pedestrians in that there are sidewalks and crosswalks and things. That said, the town is a nightmare to traverse on foot. The grocer down the street was turned into a conveniance store, meaning to get non-ethnic groceries you have to go about two miles in any direction. There is no place you'd want to go to hang out within about two miles, just some dive bars and fish restaurants.
Outside of these old neighborhoods are a few hilly communities which are part of the city at large but are not really accessible by foot. I'm not even sure HOW you'd get to them on foot - there are no sidewalks bridging them, you'd basically have to j-walk or go into the woods.
Where I live in Oakland, there are 5 coffee shops, 2 small grocers, 2 supermarkets, a hardware store, a theater, a post office, sushi, chinese, korean, mexican, fried chicken, two breakfast cafes, two bakeries, and bunches of specialty stores all within about a ten minute walk. There are two major shopping districts within a 30 minute walk and downtown is about an hour's walk. And it's not even what I'd call a "city" atmosphere - most of buildings in my immediate vicinity are either single-unit family residences or 8-unit apartment buildings. It's just been built up naturally, rather than artificially fenced into miles and miles of purile tract housing.
Trust me, there's LOTS OF THINGS to Fix with The Fucking Finder.
Actually, now that I start tripping on it, I think that the optimal solution would be to provide window manager-level support for multiple finders, rather than providing a one-size-fits-all solution. While (I venture) a majority of Mac users are dissatisfied with the Finder, we do not agree on what is wrong, how to fix it, or even what direction to go in.
I stand by my (well, the LUG guys') point. Firstly, what do you consider "the device?" If you think of the device as the drive itself, sure. But if you are thinking of the device as the computer and the drive as a component, then doesn't it make sense to have all of the controls in one place? Why doesn't it have a play and stop button as well? Secondly, the primary reason that floppy drives had physical eject mechanisms was because you needed to apply mechanical force to remove them from the drive, whereas CDs do it for you (with modularity/interchangeability/standards gripes being a close second).
Oh, and totally off-topic, but I am *greatly* amused by the fact that my mother, who is in her 50's and fairly tech-savvy, still does not readily identify the icons for "play," "fast forward," "rewind," "stop," and "eject" on any device made by man.
The newer ones seem to have the power buttons in various wacky and inaccessible locations (iMac - back of monitor on lower left), and not really on the keyboard. The theory that many have put forward about this is that turning off your computer in the first place is silly and unnecessary, and that it should just be put to sleep after being idle for a certain amount of time, or if you hit a keyboard shortcut. Then your "on" button effectively becomes any button on the keyboard or opening the laptop, and your "off" button is walking away from the computer or closing the laptop.
I'd say that's a valid criticism, perhaps because it's something which I found weird and which took a while to get used to. An invalid criticism would be criticizing the positioning of the minimize/maximize/quit buttons.
I was listening to an episode of LUG Radio where they were doing some evaluation of OS X (predictably, some loved it, others not so much, and one guy hated it just because it was proprietary.
Many of the criticisms of OS X they struck off as irrelevant or persnickety went like this: "Why is the CD Eject button on the keyboard? That's clearly inferior to having a button on the actual drive."
Well, hardly, because if we lived in a strange alternate universe were Apple ruled the market people would be criticizing IBM clones for having the button on the drive. Most people's complaints about OS X fall under this category. Now, if you were to make some criticisms of Finder (my pet peeves are the network disconnects, its overly-glam and non-utilitarian appearance, and its occasional sluggishness and inconsistency as it attempts to combine the worst of a relational and non-relational browsers) you might have something, and you're out of luck if you want to play any cutting edge games aside from WoW. But if you're going to carry on about how it's an inferior OS because you don't like that shade of gray, then you're a certified fanboy.
I'm a recent Mac convert, I've got four systems at home between myself and my fiancee, and I wasn't sure what Appletalk was until I looked it up just now. We use AFP for file sharing, and I'm pretty sure the printer is just running a CUPS server or something else fairly banal.
The quote in the article, then, is just flamebait. You might as well criticize Windows Vista for requiring cryptic edits to config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to run Dark Forces.
