Would you spend $12,000 - $13,000 on your 50GB collection ? Wait you already answered that.
Over the course of how long it took me to get that 50GB, absolutely. The mistake here is to think I got all of it overnight. Think of how much you've spent over the past, say, 5 years, on DVD's, cable, utilities, etc. Think about how much you've spent, aggregate, on gas. It adds up. If you were to phrase the question "would you be willing to spend $6,000 to get to work?" it sounds ridiculous. But at 12k miles/year, 30 mpg and $3/gallon of gas, that's how much you spent over 5 years driving to and from work.
So while popping $12k on music may seem like a lot, consuming habits over the course of years may, indeed, aggregate to much more than that.
10 years ago, would you have even conceived that you'd have a 50GB mp3 collection?
Erm, yes. I owned maybe 10 cd's (was 14, didn't have much money) back then and could very well imagine that over the course of 10 years, I'd have bought maybe hundreds if not thousands of cd's. Of course, a year later, Napster came around and I forgot about such ridiculous ideas as buying cd's.
I mean, do you *really* think that the value of media per unit is ever going to *increase* ? My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more.
And my point is that increase in storage capacity is not directly tied to consuming more. At some point, I will have more space than I will be able to fill unless I actively get stuff I don't want (for the sake of getting it). This will not happen at $0.99 per song. I'd say that around $0.10 per song, I'd be able to get everything I want at a price I would feel is to the level of my income and still not miss anything out there. Half the things I download, I don't even listen to but did it because, well, it's there.
That may be for things like application boot-up and OS boot-up time but I don't think those things are a priority for speed-up. Most applications now-a-days can run almost entirely out of RAM (and store their data-sets in RAM). 2GB of memory is not uncommon. This makes memory speed predominant in limiting the speed of a computer in most applications.
Having photoshop filters run faster or your iTunes transcode your "collection" of Simpsons episodes so you can play it on your iPod are all things that are computationally and memory bound.
The increased latency means a larger problem but the argument is that the aggregate improvement over time is better. That is, there was no further way to improve standard DDR other than to start dual or quad-channeling it (making 512-bit buses on the motherboard). There is a clear frequency hit unless you start increasing latency and pipelining memory accesses. There is a penalty, yes, and with latency-sensitive applications that does a lot of pointer-hopping, it can mean that the application will actually be slower on DDR2 than the original DDR memory.
This isn't some indication that people who make these designs "just wanted higher numbers". That's really a short-sighted way to look at it. You might as well argue that going multi-core is "just to boast a higher number of cores" since it doesn't improve on current, predominantly single-threaded applications.
As we move into the future, the ability of hardware to continue to improve independently of how software is written as well as how the rest of the system jives with it will become more and more limited (Netburst proved this). Software and hardware will be tied closer and closer together and *both* will have to change for performance increases.
In the case of multi-core, this means software will have to be multi-threaded. In the case of high-latency, but high-bandwidth memories, this means that software will have to do much less pointer-hopping and allow caching systems to be able to better hide latencies to memory while utilizing the higher-available bandwidth. Remember, not all small, short memory accesses will be affected by higher memory latency, only those that are unfriendly towards caching.
I honestly don't see why the ISA's of microprocessors don't allow direct control of the cache. If not the L2 cache for speed reasons, at least some kind of L3 cache. Make instructions that will allow software to allocate certain regions of cache to certain memory address spaces (CPU will translate and cache). If I have 4MB of L3 cache available that I can control directly, it's quite trivial to make a pixel processor, for instance, that pre-loads 3MB of pixel data and 1MB of meta-data that's needed (like coefficients) and run the loop (interleaving load and calculation blocks so that there won't be any downtime). That kind of scheme would normally cause caching systems to die because the meta-data is stored in a different region of memory than pixel-data. This would also eliminate the penalty (depending on how the L3 cache is designed) of unaligned memory accesses in the main calculation loop.
Fair use. The argument isn't that your buddy sent you a TV show. It's that some anonymous stranger sent the show to thousands (if not millions) of people.
Not that I think that's wrong but that's how the corporate-purchased law made by our corporate-purchased legislators works.
