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Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy
js7a writes "The New America Foundation has published The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy (pdf). An excellent 14 page guide that everyone should print a few copies of to have handy in the backpack or car. Learn what would happen if the government regulated speech the same way they regulate airwaves. Learn the truth about microbroadcasting, smart radio, and so-called intererence (all previously covered on Slashdot.) Learn more creative ways to tell Congress to stop giving away public resources to private corporations. Make the most of your rights to use unlicensed wireless, before it's too late."
These guys just don't get it.
Loud speakers are regulated too. Tonight at midnight local time, go out to your car, open the windows, and turn up the radio as loud as it will go. Cops will be visiting you shortly for distrubing the piece. See, you need a license if you're going to speak so loudly such that your sound is going to travel beyond your property and/or personal area.
These are just outlandish comparisions that don't hold water...
These are just outlandish comparisions that don't hold water...
As opposed to outlandish bullshit that is totally off topic.
The FCC needs to regulate the air waves. Given, they do go a bit far in some cases. What if they did not? Personally, I would not like to be driving down the road listening to some nice music on the radio only to have it interrupted by death metal or the sounds of porn. That 802.11a/b/g connection you are using would be a whole hell of a lot less secure and reliable if they did not regulate.
We've seen this several times along the campaign trail this year, and we're likely to see it several more. Try interrupting a candidate by yelling anything while he's trying to speak, and you're going to get thrown out of the venue.
See, the owners of the venue have the right to decide who gets to speak on their property, and to throw out the people they don't want there.
...this pdf looks like a japanese VCR user's manual?
This sort of thing is the best way to get something through to the public. What's more likely to get people interested: pages of plain text or a comic strip?
Norml have some excellent comics which do exactly the same thing: put across an issue in an interesting way.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Not sure what a few copies of this in the back of your car would do? Maybe you can hand it out with candy at your local school. It doesn't add to any debate, it provides no support for its assertations and propagates myths.
Not helpful
That PDB made me stupider.
your loud speaker can't be heard fifty miles away, and your whispering can't be intercepted or interefere with everyone within a few blocks of your location. Left out that minor detail. It's all a matter of scale.
Everybody has the right to transmit on the FM radio band!
What, you don't believe me? Just go to your local Best Buy or Circuit City location and look at the iPod accessories. You'll see several models of battery powered FM transmitters. Yep, you can plug those into to your iPod and go, no FCC license required, but batteries are not included.
Of course, the catch is that it has to comply with some pretty low power limits but that's the point. You're only allowed to affect the radios in your immediate area, not to set up a major broadcaster that'd interfere with the already licensed stations.
See, everybody else has the right to hear what the licenced transmitters are putting out, and your right to broadcast falls when it comes into contact with their right to recieve.
What happens when I decide to be an asshole about it? Say you are happily using your WiFi connection at home, along with others in the neighbourhood. You are happier still since there is no power restriction, so you've cranked it a bit and it reaches all corners of your house.
Then I come along and decide that I don't like you all, for whatever reason. So I build a transmitter that operates on the WiFi band, but spews noise with 2000 watts of power through a massive antenna. Suddenly your WiFi is worthless. However there's nothing you can do, since there's no regulation. What I'm doing is legal, though assinie.
We have to share the airwaves just like we have to share roads. As we've found out all through history, you need rules when people have to share something or some assholes will abuse it. Hence, regulations on the airwaves.
I'm not saying they are perfect and need to changes, but they ARE necessary.
Are you mods even reading the article? The entire cartoon guide works on a comparison between achoustic transmissions (rock concerts, conversations, etc.) and radio transmissions.
In that light, the poster's response is a perfectly valid critique of one of the assertions of this cartoon guide.
Don't go modding people "Offtopic" if you don't even know what the topic is!
I read an article a few years ago that said that Italy allows anyone to open a radio or tv station that wishes to do so.
According to the article the results were pretty interesting. An enormous choice of things to listen to, some with really limited interest to most of us. One example the article gave was a 24 hour Hare Krishna station broadcasting nothing but chanting 24 hours a day.
