I found that it's trivial to crack the encryption on Barnes and Nobel Nook books, and I've done so on many of the books I've purchased there. Now I let the books float freely between my Nook and Kindle. There were a few Nook books that I was having trouble decrypting, and it turns out that they were already sold with no DRM - I haven't run across any Amazon books without DRM restrictions.
Conversely, I haven't had success at cracking my Kindle books, so I've stopped buying from Amazon. I try to buy non-DRM books (Google Books is a good source for mainstream books, many of their titles have no DRM, Smashwords is another great source for non-DRM books), but when I can't find a non-DRM title, I buy from B&N since I know I can strip the DRM even though I have no interest in sharing books with anyone, I just want to share them among my own devices.
Police department wants to fight it out in federal court to try and establish their right to steal software? Hmm...
It's possible that the contract is not as clear as Micro Focus makes out it to be and the police department thought they had a site license. Since the police department is willing to fight rather than pay up, it's quite possible that the contract is unclear enough that they could win - if it was really a clear 6500 seat license contract, it's not likely that the police department would pay millions in legal costs to delay an inevitable $10M penalty.
Also note that when Micro Focus started investigating the cops illegal software copying, the cops began deleting the software from a number of systems.
That is willful destruction of evidence of a crime.
Sure, right, because that could have been in no way a move to cease breaking the law by keeping it.
Kind of the same way a drug dealer flushes his goods down the toilet when the police arrive to serve a warrant - he's not destroying evidence, he's just trying to cease breaking the law.
If I open source a mortgage calculator that does an incorrect calculation, does anyone really have the grounds to sue me? After all, they have the source code, and are just as capable as me of finding a mistake in the code. And if they aren't capable of understanding the source, maybe they shouldn't be using it.
You mean like recalling and banning lawn darts because people are too stupid to figure out not to throw them at each other or stand under them when throwing them straight up? Or like all those people that (using your example) listened to their realtors/brokers and couldn't figure out that no they really couldn't afford that house? Or maybe like the guy that just won class action status against Apple because he was too busy to be a parent and use the tools Apple provided so his kid ran up a "large" bill with micro payments?
In the US people will sue over anything and really licenses and agreements mean less than which judge you get and what type of mood they are in that day. I understand and agree with the idea that you shouldn't be able to sign away your rights, but that should be balanced by common sense and responsibility (e.g. it's not the MFGs fault that a dart impaled you if you stood under it).
Yes, interesting examples of the litigious nature of Americans (but I think the lawn dart case had merit - few would expect a toy marketed toward children to have the potential to penetrate a child's skull when the very nature of the game involves tossing the dart in the air so even if used properly such an accident could occur), but do you have examples of an open source software developer was sued (whether successfully or unsuccessfully) when the software he provided for free with no warranty didn't do what it was supposed to?
People often list liability as a potential concern when they open source software, but is that a valid concern? Has any organization been sued because software they released to the world when they don't guarantee that it will do anything useful?
If I open source a mortgage calculator that does an incorrect calculation, does anyone really have the grounds to sue me? After all, they have the source code, and are just as capable as me of finding a mistake in the code. And if they aren't capable of understanding the source, maybe they shouldn't be using it.
Of course!! why didn't anyone think of shared hosting before the cloud came around and saved us? Oh that's right, they did. Good god some of you people are so drawn to buzzwords it's mildly terrifying.
Throughout the history of the web (at least in so far as you were alive and able to operate a computer), you have been able to buy webhosting on shared servers. You call that "cloud", the rest of us call that a data center. The only part that has changed is the marketing.
Yes, shared hosting has been around for ages, and cloud is a new buzzword that largely means the same thing. So what's your point? That terminology changes? Would you feel better if it was called a time-sharing system? Maybe it should be called a batch-processing system, since what is a web request but a very small batch where the punch cards are replaced by HTTP?
Of course, Cloud means more than simple shared hosting (like Amazon's EC2), it also means dynamic resource allocation (i.e. Google's App Engine) that lets your app scale to use as many resources as it needs without any work from you.