I think you are vastly overestimating Square/Enix's largess and brand loyalty. Final Fantasy I-VI were Nintendo exclusives (well, there was no real competition at the time) but they jumped ship because the N64 wouldn't cut it. It is fair to say that they did this both because the N64 would not allow them the creative latitude they needed, and because they sensed that the N64 would ultimately lose out because the N64 was so creatively restrictive that no one would write games for it.
Granted, I do not know much about S/E's business, and I haven't really followed them since they got in bed with Sony. While FF 13 is in development for the PS3, unless Sony has them in an iron-manacled contract, a port is not out of the question. Heck, it would probably be pretty easy, considering that they're getting chips from the same company, and they'd be going from Stupid Ass-Backwards Gimmick Processor to Solid Traditional Processor.
At the end of the day, I would rather be the manager who sold out to the Southern Barbarians and made a fat wad of cash for my stockholders than be the patriot who brought ruin to my stockholders.
It seems obvious that his intended purpose is to devalue the works in question.
Does he devalue them by offering people an alternate source for entertainment (not fair use), or does he devalue them by showing how horrible they are (may be fair use)?
For example, since your comment is owned by you, I quoted you as fair use to illustrate that you are incorrect. This is fair use, regardless of how it affects your karma, rep or ego. I did not quote you to provide others with an alternate source of your insight, thus denying you ad dollars. This would not be fair use.
No, because before the digital age where everything is reproducable, the reproduction of something could hurt your ability to sell it. For example, if you wrote a book called "The Four Things That Could Save Your Marriage," and someone printed those four things in a review, you could claim that they are acting as a market substitute for your good. Or if someone offers a download of the hit song off of an album, but not the whole album, and claims it's fair use. That supercedes the need for your album. It specifically does NOT include parody or negative review.
Disney may have a legitimate case. I don't know. It depends on the length and content of the clips. But you cannot restrict someone from showing, say, a screenshot from a defective game to illustrate that it is defective, or even that it's just shoddy or stupid.
What gets me is that he's essentially a jock, but we have trouble recognizing it because he hasn't yet adopted jockish bravado nor gotten a pair of magic contact lenses. Think about it. He's:
Good at sports,
Spends lots of money on fancy sports equipment,
Gets special treatment from the powers-that-be,
(in)Famous,
Guided by his dick, and, most importantly,
Dumb.
Seriously, a trip to Aberzombie and Fitchicus and a six pack of Cooricon's Light is all he needs to become a typical beer-swilling young jock.
There will always be managers who want you to do a particular task so quickly it becomes dangerous (ironically, these same managers also prove to be a bitch with workman's comp). Never work faster than you can work safely. If your boss says, "You're typing slowly," respond, "My wrists have been bugging me, are you saying work so fast that I injure myself?"
Slashdot Mirror
And that's a non-argument. On the contrary, any scientist who doesn't attempt to deal with the fact that they have biases and these biases may influence their conclusions is not worth the paper their degree is printed on. They generally try to get that through your skull even before you get to grad school.
I would say that you are basically right, with a corollary: if you're influential and wealthy enough - a rockstar game designer like Cliff B. or Shigeru Miyamoto - you can still be pretty creative.
It's not like this is a new or novel phenomenon, either. I mean, most of the movers and shakers of the art world throughout history have started with a fairly conservative style and moved to the fringes gradually. Picasso did not start doing cubist drawings. The reason that this is now incredibly apparent in the games industry as opposed to twenty years ago is partly the amount of labor and craft necessary for one game to be produced, and also the fact that a great number of idiots buy things like Madden 2008. The industry is effectively clogged by those nothing blockbuster titles, and huge channels of distribution and advertising and production are built around them. Just ask any Best Buy employee how many units of The Burning Crusade they recieved at their store - it's probably in the thousands. And even if you distribute via the internet, Verizon and Sprint are fighting to put a toll booth at your data connection, and huge amounts of promotional labor, from viral marketing to professional blogging, are devoted to making sure that people are talking about the games that the industry wants them to talk about.