I've long wished that the same rights were available in the U.S. If the law was changed tomorrow, I'd be in the market tomorrow for the equipment to set up my own radio station. If it could reach 20 miles, I'd be happy.
There is a typo in page 16 (page 10 of the pdf file.
Humans can hear frequencies from 20 Hz to 20 kHz
not 20 kHz to 20000 kHz.
The 0 kHz in the radio makes me think somebody typoed all "Hz" words to "kHz".
Sounds like they are finally reaching out to Dubya!
Regulating air waves? For what? I thought radios work with electromagnetic waves..
Hell, they should try to regulate ocean waves too.
Here's a little tidbit of knowledge for you folks:
Modern FM receivers work by mixing a beat frequency with the frequency you want to receive. You wind up with (a+b) and (a-b), one of which is trivially filtered out with a high (or low) pass filter.
Now there's a nice, simple, standard design (and corresponding set of chips) for handling FM at a particular frequency. So given your target frequency (a), you can choose a beat frequency (b) such that (a-b) matches the standard chip frequency.
For standard US FM radio, that beat (b) frequency is right in the middle of the aircraft band.
Aircraft use AM for their comm gear.
So your little FM walkman receiver can jam air-to-ground comms.
That's a RECEIVER! Once you get into transmitters, it's really easy to jam everything around for miles. Not only on your frequency, which may be quite wide, but also on all the harmonics.
Take it from someone who used to jam his little brother's radio reception. "Turn it down or I turn it OFF!"
Off topic but (Score:0, Offtopic)
You think??? Thanks for reminding me. Maybe it would've help if I linked to what I was talknig about?? Probably not. Ah, well. Life in the big city.
The problem with the EM transmission spectrum is not licensed use vs. unlicensed use. It is the fact that EM bandwidth is not ownable. Essentially, the federal government claims ownership over the whole spectrum, and doles it out in bits and pieces via licensing and FCC enforcement actions.
Don't reform the FCC. Auction off frequencies, with permanent ownership rights, to the public!
"This quote is a product of the Frobozz Magic Quote Company."
I agree with the overall message that the FCC should allow more free spectrum. If we look at the proliferation of devices on 2.4 and 5.8, we can see the sucess of the unlicense space versuse the licensed space. Anyone want to bet where more money is flowing through? If we took down 2.4 and 5.8, would the economy suffer more than if we took down any other two spectrums?
Free Willy!
Voice would be regulated too if you could be heard 70 miles away whenever you talked.
Obviously the person who did this is does not have any grasp on the realities. Audible freqencies go from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Different frequencies propogate differently at different times of the day on different modes. There *is* science behind the current regulations. They should take a couple of classes at a JC and smarten up before making any more "cartoons."
One error popped out while I was reading it. In the section near the end on failures of the analogy, it lists the human hearing range as 20-20,000kHz. That should be Hz, not kHz. Right next to that they list the usable EM spectrum as 0Hz-30GHz. I've never seen a radio that could tune below 10kHz.
No, a properly written article on the benefits and draw backs of liscencing the airwaves would have been better - using frank and somewhat comical analogies is fine, but keep it real. This whole comic is just a bunch of "OMG THE GOVERMENT OWNS OUR AIR" crap, very light on facts and counter-arguments.
Like a wireless network instead of 'broadcasting' which is outdated. Broadcasting is old school and is a waste of time. We need a public longdistance wifi network.
Last I heard the military is losing out to commercial interests as well. They're losing out on new freqs for expanded comms and radar to commercial interests. Main reason...government agencies are forbidden to lobby other government agencies. In the end the military is fighting for the scraps as well since they can't "contribute" (cough, cough) to the FCC's decision making process the way corporations can.
How recently is this guy talking about? Will the radio in my '92 Acura be able to work like that? What about even older devices? Or would the recommended policy make all those radios obsolete?
I'm generally against overuse of government power, but it seems the new technology has to fully overtake the old technology before the government changes their policy.
