This one: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

For everyone other than people trying to argue semantics on Slashdot, "wasting food" means discarding it uneaten. The fact that uneaten food that is discarded into a compost bin will be turned into fertilizer does not mean it was not wasted.

Seattle has not made it a fine-worthy offense to discard uneaten eat food, which is what the headline implies. Seattle residents are instead supposed to throw both uneaten food and the remnants of mostly-eaten food - as much of it as they want - into their composting bin, not the "regular" trash. The goal was to get people to compost compostable items (like food) instead of throw them into the trash. Not to prevent discarding uneaten food.

I suppose since compost is later turned into fertilizer, composting is a bit less truly wasteful than throwing uneaten food into the "regular" trash, but I doubt that distinction is meaningful since in either case the food is no longer edible.

Many times, the economics of "fun" things that people enjoy only work out if there are enough people in a small geographic area. You can't have a football team without enough people to fill a stadium every week, and you don't get that many people without them living in a large-ish city where that football team plays. Any one person going to a football game certainly knows almost none of the other people going, but they're necessary to make the game happen at all. Same for music. Bands aren't going to play a show out in the sticks where they can't fill a medium-size venue. These cultural things are what draw people to live in a city instead of in the sticks, even if their job could be done from anywhere. Ditto for art galleries, parks, recreational sports leagues. Even though one of those faces could die tomorrow and you wouldn't notice, if most of them died, you certainly would because you wouldn't have enough people to do those things.

Three things:

1. These unlimited contracts came into being at a time when 3G radios had just come out, so the amount of traffic any one device could produce on their network was an order of magnitude less than what they can today with LTE. It would be reasonable for Verizon to say that the plan is unlimited at 2008 bandwidths.
2. I don't recall these unlimited plans as even having a bandwidth number attached to them. Do you?
3. Speaking strictly about wireline ISPs, no wireline ISP sells a consumer grade plan as 20Mbps for 24/7 usage. They sell it as 20Mbps peak bandwidth, with "peak" being purposefully vaguely defined. Besides this artificial throttling, there really are network congestion issues that come into play on consumer links at peak hours. They will sell you a business grade plan where it's guaranteed bandwidth for 24/7 usage, for about double the price of the consumer grade plan. Yet most people haven't opted for that type of a plan.

The employee suggested no such thing. She said that the man would have to wait until his children were able to board, and then they could board together.

You're right. But most of the rest of them got big-enough advances from record labels though so that they could try making music for a living for a couple years. The money for those advances came from record sales of the few acts that did make it. Now, there's little money coming in from record sales from the acts that made it - only peasly subscription revenue and $0.99 tracks. Less money coming into the labels, less money going out as advances to artists.

Speaking only to the example in the L3 blog post: the utilization on L3's network before hitting the L3/Verizon connection point is about the same as it is in Verizon's network downstream of that connection point. That suggests that each company's network can handle about the same bandwidth. Any additional traffic on Verizon's network coming from L3 would obviously also be on L3's network. Why is L3 willing to take on this additional traffic, but Verizon isn't?

Replying to myself, this is obviously an incorrect statement. You could rent a VCR or DVR or whatever and an antenna from someone, bring it back to your house, and record stuff there, and that would be legal. It's the combination of the entire service together, with the equipment rental and delivery system over the internet, that makes it "substantially like a cable company" which makes it subject to Breyer's standard. I'm sorry that this doesn't agree with how Slashdotters like to interpret the letter of the law, but that's precisely what the courts are there to do - consider intent, consider grey areas, draw arbitrary lines.

Oh my god, please stop. No, you haven't won.

Absolutely, I agree with you 100%.

How is their business model obsolete? Producing desirable content and charging for it? The thing that's obsolete is providing free OTA transmission of this content, because the content costs more to produce than the networks recoup from advertising alone.

If Aereo becomes legal, a whole shitload of people (or, rather, their cable/telco/satellite provider) will do it and that business model (free OTA transmission) will indeed become obsolete very, very quickly.

This is absolutely the most likely scenario. I'm glad you at least acknowledged it. I feel terrible for you that your TV show preferences aren't matched by 100% of the shows that ABC airs.

Exactly, provided that you own the antenna and some sort of recording device. I'm glad we agree on this.

On a VCR that you own.

On equipment that they own.

Are you seeing the common theme? If you own the equipment, it's legal. (And this will only continue to work if the cost of owning the equipment makes it not worth bothering for most people.) If you rent this stuff from someone else, it's tantamount to a cable company and thus that company is required to pay the licensing fee. If you want it changed, go complain to your local politician that everyone deserves ad-supported TV for free. Maybe the laws will change and these companies will become taxpayer-subsidized like the BBC.

How is Aereo innovative? It provides exactly the same service as cable+DVR, which has been around for over a decade. The only innovative thing is the lack of content cost for Aereo, which is unsustainable.

Of course consumers want it, who wouldn't want something that's much cheaper by virtue of having almost none of the cost structure required to deliver the service because the cost is being borne by other companies?

You've got to be kidding, right? A TV decodes the transmission but doesn't re-encode it for subsequent retransmission. You would need a camera and a microphone for that. As for the "it's a performance" aspect, the TV itself doesn't consider where it is and who is watching it, i.e. the private home vs. bar example we have been discussing. The party responsible for considering the context in which the performance is happening would be the bar owner or homeowner/renter, not the TV rental company.

It's because while it's not that by the letter of the law, that's what it is in spirit. Aereo is providing cable TV service, just without having to pay for the content. The entire point of Aereo's microantenna setup is to use a technicality to get around the "public performance" wording of the law that made (multicast, retransmit) cable providers have to pay the networks. I think one of the justices asked this at the trial (although he said that even if it was, that may not mean it's illegal). I don't know what Aereo's response was.

Now let's go to the dissent:

I agree completely.

I think something like this is necessary. Maybe it's improvised, but we need it. Someone has to pay for content to be produced, and it's no longer (completely) covered by advertisers alone. They let people watch for free via OTA because the percentage of people watching that way is low enough that their costs are still covered.

I don't think Breyer's opinion is what you think it is. Scalito said it explicitly - Breyer made up a new "looks like cable TV" standard and is judging Aereo by that standard. You don't have to like it, but don't misrepresent it.

How did you acquire the TV show that is hosted on your private storage in Amazon's cloud? The cloud storage piece assumes you acquired that content some other legal way. For remote DVR, I don't think he's going to have to go back on what he said at all. He's using a "this looks like cable TV" standard. If it's just cloud storage for shows you already have, that doesn't look like cable TV. If it's remote DVR for cable TV service and you pay for the remote DVR service, that service will be subject to the same "must pay the networks" standard as Aereo and the cable TV networks. Or you could separately pay for just the remote DVR service and have that be linked to a cable/telco/satellite/Netflix subscription as well if you want to decouple DVR from service provider.

Yes, I think it might be that easy. SlingBox comes to mind, so if you wanted to buy a SlingBox and an antenna and rent space at Aereo's location, that would probably be legal. Practically though, that wouldn't be very profitable for Aereo because the equipment would be too big, and for the end customer it's probably cheaper to just pay the cable/telco company for basic cable and DVR service.

Simply displaying a picture on a TV isn't a retransmission, so the TV rental company is off the hook.

The other piece of this, which others have pointed out, is that it is being offered to the general public. If you rent a TV and show some content to the general public for a fee, I believe that constitutes a "public performance" or something like that and you would need some sort of license to show it. Bars, for example, subscribe to a different type of cable or satellite service that allows them to do this.