If the energy costs are similar or more, then it doesn't matter. Greenpeace doesn't care about equipment cost or deployment cost. It's 100% energy. Theoretically, the energy cost should be similar between cloud and non-cloud. However, server farms a single point of energy purchase with the potential to greatly reduce the amount of energy coming from fossil fuels. Therefore, focusing on cloud data centers and trying to reduce their fossil fuel intake has a high impact potential over trying to get each tiny company to find alternative sources of energy.
That's the point - by having Amazon's Cloud service available and cheap, I dramatically cut my energy use. If Greenpeace forces them to use more expensive power, they may not be so cheap anymore.
My website may need only 3 servers to run it. However, since I don't want any single point of failure to take down my site, if I build out my own server infrastructure, I need 6 servers, 2 firewalls, 2 network switches, 2 load balancers, one SAN storage array (with dual controllers), with at least 5 disks (or maybe I skip the SAN and use discrete disk drives - maybe 20 drives spread across the 6 servers. (2, 2, 6 times 2). And I have redundant UPS's to power it all. And redundant cooling.
While if I build it on Amazon's cloud, I just need to spin up a few virtual servers. For redundancy, I have duplicate servers in another availability zone (or region). Since my website is idle most of the day, I use a fraction of a physical machine. Likewise, my disk storage uses some tiny fraction of Amazon's SAN. I use their network firewall and load balancers, again just a fraction of a piece of hardware.
I think Greenpeace is missing the environmental benifit of the Cloud.
When I want to deploy my website, I can either purchase a SAN and a half dozen servers plus network gear to run it, or I can deploy to Amazon or some other cloud provider where I'm running on the same shared hardware as many other customers.
Computing, HPC computing, and data center housing are the most Green industries on the planet.
Every year, every generation, every iteration of hardware is faster than the last. Every new product does more computations than the last, often with the same or less power.
EVERY company that has anything to do with computing has a direct interest in reducing power consumption. It drives lower power bills, longer battery lifves, or materials saved due to smaller thermal envelopes, and increased capabilities.
The power cost per computation shrinks at a shocking rate, with gains not seen in any other industry, ever.
Green peace, if anything, should be up in arms about the industries that thirst for computational power and computer resources. That party would be programmers. They drive the consumption of resources, not the hardware makers or the data warehouse managers.
Doesn't that also lead to more waste as last year's computers are discarded and replaced? And computer production isn't exactly an activity with low environmental impact - a large amount of energy and many toxic chemicals are used to create computers (and further energy and chemicals are used to recover useful materials when computers are recycled).
I still drive my 12 year old car, but my Celeron 533 and Athlon 800 (both released in 2000) have long been relegated to the scrap heap (along with motherboards, memory, disk drives, etc)
I quit BBSes because they only had a range of ~100 miles (the local area code). I was involved in HAM for a while but quit for the same reason. Nowadays with the internet my voice or text can reach the whole world.
Well your voice or text can reach the whole world that's not blocked by their country's (or your own) firewall.
But, living in earthquake country, I became a ham so my voice can be heard even if local communications infrastructure has been destroyed. And through ARES, I can help others.
It has been on my geek “bucket list” for many years to get my license. This story and a recent job change are just the motivation I needed to finally do it.
Now that the there's no Morse requirement, getting a tech license is trivial - any geek can do it with a couple hours glancing over a study guide. Most of the "technical" questions are common sense to anyone with a bit of electrical knowledge, so you just have to familiarize yourself with things that need to be memorized like license restrictions, power limits on various bands, etc.
Why not have the pilots take their naps in a separate bunk near the crew compartment. It gives them better rest, and the act of climbing out of the bunk and walking to the cockpit gives them time to help shake off the grogginess.
Or is it better to have them sleep in their seats so they are immediately ready to step in if needed?
They claim a 20 year lifetime at 4 hours/day, but how bright will it be after 20 years? LED's reduce their light output over time, and the end of life is based on some loss of brightness (30% loss?), so that 60 watt bulb may be more like a 40 watt bulb by the end of its lifetime. And based on previous LED lights I've seen, I'm skeptical that it's really equivalent in brightness to a 60 watt incandescent bulb in the first place.
The technology just wasn't there to create an very usable iPhone like device in 1991. The first Palme (the Palm 1000) was released in 1996 (at $299 each). The data-enabled Palm VII didn't come out until 1999 (at a cost of $599 + $15/month and data was super slow)
The Newton was released in 1993 and it while it was innovative for the time, was large and clunky and few would say that it was "iPhone like".