Or maybe this is a dumbed down version of the argument and I'm missing something.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Don't reform the FCC. Auction off frequencies, with permanent ownership rights, to the public!
Oh, for fuck's sake, do we have to apply the property meme to every fucking thing humanity discovers?
Shiny rock? Mine! Sexy mate? Mine! Territory? Mine! Land between fences? Mine! Prisoners of War? Mine! Novel? Mine! Audio recording? Mine! Right to build a telephone? Mine and mine alone!
OBEY, proles. I own all.
Et cetera.
"The line must be drawn here!"
- Captain Jean-Luc Picard
Abolishment of private property might be a bit extreme, but can we please stop inventing new forms of it? It's not benefitting anyone.
None of the great innovations, discoveries, or achievements in human history were made for material gain.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
> Here is a primer on spread spectrum.
Key word being primer.
Look, Spread Spectrum isn't a magik nostrum to solve all ills. It makes it harder to actually intercept the signal but it raises the noise floor across the band it is operating on. Get enough devices operating and the noise floor comes up and smacks you. Toss the regulations and everyone starts cranking up the outpower and that floor will hit you pretty damned fast unless YOU crank up your power, which means your neighbors have to up THEIR power to overcome your contribution to the noise level, spiral out of control to madness.
Fact: Spectrum is not an infinite resource.
Fact: Spectrum, like every other finite public resource will be allocated in some fashion.
Discussing whether the current bandplan is sensible in the age of WiFi and other emerging technologies is a different debate, one I would love to get into; however there isn't much point of trying that in this thread:
1. This cartoon is a bunch of propaganda from some corporate consortium wanting to SELL lots of small RF devices who managed to tool some leftist think tank to make their arguments for them in terms of anti-corporatism. Kinda silly if you think about it. But with that sort of red meat hanging, the "down with authority" crowd is going to be out in force on this article.
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
Democrat delenda est
There's a variety of economic and practical reasons why you would never do such a thing. Even assuming you could get a 2000W transmitter for free, you'd still spend nearly $400 a month on electricity to run the thing assuming 50% efficiency and $0.13/kwh electricity. With 2000w into a high gain antenna at wifi frequencies, you'd also have all sorts of issues with microwave heating and could very well cause yourself personal injury or death due to rf burns.
Actually, you Do have a right to heckle and the candidate has a right to remove you. One could argue though that if enough people heckle a given candidate, and enough people are thrown out; eventually the public takes notice of the hecklers. The airwave hecklers are never given that notice. The people who would bring the truth of the hecklers words to the people are the very media people who order the hecklers thrown out of the "hall".
Note to media and telecom companies: you don't own the airwaves. You rent them from us at our sufferance. What this cartoon suggests is that the low-power, high-frequency spectrum should be ours.
Yes, yes I know, bad analogy. This is Slashdot. Deal with it.
1) The right to say something offensive to somebody before they beat your ass. You're protected under the law as a victim of the crime of battery, but the perp didn't violate your free speech rights.
2) The right to say something at work that gets you fired. Your employer has no obligation to let you say anything you want. They have the right to put their own best interests first with regard to your speech.
3) And yes, the right to broadcast on radio and television. It's not a right, it's a privilege. More about that in a moment.
So, what is this mysterious freedom of speech that people talk about all the time? Well, it's hard for many Americans (most westerners, actually) to understand what it really means, because we've never known anything else. Well, like calling President Bush an idiot, for example. You're allowed to do that. You won't get shot or thrown in jail for saying it. You're allowed to say basicaly anything you want to and the federal government can't come after you for it, with some obvious exceptions:
1) If you suggest that you're going to harm the President or anybody else under Secret Service protection.
2) If you call in a bomb threat or any other kind of threat.
3) If you lie to an investigator or in a court of law
Now, back to the topic at hand. It's probably a great idea, now that radios are getting good enough to distinguish the signal they want from the signal they don't want. Of course, you can't really expect the government to jump on this development immediately. One great thing about radio is that it's really backward compatible. You can still use radios from many decades ago and they work just fine.
