You'd think they would remember RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. which affirmed that space shifting (from media to hard disk) for personal use was considered fair use under the act.

No Othello

Those aren't SUVs. They're passenger cars with lift kits installed.

Actually they are a hatchbacks (aka station wagons) but the marketing people renamed them as SUVs to make them more hip and trendy.

hey'd probably get more money because they could hold a vast section of the internet to hostage

The problem is that more people use Windows at home than Linux. This is why Windows is the largest "soft" target.

Linux at home is not immune. Why? Because home users are less likely to be careful about their security and more likely to download malware. They also tend to tolerate software operating slower than normal because they incorrectly associate it with the age of the computer.

Computers running at an enterprise level (aka. the ones running the internet) are harder targets than what you would find running on a personal computer at the typical household regardless of OS .

Again, they do the same sort of thing a CATV does, but by aggregating several discrete receptions across several discrete connections. This to my IANAL eyes is why Aereo should have been allowed to continue until someone changed laws regarding OTA reception and access.

The act used to define and regulate a cable system only specifies that the cable system sends video transmissions directly to the subscriber and makes no mention about the protocol or method used to send that video transmission over wire or cable. So the fact that Aereo used discrete transmissions versus multicasting isn't relevant to the act.

I don't know. That would be interesting to check out. Maybe one day...

Correct. I still have the Beta and Release CDs.

They'd released the i860 (RISC, not x86-compatible) in 1989 and tech magazines were saying it would kill x86. Windows NT was originally written for the i860 and only later ported to x86, so even Windows looked like it might not be tied to x86 in the long term.

This is technically true. Windows NT was originally designed to be OS/2 version 3.0 and at first they targeted the i860 which never did well, so they changed to the MIPS platform. Prior to release Microsoft decided to make it their next Windows platform and the rest was history.

What made Windows NT unique at the time was the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that allowed Microsoft to target multiple processor platforms. At release, Windows NT supported i386 (called IA-32 at the time), Alpha, and MIPS.

Um, that's EXACTLY what Aereo was doing.

Excluding the part where slingbox users are the end-to-end owners of their personal redirect service and Aereo being a for-profit company in the business of leasing access to an antenna, I can see how you can think of them being the exact same thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if they require at least one passenger sitting at the "control point" within the driverless car at all times the car is in operation on a public road. They may even require that the passenger sitting at the "control point" be licensed to drive.

By "control point" I mean a seat near an emergency stop button or cut off switch.

Maybe what I need to see is this clarified: Could I, as a New Yorker, rent a rooftop in the city, put up an antenna and run a wire to my ground floor apartment several blocks over? If the answer is yes, then why can't Aereo do the same thing on my behalf? Where does it say I have to OWN the antenna and transmission medium versus RENT?

To paraphrase the SCOTUS: Because Aereo is not only an equipment provider but also a service provider, the supreme court ruled that the business model that Aereo operated under was substantially similar to a cable system that the fact that Aereo didn't constantly transmit a signal but instead was directly controlled by the customer didn't provide a significant enough technological difference to warrant not treating them as a cable system.

The original purpose of a cable TV system was to provide reception of OTA broadcasts to areas (within the broadcast market) which may have difficulty receiving those same signals via outdoor antenna. According to SCOTUS, Aereo didn't do anything significantly different.

Fox is the redirecting us to this discussion by trying to apply the Aereo ruling to their case. I'm in agreement with you that despite Fox's best efforts the Aereo ruling isn't a factor in this case, since we are talking about what people do with their video once it reaches the confines of their own homes.

Except Aereo was providing the rebroadcast. With sling box you are redirecting broadcasts from your own home. The courts saw little difference between leasing an antenna and providing a subscription service and saw the former as an attempt to provide the latter without having to pay rebroadcast fees to the local affiliates.

This seems to further re-affirm the court's position (agree with it or not) that Aereo is a cable company even though they use the internet for transfer.

Why would we not agree? It doesn't matter what media or protocol being used to forward the television signal. What mattered was that Aereo provided a service to forward all the live broadcasts to you which seems very similar to the early cable companies. We had wireless cable companies in the 90's. The fact that they were wireless didn't diminish their ability to be a cable service.

Slingbox is very different. It's a personal device that does nothing but forward a single channel from your own cable box (or DirectTV receiver) to your current location.

How many people are going to spend $3000 (or even $1300) on something they know almost nothing about after "wandering by"?

I guess you never been bored one weekend and shopped at Home Depot. It is never cheap especially if your spouse is with you.