And none of these devices had a phone built-in which would have made them bigger and more expensive. In 1991 my portable cell phone came in a small bag to make it portable (between cars, it's not something I'd take to the movies).
I have to ask at 1000 Gbps are your hard drives even able to write that fast ? That's 125 Gigabytes per second, 500 MB/s is pretty good for an SSD. Also, what are you doing that requires that kind of speed?
We have 8 blade servers with SSDs, each blade keeps most data in DDR3.
What are we doing? Medical and statistical research. You should see some of the protein folding units.
Thank you for reminding me why I love living in Dallas.
I'm living in a 1500 sq. ft., 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 2 story townhouse for about $1130/month.
California can go fuck itself.
I think you're confusing San Francisco with California. They aren't synonymous.
If you want Dallas prices, you can always live in Fresno.
However, if you did live in San Francisco, the difference in salary can help make up the difference. I looked at a job in Houston but the cut in pay was double the reduction in housing cost.
Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?
Sure I do: it is the difference between a talented baker making a couple dozen cookies in their home, and a talented baker running their own bakery. What the broadcasters want to do is stifle the growth of an innovative business, because they lack the creativity and talent needed to deploy innovative technologies on their own. Do you really think that killing an innovative business is a good thing?
Streaming content to end-users is neither innovative nor creative - Netflix and others have been doing it for years.
The creative thing that they did is finding a way to do an end-run around the need to license the content for redistribution. And the networks are trying to close this loophole. This service sounds a lot like the defunct iCraveTV that tried to stream over the air broadcasts from Canada.
Is the content distribution model broken? Yes. I don't want to pay a cable company $100/month (or more) to get 200 channels of mostly crap just to watch the few shows I care about. Is Aereo going to change it? No. Netflix has much deeper pockets and a lot more clout in this area and they still have a very limited streaming catalog.
So if I have an antenna at my house, that's fine, but if it is at your house then there is a problem? What?
This is a clear-cut case of one business trying to destroy the competition through frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the court system. The broadcasters are just angry that they were not innovative enough to develop such a system on their own. When Aereo is sued into bankruptcy, the broadcasters will buy up all the patents and trade secrets and try to deploy their own version of this system.
Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?
But I probably can set up a proxy server so that my friend can get to your content through my connection. This is no different from me running a coax wire from my antenna to my neighbor so that only one of us has to have a butt-ugly mast antenna outside to get the signal. I can probably charge them for the connection as well, since it's charging for a wire, not the data on the wire.
Perhaps in theory it's no different than sharing a physical cable, but in practice it is much different -- unless your neighbor literally lives next door, you can't run a cable to him without negotiating a right-of-way through other neighbor's yards or public easements. So anything requiring physical wiring is self-limiting, it won't be done on a large scale. Which is not the case when you're dealing with a virtual service.
I thought this battle had been fought and won in the VCR times.
Since they are rebroadcasting from a central location, this isn't quite the same as the VCR case (as much as Aereo tries to make it so). This would be more like if a company was recording shows off the air onto VCR tapes and mailing them to subscribers. Which is quite a bit different than a user recording shows at home for later viewing.
When I read the summary, I assumed that the customer installed an Aereo box at home and used their own internet connection to stream the content to their iPad. This seems like a clear case of fair use - I should be able to watch my home TV service (even over the air TV) on any device I want. However, what the Aereo service does is host thousands of tiny antennas in a datacenter, and rents an individual antenna to each user, no box at home needed.
Sounds like an interesting attempt to allow rebroadcasting, but I can see why the networks have a problem with it. They don't want someone in San Francisco watching TV (and ads) from New York - it dilutes their ability to sell targeted ads and reduces the value of network affiliates. Ever if Aereo claims to do address verification, there are many ways to get a mailing address in New York, but it would be harder to do that if they required a physical box to be the receiver.
As an American Citizen, I also store my data overseas - I have nothing to hide, but I like to think that it makes it less likely that my data will be swept up in a Megaupload type seizure.