The part where I get upset is when people get upset about evil corporations buying the airwaves. Yes, the FCC has had some pretty crappy decisions in the last 15 years or so about their ownership rules, allowing companies like Clear Channel and Cox to reallly build major empires. But it's not a free speech violation. We do not and have never had any right to broadcast on public airwaves within certain frequencies. The reason for this is that those frequences are not unlimited. In fact, they're quite limited. So they are a public trust and must be regulated by the government. Don't like it? Go invent something better.
RP
Oh man. That was funny.
Let me know when you get out in the real world and realize that humanity's second greatest motivator ever is greed, second only to sex.
Don't reform the FCC. Auction off frequencies, with permanent ownership rights, to the public!
In case you haven't noticed, that's close to what the FCC does already. Guess what: if you did that, one large company will own all the frequencies and nobody would be able to do anything.
from their site "The Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum."
...after all, for all we know, next month they'll get hired by neo-nazis and start promoting death camps and slavery!
and they're funded by "public intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." Although if these "intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." are so public, why don't they want to publicly put their names to this organisation.
It seems to me that they're a professional political lobbyists - guns for hire, if you will - but who pays their wages? I don't like the idea of raising the profile of an organisation without knowing exactly who they are...
--
Astronomers have radio telescopes that are extremely sensitive. Some areas of the frequency spectrum are more interesting than others (those that can pass through the ionosphere, for example). So let's pretend these scientists are dogs with hearing so acute that someone blowing an ultrasonic dog whistle 1000s of miles away is painful, or hides the sounds made by rare pelagic squirrels. They're glad ultrasonic whistles are banned but willing to tolerate whistles at other frequencies.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Remember this people, if you live in the states, you can tell police officers to mind their own damn business. Or at least you could when Clinton was in office. If a cop comes to your house and starts harrassing you, unless they have a WARRANT you can slam the door in their face. DO NOT LET THEM IN WITHOUT A WARRANT.
New America foundation is centrist my ass. More like neoconservative libertarians. Centrists are moderate and look for consensus. I don't see that here. I always considered myself a moderate liberal, and now they are saying they are centrist. Apparently their "centrism" can drive a moderate liberal crazy.
This sort of thing is the best way to get something through to the public. What's more likely to get people interested: pages of plain text or a comic strip?
Government-funded PSAs on TV about internet spam and scams would work.
Whoever wrote this needs to get a clue! If everyone was allowed to broadcast on whatever whenever wherever they want, there'd be chaos. It seems the author has a utopian outlook about this, which just won't ever happen.
Spectrum regulation does not have to be all-or-nothing. There can be heavily regulated sections and non-regulated sections (as long as you broadcast within the specified non-regulated range).
Some applications of radio/TV/ephones work better for pre-defined bands and some work better under free-for-all.
Let's have ranges set aside for some of each and let the market-place decide which they will choose.
Table-ized A.I.
With all the new uses of radio waves coming, won't we be bombarded by too much radiation? If every frequency just about is being used, that must mean a lot of electron particles flying through the air and through our brains and asses. (Please no jokes about goatse sitting on a cell phone.) How far are we from dangerous levels at this time?
Table-ized A.I.
... is never a good thing.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Hahah! What are you smoking sir?
o gID=17
http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=program&Pr
This is hardly nerconservative libertarians (never heard of such of thing anyway).
New America's Universal Health Insurance Program has four primary components:
National Policy Research
In its first two years, the Program will publish an integrated series of ten major policy papers, which will collectively lay the intellectual foundation for a system of mandatory but privately administered insurance coverage
Hah, what are *you* smoking? Mandatory doesn't mean state-funded, it means you have to buy private health insurance or you will go to jail for tax fraud. In other words, the government is forcing you to buy from a private company. That's not centrist, that's corporatist. "Most of the uninsured are members of the middle class; a third have annual incomes of more than $50,000. Requiring them to devote up to a certain percentage of their income to purchasing basic coverage would be imposing a significant, though not ruinous, financial burden -- but they themselves would be the primary beneficiaries. "
Property rights ARE precisely necessary to prevent the tragedy of the commons. Since the spectrum is a shared resource, it makes sense for it to be regulated by a public authority (government).