It's difficult to prove to advertisers that a show distributed through torrents is reaching a certain number of people. It's easy to track IP's who visit your website. In the end, it's about the money and advertisers simply aren't creative and/or imaginative enough to get past the Nelson-era broadcasting model.
There is a flaw in the first part of the argument. You're assuming that the amount of content a consumer consumes is limited by the storage capacity he/she has. I don't think this has been true for quite a few years now. Consumers consume what they like and I don't think that the majority of consumers eat up every TV show or ever music album release. I know that I currently have more than enough space on my iPod and removable HD's to exhaust all of the shows that I get weekly that I'd like to watch. I rarely archive them after watching.
Music may be a different matter as people like to store those for the long-term but as far as *new* music that a consumer adds to his collection, I would argue that the pace at which he/she consumes isn't limited by his digital storage capacity. So the price to consume isn't directly growing with the increase in storage capacity and at some point, will not be restricted by it at all.
That being said, it means that there *is* a limit at which point a single consumer will be able to buy everything he wants and not break the bank. Not everyone fills up their iPods with downloads within weeks of getting it. Hell, I'm only up to 50GB and that's with all the stuff I've gathered (and not a one I paid a cent to those greedy a-holes for) long before I got the iPod.
If you read Hillary's history, *she* is descended from wealth. I would speculate that that wealth and influential circle was what got Bill to the presidency. He married well....and then fucked an intern.
Actually, no. His family was wealthy, yes. They were able to get him into college. But they weren't money-in-stocks wealthy. They were upper-middle class high-income people (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.).
The idea of economic mobility isn't that you can go from being a janitor to being Bill Gates in your lifetime. It's that you can be a janitor, send your kids to a community college so that they can be a tradesman/professional (mechanic, etc.) and then send their children to more advanced universities (getting either a Bachelor-level or doctorate degree) and become the high-income parents of another Bill Gates.
This isn't true for 99.99999% of the people but that one guy who makes it *did* work for it as well as his parents, grandparents, etc.
Sometimes (many times) this isn't true and I think the purpose of government isn't to punish those who made it through hard work but to eliminate the unfair conditions that allow those who didn't work hard to become rich. Ironically, it is the government who is a large (if not primary) source of wealth for people who don't deserve it (*cough* defense contractors *cough*).
No matter how much you don't like Microsoft, I would argue that they earned their keep. I would not say the same of Halliburton or Lockheed Martin.
Which is a good indication of that "lack of judgment" conclusion. Yes, we'd all like to believe in the American Dream of being rags to riches. If you work hard, be ambitious, etc. you'll go far in life. The truth of the matter is that that simply isn't true for most people. By definition, there has to be a loser for every winner and usually multiple losers for every winner. The failure to recognize this pattern and the reality of the world takes about the same cognitive impairment as believing in an mythical father-figure who purposely avoids providing evidence for his/her existence and yet expects you to have no doubt in your mind that he/she is there. Notice a pattern in conservative thinking here?
Liberal-minded people, even if they aren't able to articulate their sense of the harsh realities, are at least aware of it on some level. Many advocate socialism because that seems like an attractive solution. Some, like myself, recognize the dog-eat-dog world as a necessary evil. None of us are delusional about a dreamy paradise where everyone can be happy and have what they want if they only work hard. We all know that only a selected few can, while the rest can work as hard as they want and still end up in debt and impoverished.
The point isn't that they are patternless. They certainly might, if approximated, have some pattern. For instance, if, given the long run, there is a 60/40 distribution between RAM bits with 1's and 0's respectively. But as long as there's some kind of local randomness, the numbers can be "massaged" to produce truly random numbers. Let's say that, if you only restricted yourself to picking 10 bits instead of the some-odd-billions you would need to get to 60/40 consistently. If the physical process means that there is no deterministic way to determine where on the billions-of-bits-wide distribution curve you picked that 10 (as there isn't when you power up a chip), then you have a truly random 10 bits. The beauty of randomness is that only the tiniest amount has to exist to make the whole thing random by nature.
That actually depends on your process. Not all logic is symmetrical. In fact, I would venture to say none of them are. A p-mos and an n-mos in standard CMOS are built differently. I believe you start out with a lightly doped p substrate and implant N-wells to construct an n-mos. A p-mos starts out the same with a p substrate but is then implanted with a large N-well, then subsequent p-wells inside the n-well.