Nope, it's a lot worse to have a patent on a device you make, and sue competitors who do not violate the patent in hopes of putting them out of business with legal fees. Patent trolls may have possibly invalid claims and may be extorting, but Honeywell knows it is filing groundless lawsuits in hopes of crushing competition without having to innovate or compete. Patent trolls just want some money, not to destroy you and bury your corpse.
But is that really what is happening in this case?
A solid state power switching circuit for alternating current loads, in which operating power for the circuit is diverted from the switched current during power stealing intervals self-synchronized with the alternating current waveform. During periods in which current to the load is commanded, a load current switch is maintained in a low impedance state except for the duration of a short power stealing interval each half-cycle of the supplied alternating current. Self-synchronization is achieved with a current detector which senses whether or not the magnitude of the current diverted during each power stealing interval exceeds a current threshold, and pulse generator logic which shifts the power stealing intervals in time relative to the alternating current waveform in response to the previously sensed current magnitude.
Is a an expired patent that provides prior art for this one:
A power stealing system having a switch and a circuit that takes power from equipment to operate control electronics. The system may be such that power stealing occurs while the equipment is not powered to avoid disruption or false signals in the electronics or equipment. The circuit may convey taken power to a storage device. The electronics may be powered by the storage device. The storage device may have a capacitor, a rechargeable battery, a non-chargeable battery, a solar cell, fuel cell, line power, and/or the like.
I'm no patent attorney, but they look completely different to me. One synchronizes with an AC signal to steal power only during part of the waveform, while the other steals power when the powered device isn't currently using it.
Honeywell is known for this type of practice. I remember the last sales rep that came to our office. His statement was along the lines of 'you should just buy from us because we own all the IP. Even if you buy from a distributor or competitor you are still buying from us.'
They want their section of the market and will do anything to keep it.
If they hold legitimate patents to the technology, what else would they be expected to do?
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I found that it's trivial to crack the encryption on Barnes and Nobel Nook books, and I've done so on many of the books I've purchased there. Now I let the books float freely between my Nook and Kindle. There were a few Nook books that I was having trouble decrypting, and it turns out that they were already sold with no DRM - I haven't run across any Amazon books without DRM restrictions.
Conversely, I haven't had success at cracking my Kindle books, so I've stopped buying from Amazon. I try to buy non-DRM books (Google Books is a good source for mainstream books, many of their titles have no DRM, Smashwords is another great source for non-DRM books), but when I can't find a non-DRM title, I buy from B&N since I know I can strip the DRM even though I have no interest in sharing books with anyone, I just want to share them among my own devices.
Police department wants to fight it out in federal court to try and establish their right to steal software? Hmm...
It's possible that the contract is not as clear as Micro Focus makes out it to be and the police department thought they had a site license. Since the police department is willing to fight rather than pay up, it's quite possible that the contract is unclear enough that they could win - if it was really a clear 6500 seat license contract, it's not likely that the police department would pay millions in legal costs to delay an inevitable $10M penalty.
Also note that when Micro Focus started investigating the cops illegal software copying, the cops began deleting the software from a number of systems.
That is willful destruction of evidence of a crime.
Sure, right, because that could have been in no way a move to cease breaking the law by keeping it.
Kind of the same way a drug dealer flushes his goods down the toilet when the police arrive to serve a warrant - he's not destroying evidence, he's just trying to cease breaking the law.
If I open source a mortgage calculator that does an incorrect calculation, does anyone really have the grounds to sue me? After all, they have the source code, and are just as capable as me of finding a mistake in the code. And if they aren't capable of understanding the source, maybe they shouldn't be using it.
You mean like recalling and banning lawn darts because people are too stupid to figure out not to throw them at each other or stand under them when throwing them straight up? Or like all those people that (using your example) listened to their realtors/brokers and couldn't figure out that no they really couldn't afford that house? Or maybe like the guy that just won class action status against Apple because he was too busy to be a parent and use the tools Apple provided so his kid ran up a "large" bill with micro payments?
In the US people will sue over anything and really licenses and agreements mean less than which judge you get and what type of mood they are in that day. I understand and agree with the idea that you shouldn't be able to sign away your rights, but that should be balanced by common sense and responsibility (e.g. it's not the MFGs fault that a dart impaled you if you stood under it).