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
:D
I bet people don't borrow your CDs much
Wow! I have never seen such a stupid document before! Even in hospitals and schoools :) It looks like it was designed for little kids only. Are authors serious or just kidding?
Nowhere close. Radio waves cannot effect electronic transitions in DNA. Period. At that point, it has to be a massive radiation density argument, and the W/m2 created by radio transmission isn't even in the ballpark.
This is one thing that doesn't cause cancer, regardless of what the talking heads on the news would lead you to believe in the name of ratings.
I am not saying you are wrong, but please tell me, how do you reconcile your statements with the FCC warning on every transmitter that (paraphrased) "This device does not emit anything, but must accept any interference caused by other devices." ?
If every radio in fact emitted radio waves, even if only to weakly mix with existing strong signals but enough to interfere with the plane, why would this statement exist?
I tried googling for this without success, but there was an article on Slashdot about this very subject a while back, where a company developed a highway billboard which would detect what radio station you're listening to and track the results. It does this using the method you've described -- detect the base frequency that radios are emitting.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
What conceiveable reason would anyone have for jamming a frequency being used for emergency communication? ;)
He's a terrorist. Make him wear an orange jumpsuit. Oh yeah, and send him to Guantanamo, too, for great justice.
Free as in mason.
Human hearing is 20Hz - 20 KHz.
"humanity's second greatest motivator ever is greed, second only to sex"
What makes you think the two are differnt?
De sig boss de sig
What is "the tragedy of the commons"?
See this page for a listing of the FCC EMC rules.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If the court grants you immunity, you do have to testify. The grant of immunity precludes you from claiming that your testimony might incriminate you. You then have the choice of testifying or being found in contempt of court.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Modern FM receivers work by mixing a beat frequency with the frequency you want to receive.
You wind up with (a+b) and (a-b), one of which is trivially filtered out with a high (or low) pass filter.
Sorry but this is incomplete. This discribe both Amplitude Modulation and Frequency Modulation. The difference between the two is how the mixed frequency behaves. The carrier ( beat ) frequency is also filtered. This is done to save "space" on the bandwidth.
Now there's a nice, simple, standard design (and corresponding set of chips) for handling FM at a particular frequency. So given your target frequency (a), you can choose a beat frequency (b) such that (a-b) matches the standard chip frequency.
Close but: Only the mixed frequency is send. In order to "de-mix" it the receiver has to generate the right carrier. Whitout it the reciver cannot unscramble the mixed frequencies. The audio signal ( the result ) is a known value that is always the same regardless of the broadcasting station.( 0 to 15 KHz for example ) When you change your radio station, what you are doing is changing the value of the receiver's frequency generator so that the de demixer can extract the 0-15K range from the received signal. The key here is that you receiver is actually generating the "missing" carrier. Thus emmiting, but with no antenna to speak of nor power to go far.
For standard US FM radio, that beat (b) frequency is right in the middle of the aircraft band.
I doubt that very much. The primary objective of such regulations is to prevent this from happening.
Aircraft use AM for their comm gear.
I haven't look into it but this makes sens because the FM would be subject to the doppler effect. Note however that the AM band reserved to plane communications is not the same as the one for broadcasting commercial radio signal.
So your little FM walkman receiver can jam air-to-ground comms.
Possible in theory, because your receiver is generating a frequency. But in reality, for this to happen, you reciever would have to generate a wave of sufficient strenght to parasite AG communications. This require factors such as frequency, antenna and power level to be right. The idea behind the regulations is to insure that these factors don't match by accident. Your walkman can get the frequency right, but it lack a good antenna and would be destroyed by the power level required.