Because of things like the body effect, substrate bias, and just plain differences in p and n doping methods, I wouldn't expect both types of transistors to have the exact same behavior scaling (or even Vt/vd/vs points to start with) with temperature.
This is why CMOS designs should generally allow for differences in behavior and try to prevent latch-ups.
The method of generating random numbers that this article proposes follows the same principle. And the "randomness" that it provides becomes more random as process feature size shrinks. At 45nm, the steady-state bias (if there is one) that a circuit comes to (depending on the circuit design) is truly random in two ways:
1. If, in the case of a CMOS circuit in which the state of a flip-flop depends on charge accumulated during power-up, small variations in electron leakage (due to quantum effects, since an electron's wave function becomes larger than the dielectric material's thickness (hafnium-based in 45nm I think, silicon-dioxide in 65nm and above) can make the difference between a logical 1 and 0. 2. Process variations. As each chip is "grown", the process generally (and this area is definitely outside of my knowledge) involves highly charged plasmas to etch the material at each layer. Again, the wave function of these charged particles (or their specific charge depending on the wave function of the electrons in their out layers), will cause differences in the thickness/shape/size of the subsequent footprint. This essentially means that each individual chip made has a slightly different, and random, "pattern" associated with it.
Have you seen the size of those? Do you know that they require up to 10A of in-rush current? Not only that, but their functional equivalent, in terms of logic, is about ~5 million gates (it's a black art since they use LUT's) which is nil to nothing when compared to high-powered microprocessors. Remember, it's not all about the MHz.
Marvell isn't really a company to undertake something like that. They bought Intel's cell phone group because they revel in competing in a lowest-cost, commodity market. They're not guys who shoot for the stars with the latest and greatest.
Anecdotally, the company is like 70% asian according to a friend of mine who works there.
I think he means FPGA on the CPU die itself. IBM already provides cell libraries for programmable logic (based on Xilinx's SRAM-tile design) that you can integrate with the rest of your silicon logic. The only problem is figuring out a set of instruction extensions to program it. Wouldn't be too hard, it's not like Intel has a problem releasing more ISA extensions....
Only problem is, to run the FPGA portion at speeds even remotely close enough to be of use would eat up a lot of power.
Personally, I think that broadcasting and/or DVD's without encryption allow free distribution on the receiver's part. Aside from that, I believe it is the responsibility of the "inventor" to protect their work through copyright. I'm against automatic copyrighting in the sense that if someone wants to get government protection, paid for by tax dollars, they should have to ask for it.
The obvious answer is that the hippies didn't get into positions of power. This is probably because the hippies, though characteristic of the 60's, were not the majority of the youth and were not, in fact, on a career path to put them in a position of power.
A different thing could be said about technologically knowledgeable 20-something's of today.
The internet was most definitely not "built on trust". It was built for academic/military purposes and flourished on its own. The beauty of unhindered growth is that there will be results you like and dislike. Such is the price of freedom. If you're somehow arguing that one should restrict freedom to allow for elimination of things you dislike I will kindly tell you to go to hell.
You're right, the current movie companies would go out of business. And good riddance. There will always be a demand for entertainment and if they can't live in today's world of free, unhindered information, others will gladly come in and fill the void. That's what's so great about the free market. Those caterers and poor people who, according to you, will starve on the streets if the movie companies go out of business? They will work for whoever takes their place.
The old medium of TV and theater will be marginalized and their capital reduced. They will be replaced. Companies smart enough to use the internet (and near-free distribution) to their advantage (by coming up with new ways to make money that doesn't involve screwing the consumers) will flourish. Those companies will employ the same people, the same actresses, and the same film crews and technologies. This idea that somehow, if big cartel-like corporations were to disappear, there'd all of a sudden be no jobs is complete drivel. If Walmart or Sony Studios or Universal died tomorrow, there are hundreds if not thousands of start-ups or well-established companies more than willing to take their place.
There is an inherent danger in deriving morals from the value it contributes to society. This raises the question of what happens when the best thing for the majority is really bad for the minority....