Yes, interesting examples of the litigious nature of Americans (but I think the lawn dart case had merit - few would expect a toy marketed toward children to have the potential to penetrate a child's skull when the very nature of the game involves tossing the dart in the air so even if used properly such an accident could occur), but do you have examples of an open source software developer was sued (whether successfully or unsuccessfully) when the software he provided for free with no warranty didn't do what it was supposed to?
People often list liability as a potential concern when they open source software, but is that a valid concern? Has any organization been sued because software they released to the world when they don't guarantee that it will do anything useful?
If I open source a mortgage calculator that does an incorrect calculation, does anyone really have the grounds to sue me? After all, they have the source code, and are just as capable as me of finding a mistake in the code. And if they aren't capable of understanding the source, maybe they shouldn't be using it.
Of course!! why didn't anyone think of shared hosting before the cloud came around and saved us? Oh that's right, they did. Good god some of you people are so drawn to buzzwords it's mildly terrifying.
Throughout the history of the web (at least in so far as you were alive and able to operate a computer), you have been able to buy webhosting on shared servers. You call that "cloud", the rest of us call that a data center. The only part that has changed is the marketing.
Yes, shared hosting has been around for ages, and cloud is a new buzzword that largely means the same thing. So what's your point? That terminology changes? Would you feel better if it was called a time-sharing system? Maybe it should be called a batch-processing system, since what is a web request but a very small batch where the punch cards are replaced by HTTP?
Of course, Cloud means more than simple shared hosting (like Amazon's EC2), it also means dynamic resource allocation (i.e. Google's App Engine) that lets your app scale to use as many resources as it needs without any work from you.
If the energy costs are similar or more, then it doesn't matter. Greenpeace doesn't care about equipment cost or deployment cost. It's 100% energy. Theoretically, the energy cost should be similar between cloud and non-cloud. However, server farms a single point of energy purchase with the potential to greatly reduce the amount of energy coming from fossil fuels. Therefore, focusing on cloud data centers and trying to reduce their fossil fuel intake has a high impact potential over trying to get each tiny company to find alternative sources of energy.
That's the point - by having Amazon's Cloud service available and cheap, I dramatically cut my energy use. If Greenpeace forces them to use more expensive power, they may not be so cheap anymore.
My website may need only 3 servers to run it. However, since I don't want any single point of failure to take down my site, if I build out my own server infrastructure, I need 6 servers, 2 firewalls, 2 network switches, 2 load balancers, one SAN storage array (with dual controllers), with at least 5 disks (or maybe I skip the SAN and use discrete disk drives - maybe 20 drives spread across the 6 servers. (2, 2, 6 times 2). And I have redundant UPS's to power it all. And redundant cooling.
While if I build it on Amazon's cloud, I just need to spin up a few virtual servers. For redundancy, I have duplicate servers in another availability zone (or region). Since my website is idle most of the day, I use a fraction of a physical machine. Likewise, my disk storage uses some tiny fraction of Amazon's SAN. I use their network firewall and load balancers, again just a fraction of a piece of hardware.
I think Greenpeace is missing the environmental benifit of the Cloud.
When I want to deploy my website, I can either purchase a SAN and a half dozen servers plus network gear to run it, or I can deploy to Amazon or some other cloud provider where I'm running on the same shared hardware as many other customers.
Computing, HPC computing, and data center housing are the most Green industries on the planet.
Every year, every generation, every iteration of hardware is faster than the last. Every new product does more computations than the last, often with the same or less power.
EVERY company that has anything to do with computing has a direct interest in reducing power consumption. It drives lower power bills, longer battery lifves, or materials saved due to smaller thermal envelopes, and increased capabilities.
The power cost per computation shrinks at a shocking rate, with gains not seen in any other industry, ever.
Green peace, if anything, should be up in arms about the industries that thirst for computational power and computer resources. That party would be programmers. They drive the consumption of resources, not the hardware makers or the data warehouse managers.
Doesn't that also lead to more waste as last year's computers are discarded and replaced? And computer production isn't exactly an activity with low environmental impact - a large amount of energy and many toxic chemicals are used to create computers (and further energy and chemicals are used to recover useful materials when computers are recycled).
I still drive my 12 year old car, but my Celeron 533 and Athlon 800 (both released in 2000) have long been relegated to the scrap heap (along with motherboards, memory, disk drives, etc)
I quit BBSes because they only had a range of ~100 miles (the local area code). I was involved in HAM for a while but quit for the same reason. Nowadays with the internet my voice or text can reach the whole world.