That's a RECEIVER! Once you get into transmitters, it's really easy to jam everything around for miles. Not only on your frequency, which may be quite wide, but also on all the harmonics.
Believe me, if you were jamming everything for miles, a bunch a people in suits would be knocking at your door.
Take it from someone who used to jam his little brother's radio reception. "Turn it down or I turn it OFF!"
Oooo! That's... Why that's... EVIL! I like it.
Let me explain. It was an argument used to discredit the idea of collective ownership and control of resources. The parable goes, villagers had a common plot of land that everyone could graze their animals on. No one person stood to benefit from conserving, so everyone overgrazed the common land. Contrast that to private ownership: where one person owns the land, they benefit more by not overgrazing.
The people who held the land in common were just DUMB! Plenty of societies manage public resources well. Fire departments, police, roads, and parks, for example. Plenty of private owners utterly destroy the resource they own, simply taking the profits and moving on to exploit someplace else. The poor schmucks with the common grazing land were DOUBLY DUMB if they bought the rich guy's story and let him buy all their publicly held resources out from under them. I know our city zoo has gone to absolute hell after they privatized it. Try getting water in the third world from the newly privatized systems. Tragedy of the commons, my ass. Tragedy of overprivatization and lack of accountability is more like it.
But hey, at least this rich guy used a story. Throughout most of history they have simply used goons.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Here in Europe, you do have the possibility to get licenses for "local" radio for free. The only rule is very low transmission power. This is for instance used by university radio stations (which only cover campus and surroundings) or other hobbyist stations.
Or at least you could when Clinton was in office.
Makes sense, he did indeed give the best example of this himself. Not merely lying to an investigator, but to the court itself, while under oath!
you can tell police officers to mind their own damn business.
Which is a different matter altogether than lying. Withholding information != Giving false information. Had Clinton just taken the fifth, there would never have been any controversy.
unless they have a WARRANT you can slam the door in their face.
But be sure that it doesn't touch their nose, or they'll come after you for "assault against a policeman"
This country is being sold out to buy advertising on public airwaves. It's stupid that our products are more expensive and our politicians less honest to pay for 30 second political ads that are barely informative and, because time is precious on tv and radio, try mostly to appeal to our reptilian instincts. This has got to stop. We need to give free airtime to political candidates.
They do the same mistakes as usual:
They assume that if somewhone is shouting at the same time that somebody is whispering, the shouting will always be louder. But if you are far away from the shouter, who you whant to listen to, a whispering conversation close to you may easily drown the shouter.
And in the case of listening, everybody has roughly the same sensitivity. But in the case of radio transmission, it is a very large difference between an astronomical radio telescope with a 70 m parabolic dish and an FM radio for $5. How is the smart radio going to make sure that the silent frequency it has found is not a just barely discernable signal from mars? With regulation, this is not a problem. Whithout...
Oh, for fuck's sake, do we have to apply the property meme to every fucking thing humanity discovers?
that's the whole point!
the whole thing is about property! public versus private!
the lack of regulation of whispering represents the "public property" argument, and the argument for regulation suggests that the notion of "private property" is applicable
what's interesting about this, is that this sort of argument only exists in the context of (relatively) new technology... land, for instance, is something we would never argue about... we'd argue about protection for those lands *regulated* as public, but no one, and let me repeat, no one, is going around claiming "since this land was here before we were, it is necessarily public domain and therefore should not be regulate by government or some "property meme"
They like people who chat and use mobile phones in cinemas and concerts. They chose a rock concert rather than a Beethoven symphony to illustrate though (hint: dynamic range).
They don't like bus lanes/car-pool lanes, and the ability for fire engines to go "wheeoh" and everyone else to pull off to the side of the road to let them get past.
None of the great innovations, discoveries, or achievements in human history were made for material gain.
It all depends on what you consider "great", but here are some examples:
The airplane.
The telegraph.
The radio.
The transistor.
The integrated circuit.
Metal working.
Domesticated animals.
Agriculture.
Steam power.