This is why ethical philosophers always distinguish between inherent morals (those that are valued for their own sake) and secondary morals (those that are valued as a means to an end). While the acceptance of free religion and racial equality have been recent, I'd like to think that they have always been inherent values. Indeed, if you read the meditations of philosophers ranging from Aristotle to DeCarte to Kant, you will (at least I did) see the cognitive dissonance between what was the conclusion of all of their derived morals (equality of man, freedom of knowledge, etc.) and their acceptance of the values of the social norm at the time (Christianity is the only true religion, etc.).
This seems to imply to me that such concepts could be considered moral, and indeed have been, for as long as recorded history but have simply not been practiced by society due to mass cognitive dissonance.
Well, to "hurt" or "help", we'd have to assign monetary value to the copyright (because, after all, that's all that they're about). Every little guy's blog is probably worth next to nothing, even if it is very compelling (and I would argue that if you put it on the internet, it's public domain and you've voided automatically, any right to it). On the other hand, a corporation's latest bubble-gum pop idol soundtrack is worth millions if not billions. So no, it doesn't help the little people more.
A bigger problem is I think the focus on appearance. Let's say the GP's example was not a 56 year old male but a young female who was not, indeed, "slim, fit, pretty, etc." Would the same issues be raised as an argument against the medium? People who meet others (friends, lovers, etc.) in the real world misrepresent themselves all the time. It's just that appearance is generally more difficult to misrepresent (though many try through makeup, clothes, etc.).
So why is this such a shock when it occurs online?
Archos player. Has a widescreen. Supports *way* more video and audio formats. I can drag-and-drop my music/videos into *folders* instead of being *forced* to use iTunes.
Of course, I was offered a 25% discount on an iPod which made it priced less than this (~$200 for the 60GB before the 80 came out) so I went with that. I have been regretting that decision since.
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Would you spend $12,000 - $13,000 on your 50GB collection ? Wait you already answered that.
Over the course of how long it took me to get that 50GB, absolutely. The mistake here is to think I got all of it overnight. Think of how much you've spent over the past, say, 5 years, on DVD's, cable, utilities, etc. Think about how much you've spent, aggregate, on gas. It adds up. If you were to phrase the question "would you be willing to spend $6,000 to get to work?" it sounds ridiculous. But at 12k miles/year, 30 mpg and $3/gallon of gas, that's how much you spent over 5 years driving to and from work.
So while popping $12k on music may seem like a lot, consuming habits over the course of years may, indeed, aggregate to much more than that.
10 years ago, would you have even conceived that you'd have a 50GB mp3 collection?
Erm, yes. I owned maybe 10 cd's (was 14, didn't have much money) back then and could very well imagine that over the course of 10 years, I'd have bought maybe hundreds if not thousands of cd's. Of course, a year later, Napster came around and I forgot about such ridiculous ideas as buying cd's.
I mean, do you *really* think that the value of media per unit is ever going to *increase* ? My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more.
And my point is that increase in storage capacity is not directly tied to consuming more. At some point, I will have more space than I will be able to fill unless I actively get stuff I don't want (for the sake of getting it). This will not happen at $0.99 per song. I'd say that around $0.10 per song, I'd be able to get everything I want at a price I would feel is to the level of my income and still not miss anything out there. Half the things I download, I don't even listen to but did it because, well, it's there.
That may be for things like application boot-up and OS boot-up time but I don't think those things are a priority for speed-up. Most applications now-a-days can run almost entirely out of RAM (and store their data-sets in RAM). 2GB of memory is not uncommon. This makes memory speed predominant in limiting the speed of a computer in most applications.
Having photoshop filters run faster or your iTunes transcode your "collection" of Simpsons episodes so you can play it on your iPod are all things that are computationally and memory bound.
The increased latency means a larger problem but the argument is that the aggregate improvement over time is better. That is, there was no further way to improve standard DDR other than to start dual or quad-channeling it (making 512-bit buses on the motherboard). There is a clear frequency hit unless you start increasing latency and pipelining memory accesses. There is a penalty, yes, and with latency-sensitive applications that does a lot of pointer-hopping, it can mean that the application will actually be slower on DDR2 than the original DDR memory.