Well your voice or text can reach the whole world that's not blocked by their country's (or your own) firewall.
But, living in earthquake country, I became a ham so my voice can be heard even if local communications infrastructure has been destroyed. And through ARES, I can help others.
It has been on my geek “bucket list” for many years to get my license. This story and a recent job change are just the motivation I needed to finally do it.
Now that the there's no Morse requirement, getting a tech license is trivial - any geek can do it with a couple hours glancing over a study guide. Most of the "technical" questions are common sense to anyone with a bit of electrical knowledge, so you just have to familiarize yourself with things that need to be memorized like license restrictions, power limits on various bands, etc.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+can+make+an+FM+radio+transmitter%3F+
Why not have the pilots take their naps in a separate bunk near the crew compartment. It gives them better rest, and the act of climbing out of the bunk and walking to the cockpit gives them time to help shake off the grogginess.
Or is it better to have them sleep in their seats so they are immediately ready to step in if needed?
They claim a 20 year lifetime at 4 hours/day, but how bright will it be after 20 years? LED's reduce their light output over time, and the end of life is based on some loss of brightness (30% loss?), so that 60 watt bulb may be more like a 40 watt bulb by the end of its lifetime. And based on previous LED lights I've seen, I'm skeptical that it's really equivalent in brightness to a 60 watt incandescent bulb in the first place.
The technology just wasn't there to create an very usable iPhone like device in 1991. The first Palme (the Palm 1000) was released in 1996 (at $299 each). The data-enabled Palm VII didn't come out until 1999 (at a cost of $599 + $15/month and data was super slow)
The Newton was released in 1993 and it while it was innovative for the time, was large and clunky and few would say that it was "iPhone like".
And none of these devices had a phone built-in which would have made them bigger and more expensive. In 1991 my portable cell phone came in a small bag to make it portable (between cars, it's not something I'd take to the movies).
I have to ask at 1000 Gbps are your hard drives even able to write that fast ? That's 125 Gigabytes per second, 500 MB/s is pretty good for an SSD. Also, what are you doing that requires that kind of speed?
We have 8 blade servers with SSDs, each blade keeps most data in DDR3.
What are we doing? Medical and statistical research. You should see some of the protein folding units.
DDR3-1600 will give you a peak transfer rate of around 13GB/second. You can get higher throughput by interleaving across banks, but the Xeon 7560 (for example) will peak at around 15GB/sec
PCIe Gen-3 x8 will deliver around 8GB/second.
The fastest interconnect I've seen on a blade chassis has 10Gbit ports.
Are you sure that "1000 Gbps is considered normal here"?
Thank you for reminding me why I love living in Dallas.
I'm living in a 1500 sq. ft., 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath, 2 story townhouse for about $1130/month.
California can go fuck itself.
I think you're confusing San Francisco with California. They aren't synonymous.
If you want Dallas prices, you can always live in Fresno.
However, if you did live in San Francisco, the difference in salary can help make up the difference. I looked at a job in Houston but the cut in pay was double the reduction in housing cost.
Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?
Sure I do: it is the difference between a talented baker making a couple dozen cookies in their home, and a talented baker running their own bakery. What the broadcasters want to do is stifle the growth of an innovative business, because they lack the creativity and talent needed to deploy innovative technologies on their own. Do you really think that killing an innovative business is a good thing?
Streaming content to end-users is neither innovative nor creative - Netflix and others have been doing it for years.
The creative thing that they did is finding a way to do an end-run around the need to license the content for redistribution. And the networks are trying to close this loophole. This service sounds a lot like the defunct iCraveTV that tried to stream over the air broadcasts from Canada.
Is the content distribution model broken? Yes. I don't want to pay a cable company $100/month (or more) to get 200 channels of mostly crap just to watch the few shows I care about. Is Aereo going to change it? No. Netflix has much deeper pockets and a lot more clout in this area and they still have a very limited streaming catalog.
So if I have an antenna at my house, that's fine, but if it is at your house then there is a problem? What?
