Slashdot Mirror
Microbroadcasting Summer Camp
ScottGant writes "Wired has this
story about Steven Dunifer and his four-day Radio Summer Camps sponsored by Free Radio Berkeley that offers how-tos for building transmitters and antennas, along with advice on handling any FCC agents that might come knocking. Imagine this: A thousand little stations send radio programming across cities and towns from senior centers, dorm rooms and attics. The understaffed FCC would be powerless to shut them down. Audiences would have substantive content choices. No one would tune into Top-40 radio. And the media moguls would slink back into their caves. The FCC and Big Radio are obviously paying attention to the microbroadcasters -- it was
pressure from independent broadcasters that forced the FCC to grant a limited number of low-power, or LPFM, radio licenses to community organizations, a decision that the NAB resisted. Are these Pirates or Patriots?"
It makes money because people listen to it, people liten to it because they like it, like it or not, the average "slashdotter" music is the same as the average "rebel student magazine music ed" music - total crap.
Of course we should dismantle the EPA! What the hell have they done to "save" the ozone layer? Nothing at all. They banned CFCs, but did that make the ozone layer healthier? If you believe them, it has only gotten worse. However, if you listen to climatologists, the latest ideas are that the "hole" over Antarctica has been there for a very long time, and we only discovered it in the 1960s and 70s when we began studying it from satellites. It appears to be a seasonal phenomenon, changing in size all the time. Sometimes it's big, sometimes it's small, but it may have been doing this for centuries.
The EPA is just a tax-sucking bureaucracy that can hardly demonstrate any accomplishments of their own. At least the FCC claims to be keeping the airwaves "clean" by scolding CBS, Bono and Janet Jackson for talking dirty and flashing boobs.