...I seem to recall making that same remark myself in response to the first Aereo message posted here.

Some guy's black robe won't magically prevent everyone from trying to get that rule applied in the lower courts. It will have to be litigated back up to the SCOTUS before 9 guys can declare that "sorry, it doesn't apply to you". Although even that's not assured. By the time it gets back up to the SCOTUS, it could be different guys or case could just come out different.

That's when SDL was developed. More than likely, any of the interesting games used that.

Cable companies operate a single antenna for a large group of people.

Thus you have something resembling a public performance.

Aereo didn't do this. They operated single antennas for single individuals. They rented a single piece of hardware to a single individual. There are older cases with DVD rental setups that are very analogous. Those were protected as not being public performances because they weren't really.

Now potentially any file transfer on the web is a public performance.

...and who determines what this "spirit" is exactly?

Is the "spirit" of copyright law to enable abusive monopolies or is it to be fodder for the young starving artist?

The really sad part here is that the victim was going out of it's way to abide by a previous SCOTUS ruling. The idea that you can't cater your business to recent judicial findings is an especially troubling one. It destroys the entire basis for commerce.

No. A better analogy would be transmitting a recording from one Tivo in your house to another.

This ruling potentially makes a whole-home PVR illegal.

Forget about streaming from that Tivo to your tablet while you're on the road. That will likely be "very illegal".

His black robe doesn't allow him to alter the natural laws of the universe or the basic principle that a rule once made applies to EVERYONE.

Declaring that a file transferred to a single person constitutes a "public performance" applies to EVERYONE.

That's the way the law works.

That's what Aereo was depending on. They exploited the rules created by another SCOTUS precedent. They abided by those rules.

The lower courts will apply this rule. It will have to be litigated all the way to the supremes before they can declare that some rule doesn't apply to a particular person.

It's funny you should mention package delivery because we already have a great example of this: the Netflix DVD-by-mail service.

This has always been a very efficiently handled product since the relevant middle man has no conflict of interest.

It's amazing how much less problematic that dinosaur of a product is. You have first sale protecting the right of Netflix to continue offering stuff and a parcel service that is a common carrier.

Meanwhile, the streaming service is surrounded on all sides by evil jack*sses with some entrenched monopoly interest.

It's like Walmart owns the road out to the freeway and they don't want you shopping at Target or Costco. They will charge you $100 to get on or off the freeway if they find out you've shopped at one of their competitors.

This is also a regional thing.

You can't judge the entire industry based on a single location. This goes triple if that location happens to be Silicon Valley. It's a tournament mentality over there. The gold rush started in 49 and never stopped really.

You've got tons of young talent feeding itself into the grinder.

> I was productive at my first job out of college after a month.

I was also productive pretty much immediately. Then again, I had an internship for 2 years before I graduated from school. In my day, it was a trendy thing to get job experience while you were still in school.

Do they not do that anymore?

This vanity that academia has about not being a part of the real world is really a red herring. Universities started as "trade schools" because the people paying for them weren't interested in just p*ssing money awy. The notion that Universities are above that sort of thing is just the result of academics repeating their own propaganda to each other over and over again.

But to the real point... Tuition has been rising far faster than inflation for a very long time and there seems to be no real reason for it. This article makes that pretty blatant. If academia can't affort to pay the instructors, then what the HELL are they wasting all of that money on?

It's like the prices going up at Walmart 15% a year.

That's the way these institutions are treating their people (like Walmart employees).

The Japanese are bad motherfuckers. All of this surrender talk is just disrespectful. It has the appearance of being something sweet and liberal but it's really just blatant racism. You think that they are weak inferior non-white people that be "easily dealt with".

The Germans fought tooth and nail and so did the Russians. We would do no different if the roles had been reversed.

What this really tells me is that an architect and perhaps architects in general are too stupid to bother to check what's actually going on. They are unwilling or unable to acquire a suitable diagnostic device and use it. They are unable to seek the advice of those that may be more clued in.

That explains much of the architectural dreck I have seen in new home construction. Blithering idiots.

It seems that it did not occur to this person to perform actual measurements.

My "wacko home built PVR" with a crazy amount of disks draws about 180W. Although it's an older AMD based machine with not so great power management features.

I am sure that a comparable i3 based setup would yield considerable "power savings".

Alternately, you can just turn stuff off.

If you device doesn't have a real power switch, then connect it to something that does like a power strip.

A cable receiver is totally something that you can completely disconnect from the mains. So idle power is such a total non-problem. You just have to be interested enough to bother.