Just as a side note, the biggest problem with rooting out or finding child sexual abuse is that children under the age of 10 can be made to say anything if goaded long enough, and eventually they will fabricate elaborate false memories to supplement these statements. If you put any determined adult in a room with any 8-year old, given enough time, they could eventually have that kid saying up was down or Uncle Benny touched him this way or that way, which, ironically, could be classified as abuse. Many law enforcement agencies have done exactly that, because at best the officers or attorneys in question were simply convinced they were right and that the kid had repressed memories or some other such bullshit, and at worst they were corrupt jerks out to catch bad guys - who cares if they have to brainwash a few little shits in order to catch em?
Mind you, I have no special knowledge in this subject beyond some college psychology classes.
The goal is not to make a secure system. The idea of securing a system from its owner (who has physical access) while maintaining usability is absurd and approaches impossiblity. They just want to make a system which 99.9% of users cannot crack, make it so that the crack cannot be generalized across different systems, and prosecute the remaining 0.1%.
Really, the only way to defeat DRM is to prove to companies that they will make more money without DRM than with, or, failing that, make the preceding true via strikes and public awareness.
I would say that in the field of design (any design), people/business skills are far more important than technical skills.
I remember a 5-page magazine layout I did for someone. It was just some pictures that needed to be scanned and edited (cropped, redeye removed), some text inserted, and a graphic or two drawn. All told, I could've done a really professional job - just myself - in about two hours. This job took over 30 hours because the client was that persnickety. Or how about the fairly bare-bones website I did for a nonprofit group? That took 10-12 hours for 5 pages.
Yeah, and how many people played Streets of Sim City? 10?
Applying common sense to this situation, the only reasons why a developer would write for DX 10 are because DX 9 is technically incapable of materializing their desires, because the company in question is owned by Microsoft, or because Microsoft is giving them a hefty bribe.
In the case of the former, well, this person is probably a hobbyist, because no sane person in today's gaming industry would sacrifice revenue just so they could have 128-bit textures on the barbie doll female boss's metal bustier. This all but rules out releasing an exclusive for purely technical reasons. No doubt, DX 10 is the cat's pajamas - but even so, most games will probably just have multiple rendering paths for maximum compatibility.
Ownership could be a tricky matter, because I'm not sure how many companies MS has by the short hairs. However, I think it's pretty safe to say that they would have to have a massive controlling interest to be able to force a decision which in no way benefitted the company and in every way benefitted MS.
In the case of the bribe, they would only take the bribe and go through with it if they thought the potential revenue sacrificed by requiring a bleeding-edge and thoroughly buggy OS that has everyone in the industry scared shitless is smaller than the bribe. This is pretty much just the C- titles, such as Streets of Sim City, where it is mostly clear that the game is a piece of shit, but they do a release to maybe recoup some of the development costs.
Well, that's a relief.
Let me get this straight. You're
Furthermore, textbooks are (in my opinion) a racket, and are entirely inappropriate to entire disciplines. They're an effective tool for sciences and engineering, where there is a body of knowledge and methodologies that you have to learn to become an effective scientist or engineer - even if you ultimately grow to question those assumptions. Of course, the best professors do more than teach from the book in any field, but there's not really any question as to, for example, whether L'Hospital's Rule is something you learn in the study of Calculus.
In other fields, such as history and the humanities, textbooks chain you to learning what some editor thought was the best thing for you to learn, and chain the professor to teaching that material. Then, on top of that, you have to buy a $100 course reader (which is a racket in and of itself). You end up being taught the same material over and over again, and either risk a low grade if you go outside of the course boundaries and write on something that's not in the textbook which the professor may not be familiar with, or are doomed to write the same dull essay your peers are writing. It's actually anti-research. You're not building any knowledge, you're just making weak points based on a weak body of knowledge given to you by the instructor, and fighting with your peers for source materials in the library. In an age where everything in public domain can be put online, why isn't it all online? Why do we have to even buy the freaking books, other than to keep publisher's wallets fat and for our professors to grease their palms so they get published in turn?
Same for me. Citing encyclopedias is for high school freshmen who don't know any better. Adults should be learning to do research from primary sources and in-depth secondary sources.
