So what's to stop this from getting shot down in the courts as an FCC overstepping its bounds by mandating technologies, a la the HDTV broadcast flag fracas?
Factually true, but otherwise blah blah blah. FCC enforcement is complaint-driven, and the key is to get somebody to complain (who even knows who to complain *to*).
100 milliwatts, even into a small-gain antenna, is likely at most to harm reception on his neighbors' shittiest radio, closest to his transmitter.
Given these techy specs, and the fact that he's not "knowingly and willfully" breaking the rules, the FCC would at most give him a warning letter the first time.
So let's not get overly dramatic here...have some fun with it!
Nah. What we've seen is an uptick in activity from an agency that's way overworked and understaffed to get microradio off the air. We saw the same enforcement behavior in 2000 right before the elections, too.
Key aspects to the microradio movement include:
1) Demonstrating that space exists on the FM dial to allow low power stations to exist, and that they do not cause interference (or the risk of interference is de minimis, provided they are run in a technically-smart fashion - this is not difficult to do), and
2) To "reclaim" something that is regulated in the public's name but does not serve the public, nor is there any meaningful access provided to a resource which the public rhetorically "owns."
The bottom line is *proliferation*, folks. The idea is to put so many transmitters on the air so as to force the FCC to open up public access to the airwaves (not this does not mean "chaos" - see point 1 above). The microradio stations of the 1990s were instrumental in getting the FCC to even consider legalizing LPFM like they did in 2000. Unfortunately, the incumbent broadcasters eviscerated the service, so in many ways microradio is necessary now more than ever.
In seattle two years ago during the NAB conference microradio activists put stations on 11 different channels in the metro area - and there was no interference. According to the LPFM rules as written presently, Seattle is eligible for NO LPFM stations.
The Radio reVolt idea is just one tool in a growing bag of tricks. FWIW, Tetsuo Kogawa will be the keynote speaker at the reVolt conference (happening at the end of this month). He's a pioneer of the "mini-FM" revolution, which now has thousands of stations on the air in Japan...and they were doing this before microradio (in the typical US fashion) even got started.
The FBI executed the seizure (in London) at the request of Swiss authorities, who were worried about a post on a European IMC that contained photographs of undercover Swiss police officers "on duty" at a protest in France.
The "investigation" into the RNC delegates list is "ongoing," whatever that means. It's all kind of silly because the lists of delegates were publicly available on a state-by state basis; all the posters of those lists to NYC-IMC did was aggregate publicly available data that was dispersed in "raw" form.
With regard to the ProtestWarriors, I found this thread especially rich. Protest as military operation: how orwellian is that? (The picture of a puppy in a microwave is just a bonus).
...happens to be the fact that those who complain about the perceived biases of various news sites can get those sites removed from Google's index crawl. This happened to indymedia.org after the roving horde of right-wing bloggers hounded Google News incessantly to stop crawling Indymedia sites, due to their "anti-semitism."
Anyone who's worked with Indymedia understands its open publishing model, which carries its own risks. But the entire network of sites was nixed by a coordinated campaign to do just that.
Hence, one may claim Google News has a certain level of "bias by omission." FWIW, I once complained when a "news" piece from R*shlimbaugh.com appeared at the top of some story where its placement was clearly inappropriate. Since I'm just one guy it's no surprise that that site is still being crawled by Google News.
Now, if only I had a legion of like-minded ninnies willing to march in lockstep with me to purge the opinions of those with whom I don't agree, I might have gotten somewhere...
The House vote ONLY rolls back the national TV station ownership cap to its pre-June 2 limit (stations that reach a maximum 35% of the national audience). Everything else was left untouched by the House vote.
Much of this is froufrou. While I take some sort of glee in the fact that the *partial* rollback measure was attached as a "rider" to a spending bill - just like how Congress screwed LPFM back in 2000 - similar legislation must still be passed by the Senate, and then survive a conference committee, a veto, AND an override, in order to actually happen.
Symbolically, this is a very good thing (as well as being somewhat historic in a political sense), but in the real world it will likely get axed in the dead of night by the real string-pullers in Congress, and what the FCC did will stay in place.
That is why just ignoring the FCC to begin with makes for more fun. (viva microradio!)
Seriously tho, if you want the scoop on the politics you can get near-daily updates from media reform lobbyists working the Hill. I don't know if they keep archives of their reports, but I do remember seeing that more than this rider was in play at one time. One other proposed amendment (sunk before getting to the floor, I believe) would've rolled back most if not all of the FCC's changes, but the one that made the cut was the weakest of the bunch.