This isn't some indication that people who make these designs "just wanted higher numbers". That's really a short-sighted way to look at it. You might as well argue that going multi-core is "just to boast a higher number of cores" since it doesn't improve on current, predominantly single-threaded applications.
As we move into the future, the ability of hardware to continue to improve independently of how software is written as well as how the rest of the system jives with it will become more and more limited (Netburst proved this). Software and hardware will be tied closer and closer together and *both* will have to change for performance increases.
In the case of multi-core, this means software will have to be multi-threaded. In the case of high-latency, but high-bandwidth memories, this means that software will have to do much less pointer-hopping and allow caching systems to be able to better hide latencies to memory while utilizing the higher-available bandwidth. Remember, not all small, short memory accesses will be affected by higher memory latency, only those that are unfriendly towards caching.
I honestly don't see why the ISA's of microprocessors don't allow direct control of the cache. If not the L2 cache for speed reasons, at least some kind of L3 cache. Make instructions that will allow software to allocate certain regions of cache to certain memory address spaces (CPU will translate and cache). If I have 4MB of L3 cache available that I can control directly, it's quite trivial to make a pixel processor, for instance, that pre-loads 3MB of pixel data and 1MB of meta-data that's needed (like coefficients) and run the loop (interleaving load and calculation blocks so that there won't be any downtime). That kind of scheme would normally cause caching systems to die because the meta-data is stored in a different region of memory than pixel-data. This would also eliminate the penalty (depending on how the L3 cache is designed) of unaligned memory accesses in the main calculation loop.
Fair use. The argument isn't that your buddy sent you a TV show. It's that some anonymous stranger sent the show to thousands (if not millions) of people.
Not that I think that's wrong but that's how the corporate-purchased law made by our corporate-purchased legislators works.
It's difficult to prove to advertisers that a show distributed through torrents is reaching a certain number of people. It's easy to track IP's who visit your website. In the end, it's about the money and advertisers simply aren't creative and/or imaginative enough to get past the Nelson-era broadcasting model.
There is a flaw in the first part of the argument. You're assuming that the amount of content a consumer consumes is limited by the storage capacity he/she has. I don't think this has been true for quite a few years now. Consumers consume what they like and I don't think that the majority of consumers eat up every TV show or ever music album release. I know that I currently have more than enough space on my iPod and removable HD's to exhaust all of the shows that I get weekly that I'd like to watch. I rarely archive them after watching.
Music may be a different matter as people like to store those for the long-term but as far as *new* music that a consumer adds to his collection, I would argue that the pace at which he/she consumes isn't limited by his digital storage capacity. So the price to consume isn't directly growing with the increase in storage capacity and at some point, will not be restricted by it at all.
That being said, it means that there *is* a limit at which point a single consumer will be able to buy everything he wants and not break the bank. Not everyone fills up their iPods with downloads within weeks of getting it. Hell, I'm only up to 50GB and that's with all the stuff I've gathered (and not a one I paid a cent to those greedy a-holes for) long before I got the iPod.
If you read Hillary's history, *she* is descended from wealth. I would speculate that that wealth and influential circle was what got Bill to the presidency. He married well....and then fucked an intern.
Actually, no. His family was wealthy, yes. They were able to get him into college. But they weren't money-in-stocks wealthy. They were upper-middle class high-income people (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.).
The idea of economic mobility isn't that you can go from being a janitor to being Bill Gates in your lifetime. It's that you can be a janitor, send your kids to a community college so that they can be a tradesman/professional (mechanic, etc.) and then send their children to more advanced universities (getting either a Bachelor-level or doctorate degree) and become the high-income parents of another Bill Gates.
This isn't true for 99.99999% of the people but that one guy who makes it *did* work for it as well as his parents, grandparents, etc.
Sometimes (many times) this isn't true and I think the purpose of government isn't to punish those who made it through hard work but to eliminate the unfair conditions that allow those who didn't work hard to become rich. Ironically, it is the government who is a large (if not primary) source of wealth for people who don't deserve it (*cough* defense contractors *cough*).