I think that's enough.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
He was reffering to applying a "property meme" to everything. Which of those would not have happened without being someone's exclusive "property"? Note that I am not reffering to any physical object making up the things you listed - for example a steam-operated object would be someone's property. I am reffering to the notion of calling steam-power itself "property".
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You are doing exactly what he said NOT to do, slapping a stupid "property meme" on everything.
the lack of regulation of whispering represents the "public property" argument
Whispering is not PROPERTY.
The act of shaking something back and forth 100 times per second is not property. When I talk to someone, am I somehow using "public property" of "shaking something back and forth 100 times per second"? No, that's absurd. Shaking something 100 times per second is not property.
If I were to shaking a huge speaker back and forth 100 times per second in public generating a volume of 200-odd decibels, I'd certainly be breaking the law. Hell, it could even kill someone. But it has nothing to do with property.
Copyrights can be good and beneficial, but they are not property. Patents can be good and beneficial, but they are not property. Trademarks can be good and benefical, but they are not property. Trying to apply a property meme to shaking something at a certain frequency is even more absurd.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
en tea.
the "beat frequency" he's talking about isn't the frequency used as a carrier to decode the FM, it's the intermediate frequency used in a super-het FM radio.
Here's the deal: Say I want to be able to demodulate FM from 80 MHz to 110 MHz. Do I build a bunch of demodulators that can each demod a single FM station? That would be expensive, so I build a single FM receiver, and I multiply the incoming transmission by a variable frequency, and tune the variable frequency such that the signal I want to receive is mixed down (by the multiplication) to the frequency my FM receiver is built for.
Wait, I said "mixed down to." Why wouldn't some of them be mixed up to the frequency of the receiver, and some of them mixed down? In general, for a fixed bandwidth (all FM stations have an identical bandwidth, just different center frequency), the higher the frequency, the more expensive the equipment. So to cut costs, our FM receiver doesn't operate anywhere near the FM band, it'll be way lower.
I don't know what center frequency the radio manufacturer will build the receiever to, but let's just guess that it would be 10 MHz. So, if I want to listen to 101.5 FM, which operates around 101.5 MHz, my variable frequency would have to be set to the difference, which is 81.5 MHz.
The grandparent is sugesting that the variable frequency used by most FM receivers varies over a range that interferes with air-ground transmissions. Now, your receiver isn't trying to broadcast anything, but when you build devices with radio-frequency currents running through them, the energies have a habit of wandering of the circuit, and you have to work really hard to prevent all leaks.
See For a New Liberty: The New Libertarian Manifesto -- Personal Liberty. Murray N. Rothbard. Search for "Freedom of Radio and Television"
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This is not a new problem.
As long as Congresspersons can be bribed by "campaign contributions", they will give away public resources to private corporations. Doesn't matter what the resource is. Look at the history of giving water rights to agribusiness in the western USA over the past century.
You talk about how dumbing down the level of intellectual discourse is a bad thing, and then you go on to quote Homer Simpson?
Ok there, buddy...
I got the impression that much of the pamphlet was aimed at promoting underground/pirate radio vs. the current rules that make such activity illegal.
Let the FCC regulate low-power broadcasting. Low-power station operators would then be licensed, just like any other radio service. This license would grant the operator the right to broadcast below a certain power level on any FM broadcast frequency not in use in their area. Once an hour, the low-power station would have to identify with its call-letters and state how the operator can be contacted to resolve any interfearance issues. If a low-power station interfears with a commercial station, the low-power station would have the responsibility to correct the situation by changing frequency, reducing power, or changing radiation pattern of their antenna. Low power stations would have no protection from interfearance from commercial stations or other low-power stations.
Basically, the low-power license would allow anyone who can demonstrate the requisite techinical knownledge to operate a low-power station so long as doing so does not create any interfearance.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
And after you've sold a frequency to a private company, good luck trying to get microbroadcasting or wide-spectrum rights - or ANY "commons" rights that were not in the original bill of sale - across the frequency band you just sold.
When you sell something, you've sold it.