There are a variety of reasons for this, but the most important (in my mind) is that the encyclopedia is meant to be a shallow repository of general knowledge. That's not to say it's bad or potentially inaccurate, it's just a crappy support for a scholarly argument. If I have to write a 2000-word paper on an historical figure, wouldn't I be better informed by reading a 300-page book instead of a 500-word encyclopedia entry?
Furthermore, they potentially have political omissions which, if you knew about them, could sway your argument one way or the other. This is especially true of history. After all, how many editors would quietly strike out things like homosexual relationships in historical figures? How many would print this poem from the 1600s, which wouldn't be read on television without bleeps, to give you an idea of just how vulgar the Earl of Rochester was? I bet most people don't even know those words were in use 400 years ago.
Just because Wikipedia is often more in-depth or more neutral than other encyclopedias does not elevate it to the status of a good primary or secondary source. And like it or not, Wikipedia's greatness will always be balanced against the fact that the person editing it could be a lunatic fringe scholar, a historical revisionist, someone will a reality-distorting mental illness, or just a well-meaning person who's misinformed. Call it an ad hominem attack if you will, but there's so much information out there - and so much of it which you cannot possibly verify in the time you have - sometimes looking at someone's sources and making sure there are no intellectual troublemakers/quacks on there and a few people you like are is the most efficacious way to see if something is worth reading and citing.
The town where I grew up in the Peninsula area just south of San Francisco is a little of both. The lower area of the town, which is older, has a higher latino population, and more commercial/industrial zoning (though it is still essentially a bedroom community), is fairly friendly to pedestrians in that there are sidewalks and crosswalks and things. That said, the town is a nightmare to traverse on foot. The grocer down the street was turned into a conveniance store, meaning to get non-ethnic groceries you have to go about two miles in any direction. There is no place you'd want to go to hang out within about two miles, just some dive bars and fish restaurants.
Outside of these old neighborhoods are a few hilly communities which are part of the city at large but are not really accessible by foot. I'm not even sure HOW you'd get to them on foot - there are no sidewalks bridging them, you'd basically have to j-walk or go into the woods.
Where I live in Oakland, there are 5 coffee shops, 2 small grocers, 2 supermarkets, a hardware store, a theater, a post office, sushi, chinese, korean, mexican, fried chicken, two breakfast cafes, two bakeries, and bunches of specialty stores all within about a ten minute walk. There are two major shopping districts within a 30 minute walk and downtown is about an hour's walk. And it's not even what I'd call a "city" atmosphere - most of buildings in my immediate vicinity are either single-unit family residences or 8-unit apartment buildings. It's just been built up naturally, rather than artificially fenced into miles and miles of purile tract housing.
Trust me, there's LOTS OF THINGS to Fix with The Fucking Finder.
Actually, now that I start tripping on it, I think that the optimal solution would be to provide window manager-level support for multiple finders, rather than providing a one-size-fits-all solution. While (I venture) a majority of Mac users are dissatisfied with the Finder, we do not agree on what is wrong, how to fix it, or even what direction to go in.
I stand by my (well, the LUG guys') point. Firstly, what do you consider "the device?" If you think of the device as the drive itself, sure. But if you are thinking of the device as the computer and the drive as a component, then doesn't it make sense to have all of the controls in one place? Why doesn't it have a play and stop button as well? Secondly, the primary reason that floppy drives had physical eject mechanisms was because you needed to apply mechanical force to remove them from the drive, whereas CDs do it for you (with modularity/interchangeability/standards gripes being a close second).
Oh, and totally off-topic, but I am *greatly* amused by the fact that my mother, who is in her 50's and fairly tech-savvy, still does not readily identify the icons for "play," "fast forward," "rewind," "stop," and "eject" on any device made by man.
The newer ones seem to have the power buttons in various wacky and inaccessible locations (iMac - back of monitor on lower left), and not really on the keyboard. The theory that many have put forward about this is that turning off your computer in the first place is silly and unnecessary, and that it should just be put to sleep after being idle for a certain amount of time, or if you hit a keyboard shortcut. Then your "on" button effectively becomes any button on the keyboard or opening the laptop, and your "off" button is walking away from the computer or closing the laptop.
I'd say that's a valid criticism, perhaps because it's something which I found weird and which took a while to get used to. An invalid criticism would be criticizing the positioning of the minimize/maximize/quit buttons.
