Slashdot Mirror
In Internet Age, Pirate Radio Arises As Surprising Challenge (ap.org)
K7DAN writes: Just as the demise of terrestrial radio has been greatly exaggerated, so has the assumed parallel death of pirate radio. Due to the failure of licensed stations to meet the needs of many niche communities, pirate radio continues to increase in popularity. Helping facilitate this growth is the weakening power of the FCC to stop it, reports the Associated Press. Rogue stations can cover up to several square miles thanks largely in part to cheaper technology. The appeal? "The DJs sound like you and they talk about things that you're interested in," said Jay Blessed, an online DJ who has listened to various unlicensed stations since she moved from Trinidad to Brooklyn more than a decade ago. "You call them up and say, 'I want to hear this song,' and they play it for you," Blessed said. "It's interactive. It's engaging. It's communal." It's upsetting many congressional members who are urging the FCC to do more about the "unprecedented growth of pirate radio operations." They're accusing said pirates of undermining licensed minority stations while ignoring consumer protection laws that guard against indecency and false advertising.
Slashdot has a far smaller readership than it did a decade ago. I don't think the "Slashdot effect" is a real thing anymore.
This probably has more to do with the fact that most web servers these days are no longer behind 128k ISDN lines...
Do you remember
back in nineteen sixty-six?
Country Jesus, hillbilly blues,
that's where I learned my licks.
Oh, from coast to coast and line to line
in every county there,
I'm talkin' 'bout that outlaw X
is cuttin' through the air.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
>we would have developed tech to have radio broadcast in non interfering ways
And when we were done with that, we'd have developed anti-gravity devices and eternal motion machines to generate power with.
You can't get around the laws of physics. We live in a quantum universe and there is a finite number of frequencies that can exist and absolutely zero way for two things broadcasting on the same frequency not to interfere.
Maybe we may have developed wifi likes ways of telling sources appart - but that was only possible AFTER we developed networking protocols and digital electronics, both of which depended hugely on tech for early radio to get their start - there is no reasonable way to claim the opposite would have been possible. Digital broadcasting does allow you to put more signals in a smaller band, but we couldn't get there until digital devices got small - which took a long time. Radio was already prominent in homes in the 1940s - when computers took up entire basements.
Not all public resources can be privatized effectively. And many never should. So how do you then avoid the tragedy of the commons ? The only solution is to regulate access so that nobody can abuse it.
By the way - you know what would happen if you build an early Marconi/Tesla style morse-transmitter and operated it right now ? You would fill every TV and radio in 3-block radius with static - on *every* channel. It took time to develop tuners.
Are you seriously suggesting we would have been better off if nobody could operate commercial radio devices until AFTER we developed fine-tuning abilities ? Or if the airwaves, all of them on all channels, simply belonged to whoever bought the strongest transmitter and antenna ? Why would anybody have bothered at all ? You go invest thousands in the equipment to get a station online, and somebody else decides he would rather have your listeners and spends a little more and your entire investment is down the drain - unless you invest even more and build bigger, but then they can too. Every market would either have had no broadcasts at all, or only the broadcasts from whichever broadcaster had the richest investor.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Rich? No.
Think about community public radio stations. Consider those that make investments into for-profit ones, too.
Like other confined resources, there is only so much spectrum. It's juvenile to believe that a 100w station doesn't interfere with others.
Yes, some stations trade for major bucks. It's called: business. Still others are community supported.
Want the facts? Grow up and understand how we got here, and that the radio waves aren't a private little party. Wanna be a DJ? You can be. Wanna serve your sense of community? You can. There are lots of legal indy radio stations out there. They play by a set of rules designed to allow sharing of the airwaves, through the same set of rules that all people to have FM receivers and HD receivers with great audio fidelity.
People that live within the constraints of civility understand the need for rules-- because there are lots of people that desire to do whatever the fuck they want for any reason they want, e.g. uncivil behavior. I don't believe in mandated conformance but I do believe in civil rules regarding finite resources.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.