This is a clear-cut case of one business trying to destroy the competition through frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the court system. The broadcasters are just angry that they were not innovative enough to develop such a system on their own. When Aereo is sued into bankruptcy, the broadcasters will buy up all the patents and trade secrets and try to deploy their own version of this system.
Since the Slingbox is still sold, apparently the networks and cable companies do make a distinction between you hosting a box at home (or even a friend's house), and having a commercial company host thousands of them and then charging a fee for access to the content. Do you really see no difference between the two?
But I probably can set up a proxy server so that my friend can get to your content through my connection. This is no different from me running a coax wire from my antenna to my neighbor so that only one of us has to have a butt-ugly mast antenna outside to get the signal. I can probably charge them for the connection as well, since it's charging for a wire, not the data on the wire.
Perhaps in theory it's no different than sharing a physical cable, but in practice it is much different -- unless your neighbor literally lives next door, you can't run a cable to him without negotiating a right-of-way through other neighbor's yards or public easements. So anything requiring physical wiring is self-limiting, it won't be done on a large scale. Which is not the case when you're dealing with a virtual service.
I thought this battle had been fought and won in the VCR times.
Since they are rebroadcasting from a central location, this isn't quite the same as the VCR case (as much as Aereo tries to make it so). This would be more like if a company was recording shows off the air onto VCR tapes and mailing them to subscribers. Which is quite a bit different than a user recording shows at home for later viewing.
When I read the summary, I assumed that the customer installed an Aereo box at home and used their own internet connection to stream the content to their iPad. This seems like a clear case of fair use - I should be able to watch my home TV service (even over the air TV) on any device I want. However, what the Aereo service does is host thousands of tiny antennas in a datacenter, and rents an individual antenna to each user, no box at home needed.
Sounds like an interesting attempt to allow rebroadcasting, but I can see why the networks have a problem with it. They don't want someone in San Francisco watching TV (and ads) from New York - it dilutes their ability to sell targeted ads and reduces the value of network affiliates. Ever if Aereo claims to do address verification, there are many ways to get a mailing address in New York, but it would be harder to do that if they required a physical box to be the receiver.
As an American Citizen, I also store my data overseas - I have nothing to hide, but I like to think that it makes it less likely that my data will be swept up in a Megaupload type seizure.
Nope, it's a lot worse to have a patent on a device you make, and sue competitors who do not violate the patent in hopes of putting them out of business with legal fees. Patent trolls may have possibly invalid claims and may be extorting, but Honeywell knows it is filing groundless lawsuits in hopes of crushing competition without having to innovate or compete. Patent trolls just want some money, not to destroy you and bury your corpse.
But is that really what is happening in this case?
For example, Nest claims that this patent:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5736795.PN.&OS=PN/5736795&RS=PN/5736795
A solid state power switching circuit for alternating current loads, in which operating power for the circuit is diverted from the switched current during power stealing intervals self-synchronized with the alternating current waveform. During periods in which current to the load is commanded, a load current switch is maintained in a low impedance state except for the duration of a short power stealing interval each half-cycle of the supplied alternating current. Self-synchronization is achieved with a current detector which senses whether or not the magnitude of the current diverted during each power stealing interval exceeds a current threshold, and pulse generator logic which shifts the power stealing intervals in time relative to the alternating current waveform in response to the previously sensed current magnitude.
Is a an expired patent that provides prior art for this one:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7476988.PN.&OS=PN/7476988&RS=PN/7476988
A power stealing system having a switch and a circuit that takes power from equipment to operate control electronics. The system may be such that power stealing occurs while the equipment is not powered to avoid disruption or false signals in the electronics or equipment. The circuit may convey taken power to a storage device. The electronics may be powered by the storage device. The storage device may have a capacitor, a rechargeable battery, a non-chargeable battery, a solar cell, fuel cell, line power, and/or the like.
I'm no patent attorney, but they look completely different to me. One synchronizes with an AC signal to steal power only during part of the waveform, while the other steals power when the powered device isn't currently using it.
Honeywell is known for this type of practice. I remember the last sales rep that came to our office. His statement was along the lines of 'you should just buy from us because we own all the IP. Even if you buy from a distributor or competitor you are still buying from us.'
They want their section of the market and will do anything to keep it.
If they hold legitimate patents to the technology, what else would they be expected to do?