No matter how much you don't like Microsoft, I would argue that they earned their keep. I would not say the same of Halliburton or Lockheed Martin.
Which is a good indication of that "lack of judgment" conclusion. Yes, we'd all like to believe in the American Dream of being rags to riches. If you work hard, be ambitious, etc. you'll go far in life. The truth of the matter is that that simply isn't true for most people. By definition, there has to be a loser for every winner and usually multiple losers for every winner. The failure to recognize this pattern and the reality of the world takes about the same cognitive impairment as believing in an mythical father-figure who purposely avoids providing evidence for his/her existence and yet expects you to have no doubt in your mind that he/she is there. Notice a pattern in conservative thinking here?
Liberal-minded people, even if they aren't able to articulate their sense of the harsh realities, are at least aware of it on some level. Many advocate socialism because that seems like an attractive solution. Some, like myself, recognize the dog-eat-dog world as a necessary evil. None of us are delusional about a dreamy paradise where everyone can be happy and have what they want if they only work hard. We all know that only a selected few can, while the rest can work as hard as they want and still end up in debt and impoverished.
Processor cache....
You're right that we'd need a _rand instruction though as the current x86 model doesn't (erm, isn't supposed to) allow raw access to processor cache.
The point isn't that they are patternless. They certainly might, if approximated, have some pattern. For instance, if, given the long run, there is a 60/40 distribution between RAM bits with 1's and 0's respectively. But as long as there's some kind of local randomness, the numbers can be "massaged" to produce truly random numbers. Let's say that, if you only restricted yourself to picking 10 bits instead of the some-odd-billions you would need to get to 60/40 consistently. If the physical process means that there is no deterministic way to determine where on the billions-of-bits-wide distribution curve you picked that 10 (as there isn't when you power up a chip), then you have a truly random 10 bits. The beauty of randomness is that only the tiniest amount has to exist to make the whole thing random by nature.
That actually depends on your process. Not all logic is symmetrical. In fact, I would venture to say none of them are. A p-mos and an n-mos in standard CMOS are built differently. I believe you start out with a lightly doped p substrate and implant N-wells to construct an n-mos. A p-mos starts out the same with a p substrate but is then implanted with a large N-well, then subsequent p-wells inside the n-well.
Wiki has a good article on mosfets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_effect_transistor
Because of things like the body effect, substrate bias, and just plain differences in p and n doping methods, I wouldn't expect both types of transistors to have the exact same behavior scaling (or even Vt/vd/vs points to start with) with temperature.
This is why CMOS designs should generally allow for differences in behavior and try to prevent latch-ups.
That actually depends on how long you power it off for....
Also depends on how the sense/charge refresh circuit is designed.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator
The method of generating random numbers that this article proposes follows the same principle. And the "randomness" that it provides becomes more random as process feature size shrinks. At 45nm, the steady-state bias (if there is one) that a circuit comes to (depending on the circuit design) is truly random in two ways:
1. If, in the case of a CMOS circuit in which the state of a flip-flop depends on charge accumulated during power-up, small variations in electron leakage (due to quantum effects, since an electron's wave function becomes larger than the dielectric material's thickness (hafnium-based in 45nm I think, silicon-dioxide in 65nm and above) can make the difference between a logical 1 and 0.
2. Process variations. As each chip is "grown", the process generally (and this area is definitely outside of my knowledge) involves highly charged plasmas to etch the material at each layer. Again, the wave function of these charged particles (or their specific charge depending on the wave function of the electrons in their out layers), will cause differences in the thickness/shape/size of the subsequent footprint. This essentially means that each individual chip made has a slightly different, and random, "pattern" associated with it.
Have you seen the size of those? Do you know that they require up to 10A of in-rush current? Not only that, but their functional equivalent, in terms of logic, is about ~5 million gates (it's a black art since they use LUT's) which is nil to nothing when compared to high-powered microprocessors. Remember, it's not all about the MHz.
Marvell isn't really a company to undertake something like that. They bought Intel's cell phone group because they revel in competing in a lowest-cost, commodity market. They're not guys who shoot for the stars with the latest and greatest.
Anecdotally, the company is like 70% asian according to a friend of mine who works there.