The alternative to FCC regulation is not anarchy, but private ownership of frequences in an area. It would work just like for land and many other limited resources. Government institutions would still be involved, but only to register who owned what and settle disputes.
You could still call this "regulation' if you want to, but it's very different from the current micromanagement.
What I find most sad about this is that most people are so used to the government running their lifes that they couldn't even imagine such a system, much less weight the pros and cons.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
You could argue that the radio spectrum is so commerically valuable that opening it up would be worth paying for large radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon. But while space telescopes have their advantages, they are expensive and hard to maintain and upgrade.
If you don't care about radio astronomy, you should. Not only are many astronomical phenomena only bright in radio (pulsars are a well known example), but most radio wavelengths are unaffected by dust and some spectral lines in particular are ideal for mapping gas, making radio astronomy the best way (IMBO) of studying the whole galaxy. There are also good reasons to expect that radio observations are the best way of detecting extraterrestrial intelligence.
Secondly, where is this big demand for SSSTs coming from? It's not free speech - there are more blogs and internet "radio" stations than you can shake a stick at, and they reach the whole world instead of just annoying their uninterested neighbors. WiFi seems more likely, but there are already bands for that, and as other posts have pointed out, it also benefits from regulation.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
Always question your assumptions.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
First, that's at MUCH higher power densities than exist from the radio background that exists from broadcast transmission. Second, those studies look sketchy to me, as the statistical significance (for the ones I've seen) is questionable, particularly given the complete lack of any theory that would establish causality. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but I'm skeptical.
The point here is that destroying your DNA and causing cancer are unlikely to be a problem. A host of other modifications to biological processes are more possible.
Right, and IF these situations exist, they will be a problem for consumer devices, not broadcast. Better shielding will solve the problem, if one even exists.
Maybe they would have been made, maybe they wouldn't. But the fact is that they were made for material gain. The Wright brothers patented their invention and got rich off of it. So did the creators of everything else I listed that occurred in modern times. Maybe those things would have been made anyway, if we were in a perfect patentless utopia, but we aren't. The original poster didn't say that invention would happen even without intellectual property rights; he said that nothing important was ever created for money, in this reality. That is completely false.
I don't have the assumption that you claim, and never gave any indication that I did have it. Question your assumptions about the points of views of other people.
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The Wright brothers are an excellent example of how patents reward the wrong people. The most important efforts into human powered flight were made by Sir George Cayley and Otto Lilienthal. Both worked with no reward in mind, fueled by the hacker spirit alone. Some people are like that...
You did not question my affirmation that patents can easily do more harm than good. Then again, I'm convinced that the US will pay the price of an incompetent patent system in a timeframe of 10 to 20 years. I just hope Europe doesn't follow the lead.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Except the "Loudspeaker", which we all acknowledge is regulated by various noise ordinances, is analogous to the current spectrum licensees, which we all acknowledge is regulated.
The cartoon isn't about letting everyone go around with a bullhorn and carry all their conversations out at 200dB. It's about acknowledging that it's stupid to regulate radio as if the one guy with the 200dB bullhorn can't be heard clearly anymore by anyone because I'm whispering something in your ear.
The argument has been raise that "whispering" raises the noise floor and then if everyone is whispering, then no one would be able to hear the guy with the bullhorn clearly anymore. If everyone is whispering, no one is listening to the guy with the bullhorn at that point anyway, right? And that's the point where the analogy begins to break down. With a "Smart Radio" it's no longer necessary to use a bullhorn to be heard clearly, even if other people are talking at the same volume. But that's not what the cartoon is about either.
What the cartoon is about, it that the current licensees want to restrict unlecensed low power use of spectrum (whispering) not because of any interference with their high power broadcasts in the spectrum, but because they want to be able to control the low-power uses as well, and make buckets of cash, all for them.
Doh!
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
Butte County?
That would be the county of jokes, no?
Do the police there consume excessive quantities of donuts in order to expand their jurisdiction?
At least the place isn't half-assed...