I was listening to an episode of LUG Radio where they were doing some evaluation of OS X (predictably, some loved it, others not so much, and one guy hated it just because it was proprietary.
Many of the criticisms of OS X they struck off as irrelevant or persnickety went like this: "Why is the CD Eject button on the keyboard? That's clearly inferior to having a button on the actual drive."
Well, hardly, because if we lived in a strange alternate universe were Apple ruled the market people would be criticizing IBM clones for having the button on the drive. Most people's complaints about OS X fall under this category. Now, if you were to make some criticisms of Finder (my pet peeves are the network disconnects, its overly-glam and non-utilitarian appearance, and its occasional sluggishness and inconsistency as it attempts to combine the worst of a relational and non-relational browsers) you might have something, and you're out of luck if you want to play any cutting edge games aside from WoW. But if you're going to carry on about how it's an inferior OS because you don't like that shade of gray, then you're a certified fanboy.
I'm a recent Mac convert, I've got four systems at home between myself and my fiancee, and I wasn't sure what Appletalk was until I looked it up just now. We use AFP for file sharing, and I'm pretty sure the printer is just running a CUPS server or something else fairly banal.
The quote in the article, then, is just flamebait. You might as well criticize Windows Vista for requiring cryptic edits to config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to run Dark Forces.
Keith Richards launches the iSnort. News at 11.
I think you are vastly overestimating Square/Enix's largess and brand loyalty. Final Fantasy I-VI were Nintendo exclusives (well, there was no real competition at the time) but they jumped ship because the N64 wouldn't cut it. It is fair to say that they did this both because the N64 would not allow them the creative latitude they needed, and because they sensed that the N64 would ultimately lose out because the N64 was so creatively restrictive that no one would write games for it.
Granted, I do not know much about S/E's business, and I haven't really followed them since they got in bed with Sony. While FF 13 is in development for the PS3, unless Sony has them in an iron-manacled contract, a port is not out of the question. Heck, it would probably be pretty easy, considering that they're getting chips from the same company, and they'd be going from Stupid Ass-Backwards Gimmick Processor to Solid Traditional Processor.
At the end of the day, I would rather be the manager who sold out to the Southern Barbarians and made a fat wad of cash for my stockholders than be the patriot who brought ruin to my stockholders.
Specifically:
It seems obvious that his intended purpose is to devalue the works in question.
Does he devalue them by offering people an alternate source for entertainment (not fair use), or does he devalue them by showing how horrible they are (may be fair use)?
For example, since your comment is owned by you, I quoted you as fair use to illustrate that you are incorrect. This is fair use, regardless of how it affects your karma, rep or ego. I did not quote you to provide others with an alternate source of your insight, thus denying you ad dollars. This would not be fair use.
No, because before the digital age where everything is reproducable, the reproduction of something could hurt your ability to sell it. For example, if you wrote a book called "The Four Things That Could Save Your Marriage," and someone printed those four things in a review, you could claim that they are acting as a market substitute for your good. Or if someone offers a download of the hit song off of an album, but not the whole album, and claims it's fair use. That supercedes the need for your album. It specifically does NOT include parody or negative review.
Disney may have a legitimate case. I don't know. It depends on the length and content of the clips. But you cannot restrict someone from showing, say, a screenshot from a defective game to illustrate that it is defective, or even that it's just shoddy or stupid.
Onion article: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51140 "Bush Grants Self Permission To Grant More Power To Self"
What gets me is that he's essentially a jock, but we have trouble recognizing it because he hasn't yet adopted jockish bravado nor gotten a pair of magic contact lenses. Think about it. He's:
Seriously, a trip to Aberzombie and Fitchicus and a six pack of Cooricon's Light is all he needs to become a typical beer-swilling young jock.
There will always be managers who want you to do a particular task so quickly it becomes dangerous (ironically, these same managers also prove to be a bitch with workman's comp). Never work faster than you can work safely. If your boss says, "You're typing slowly," respond, "My wrists have been bugging me, are you saying work so fast that I injure myself?"
Shush, calling it the MiseryStation will just make it a hit with emo kids.