I think he means FPGA on the CPU die itself. IBM already provides cell libraries for programmable logic (based on Xilinx's SRAM-tile design) that you can integrate with the rest of your silicon logic. The only problem is figuring out a set of instruction extensions to program it. Wouldn't be too hard, it's not like Intel has a problem releasing more ISA extensions....
Only problem is, to run the FPGA portion at speeds even remotely close enough to be of use would eat up a lot of power.
Personally, I think that broadcasting and/or DVD's without encryption allow free distribution on the receiver's part. Aside from that, I believe it is the responsibility of the "inventor" to protect their work through copyright. I'm against automatic copyrighting in the sense that if someone wants to get government protection, paid for by tax dollars, they should have to ask for it.
Little guy or big guy.
The obvious answer is that the hippies didn't get into positions of power. This is probably because the hippies, though characteristic of the 60's, were not the majority of the youth and were not, in fact, on a career path to put them in a position of power.
A different thing could be said about technologically knowledgeable 20-something's of today.
The internet was most definitely not "built on trust". It was built for academic/military purposes and flourished on its own. The beauty of unhindered growth is that there will be results you like and dislike. Such is the price of freedom. If you're somehow arguing that one should restrict freedom to allow for elimination of things you dislike I will kindly tell you to go to hell.
You're right, the current movie companies would go out of business. And good riddance. There will always be a demand for entertainment and if they can't live in today's world of free, unhindered information, others will gladly come in and fill the void. That's what's so great about the free market. Those caterers and poor people who, according to you, will starve on the streets if the movie companies go out of business? They will work for whoever takes their place.
The old medium of TV and theater will be marginalized and their capital reduced. They will be replaced. Companies smart enough to use the internet (and near-free distribution) to their advantage (by coming up with new ways to make money that doesn't involve screwing the consumers) will flourish. Those companies will employ the same people, the same actresses, and the same film crews and technologies. This idea that somehow, if big cartel-like corporations were to disappear, there'd all of a sudden be no jobs is complete drivel. If Walmart or Sony Studios or Universal died tomorrow, there are hundreds if not thousands of start-ups or well-established companies more than willing to take their place.
There is an inherent danger in deriving morals from the value it contributes to society. This raises the question of what happens when the best thing for the majority is really bad for the minority....
This is why ethical philosophers always distinguish between inherent morals (those that are valued for their own sake) and secondary morals (those that are valued as a means to an end). While the acceptance of free religion and racial equality have been recent, I'd like to think that they have always been inherent values. Indeed, if you read the meditations of philosophers ranging from Aristotle to DeCarte to Kant, you will (at least I did) see the cognitive dissonance between what was the conclusion of all of their derived morals (equality of man, freedom of knowledge, etc.) and their acceptance of the values of the social norm at the time (Christianity is the only true religion, etc.).
This seems to imply to me that such concepts could be considered moral, and indeed have been, for as long as recorded history but have simply not been practiced by society due to mass cognitive dissonance.
Well, to "hurt" or "help", we'd have to assign monetary value to the copyright (because, after all, that's all that they're about). Every little guy's blog is probably worth next to nothing, even if it is very compelling (and I would argue that if you put it on the internet, it's public domain and you've voided automatically, any right to it). On the other hand, a corporation's latest bubble-gum pop idol soundtrack is worth millions if not billions. So no, it doesn't help the little people more.
A bigger problem is I think the focus on appearance. Let's say the GP's example was not a 56 year old male but a young female who was not, indeed, "slim, fit, pretty, etc." Would the same issues be raised as an argument against the medium? People who meet others (friends, lovers, etc.) in the real world misrepresent themselves all the time. It's just that appearance is generally more difficult to misrepresent (though many try through makeup, clothes, etc.).
So why is this such a shock when it occurs online?
http://www.amazon.com/Archos-Portable-Digital-Reco rder-500870/dp/B000HAVWUA
Archos player. Has a widescreen. Supports *way* more video and audio formats. I can drag-and-drop my music/videos into *folders* instead of being *forced* to use iTunes.
Of course, I was offered a 25% discount on an iPod which made it priced less than this (~$200 for the 60GB before the 80 came out) so I went with that. I have been regretting that decision since.