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So what's to stop this from getting shot down in the courts as an FCC overstepping its bounds by mandating technologies, a la the HDTV broadcast flag fracas?
Factually true, but otherwise blah blah blah. FCC enforcement is complaint-driven, and the key is to get somebody to complain (who even knows who to complain *to*).
100 milliwatts, even into a small-gain antenna, is likely at most to harm reception on his neighbors' shittiest radio, closest to his transmitter.
Given these techy specs, and the fact that he's not "knowingly and willfully" breaking the rules, the FCC would at most give him a warning letter the first time.
So let's not get overly dramatic here...have some fun with it!
...I have a rapture to attend to...
Nah. What we've seen is an uptick in activity from an agency that's way overworked and understaffed to get microradio off the air. We saw the same enforcement behavior in 2000 right before the elections, too.
Key aspects to the microradio movement include:
1) Demonstrating that space exists on the FM dial to allow low power stations to exist, and that they do not cause interference (or the risk of interference is de minimis, provided they are run in a technically-smart fashion - this is not difficult to do), and
2) To "reclaim" something that is regulated in the public's name but does not serve the public, nor is there any meaningful access provided to a resource which the public rhetorically "owns."
The bottom line is *proliferation*, folks. The idea is to put so many transmitters on the air so as to force the FCC to open up public access to the airwaves (not this does not mean "chaos" - see point 1 above). The microradio stations of the 1990s were instrumental in getting the FCC to even consider legalizing LPFM like they did in 2000. Unfortunately, the incumbent broadcasters eviscerated the service, so in many ways microradio is necessary now more than ever.
In seattle two years ago during the NAB conference microradio activists put stations on 11 different channels in the metro area - and there was no interference. According to the LPFM rules as written presently, Seattle is eligible for NO LPFM stations.
The Radio reVolt idea is just one tool in a growing bag of tricks. FWIW, Tetsuo Kogawa will be the keynote speaker at the reVolt conference (happening at the end of this month). He's a pioneer of the "mini-FM" revolution, which now has thousands of stations on the air in Japan...and they were doing this before microradio (in the typical US fashion) even got started.
The FBI executed the seizure (in London) at the request of Swiss authorities, who were worried about a post on a European IMC that contained photographs of undercover Swiss police officers "on duty" at a protest in France.
The "investigation" into the RNC delegates list is "ongoing," whatever that means. It's all kind of silly because the lists of delegates were publicly available on a state-by state basis; all the posters of those lists to NYC-IMC did was aggregate publicly available data that was dispersed in "raw" form.
Also, they did it not once, but twice.
With regard to the ProtestWarriors, I found this thread especially rich. Protest as military operation: how orwellian is that? (The picture of a puppy in a microwave is just a bonus).
...happens to be the fact that those who complain about the perceived biases of various news sites can get those sites removed from Google's index crawl. This happened to indymedia.org after the roving horde of right-wing bloggers hounded Google News incessantly to stop crawling Indymedia sites, due to their "anti-semitism."
Anyone who's worked with Indymedia understands its open publishing model, which carries its own risks. But the entire network of sites was nixed by a coordinated campaign to do just that.
Hence, one may claim Google News has a certain level of "bias by omission." FWIW, I once complained when a "news" piece from R*shlimbaugh.com appeared at the top of some story where its placement was clearly inappropriate. Since I'm just one guy it's no surprise that that site is still being crawled by Google News.
Now, if only I had a legion of like-minded ninnies willing to march in lockstep with me to purge the opinions of those with whom I don't agree, I might have gotten somewhere...
Much of this is froufrou. While I take some sort of glee in the fact that the *partial* rollback measure was attached as a "rider" to a spending bill - just like how Congress screwed LPFM back in 2000 - similar legislation must still be passed by the Senate, and then survive a conference committee, a veto, AND an override, in order to actually happen.
Symbolically, this is a very good thing (as well as being somewhat historic in a political sense), but in the real world it will likely get axed in the dead of night by the real string-pullers in Congress, and what the FCC did will stay in place.
That is why just ignoring the FCC to begin with makes for more fun. (viva microradio!)
Seriously tho, if you want the scoop on the politics you can get near-daily updates from media reform lobbyists working the Hill. I don't know if they keep archives of their reports, but I do remember seeing that more than this rider was in play at one time. One other proposed amendment (sunk before getting to the floor, I believe) would've rolled back most if not all of the FCC's changes, but the one that made the cut was the weakest of the bunch.