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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.
I've always wanted to start a pirate radio station just for shits and giggles, and doubly so after watching 'The Boat That Rocked" (watch this one, the UK release, not the US version "Pirate Radio", imo.) The fact that it is apparently infuriating to certain members of congress would just be icing on the the cake...
" ignoring consumer protection laws that guard against indecency"
The 1950s are over. The airwaves are in desperate need of shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.
Don't forget, all those rules are only there to protect the incumbents from newcomers... regulatory capture to impose costs on them...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Who are these lucky constituents that won't have to worry about false advertising anymore?
You have to admire those Members of Congress, they go after the most hard-to-find targets first. It doesn't matter if those "pirate" radio stations only reach 0.0005% of their own constituency or operate just a couple of hours a month with little or no advertising of any kind. You have to admire the kind of motivation those Members of Congress have at wanting to stamp out those tiny little cockroaches.
If I were the shopping channel network, or ABC, or an internet advertising agency, I would be shaking in my boots right now. After all, if those Members of Congress spend so much of their time and energy going after those little guys, it's only a matter of time before they start noticing all the false advertising going on the biggest licensed television and radio networks, with diamond dealers, phone carriers, cable providers, weight loss products, Duracell batteries, and the list goes on...
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.
> It is also the battle cry against big government. Just enough to be effective without being a burden to freedom or prosperity.
Except that this is an absolutely impossible goal. You can't make government smaller. It is a guaranteed disaster. Whenever you try - you just create a power-vaccuum which is readily filled by somebody else. Initially, this is mostly corporations. As you reduce government size towards your mythic level (which is always described but never defined because those who say it will NEVER reach a level they consider "right") the power of those stepping into the resulting vaccuum grows and corporate executives get replaced by warlords (often the same person).
Now you either end up with a bunch of competing warlords in an endless civil war and your "official government" too small and helpless to actually do anything about it (ala Somalia), or one warlord actually manages to amass enough to quell all the others and you end up with a dictatorship.
The power you fear in big government is GOING to be wielded, there is NOTHING that ANYBODY could do to stop that. The only choice you DO have, is whether it will be wielded by a representative government accountable to you as a voter, or any of the everything else's which are all MUCH worse.
This is one reason I am an anarchist. As such I support the biggest government of them all. A government so large that EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN is an equal member of that government. 100% of the population large. And therefore, much less able to oppress anybody - while having both the will and the power to quell oppression from others.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
This probably has more to do with the fact that most web servers these days are no longer behind 128k ISDN lines...
Being behind a tiny pipe like ISDN would help prevent the web server from being overwhelmed. The pipe would be saturated, and temporary slowness and timeouts would happen, but in most cases the servers would be just fine.
With backbone-connected colos, on the other hand, we started to see servers going down, and returning error messages at best, or be out for the day.
As web servers and their hardware improved, unfortunately, content shifted too and were no longer on the actual web server. High traffic started taking down the back-ends.
Then single-sign-on happened. And for a short time it became possible to slashdot mulltiple sites or companies, before SSO improved too.
Three steps for the worse, before it started to get better.
I kind of miss the days when a small pipe meant that what went over it was pared down to the essentials. Like text and only minimal illustrative images, like in a book. 4k of text can convey a heck of a lot more signal than 40 MB of video, and be spread faster.
Those fuckers killed the low power FM license because they catered to Clear channel and their other benefactors.
All of the pirate radio "problem" is 100% the fault of Congress. Those are the scumbags that need to be fined and put in jail first.
Give us an affordable low power FM license ability and 95% of those pirate stations would go legit.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First you need to build your radio station into a box that you can place at the top of a taller building. get one of the 10-20 watt china transmitters and build a nice 5/8's wave antenna like a J pole out of copper pipe. putall of it inside a sealed plastic box and use a raspberry PI for the audio source.
Now use a USB stick to hold your radio station audio files plug it all in and splice into power you can find up there. if you paint it all to look like it belongs it will not get dismantled for years.
Bonus points, give it a WIFI accesspoint so you can simply drive there and point a gain antenna at the location to upload new content.
Now when the FCC raids the station you will not get arrested as it's not your property and if you are smart you have no evidence behind that it's yours. Yes you are out your $400 of gear (if you buy good stuff with filters) but that is a lot cheaper than the $40,000 fine and possible jail time.
Social engineer your way in to set it up. you are here from dish network, etc....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
As a youth back in 1960 I built a radio broadcast rig and used it for only a very few minutes before cars with funny antennas and a helicopter started searching my block. I rushed to unplug the rig and get it one mile away and turn it on at a friends house for a few seconds to keep the searchers from triangulating my location. I was astounded at the speed at which there was a response. It is hard to imagine how pirate stations are able to exist these days. One way might be to run it from the back of a van that is kept in motion.
it was fun. But what was even more fun was trolling Clear Channel, when we went into their local corporate HQ to talk about marketing...and I brought up their repeated helping the FCC in busting "pirate radio" stations. Just do a search of "clear channel busting pirate radio" and you'll find scores of stories. Once they even set up a media server to capture a signal and sent the link to the FCC along with the complaint. NPR is also an opponent of low-power FM. But, be warned, Clear Channel will aggressively pursue any signals they can find and have a very cozy relationship with the FCC enforcement arm.
To many conservatives, the "optimal government size" is one that operates solely in their benefit and is basically a "middle man contract placement system" to private entities that do all the real work. They want everything to be privatized; because they believe they would be the ones who own those corps. A computer system that matched up governmental tasks to private corporate bidders would probably be enough. No "social services" because if your "wealthy" then you don't need them and screw everyone else. I would say that humans are the dominate species BECAUSE of our cooperation, sharing resources, and empathy...but many conservatives don't believe in evolution and think we humans sprung fully-formed, talking and writing, from dust and a rib-bone...and that human activity can't ever have any lasting effects on the planet because God gave us dominion over the Earth so it's ours to do whatever we want to with.
Direct democracy is a synonym for anarchism
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I actually agree with you. The size of the government is utterly unimportant. Even the taxrate is mostly unimportant.
What does matter is whether the government does a good job, wheher you get decent value for your taxes. As long as whatever your taxes buy would have cost you more in the private sector, or be worse quality, or both (as in the case of healthcare), it's better to buy it with more taxes because even though your taxrate is higher - you spend less money - it also has the advantage that you can provide these services to people who would not be able to access them in the private sector.
That really IS an advantage for everybody. Take healthcare again: making healthcare universally available means your odds of being infected with some virulent plague is greatly reduced because it can't spread like wildfire among an untreated homeless population who can't afford to be treated for it (and thus slip through the radar of quarantine systems and the like).
Same goes with things like water supply. Making sure everybody has access to clean, fresh water protects the entire population from diseases like cholera.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *