FSF wants to deregulate the radio spectrum.

Sigh. Software Defined Radio has nothing to do with whether broadcast is required or not. The GNU people are nutters.

With the internet, everyone can transmit, because the fundamental architecture atleast has some control over denial of service. Routability is NOT a scare resource that needs a gatekeeper on wired networks. The only reason firewalls exist is bad application code, which leads to intrusions, and zombie clients in DDoS storm attacks.

With broadcast on EM frequencies, there is no way to prevent people from conflicting over who owns a channel. You see the start of this today with people who own cell phone jammers. Does Stallman think that everyone will decide to run the same software, using the same algorithms, and not fight over channels by upping their signal strength? The only way this system won't lead to chaos is if everyone runs the same protocol and all agrees to be nice.

What would he say to the rich guy who decides to broadcast his data (whether they like it or not) to everyone in town by using a 50,000 watt transmitter/jammer?

This people don't seem to understand that whether something can be centralized or decentralized is entirely dependant on the underlying properties of the resource in question.
 
As long as there is a limit to the amount of power any single person is allowed to put into the air you can always route around jamming, even locally. Noone would use channels as such if the airwaves were mostly deregulated, UWB is the natural approach ... your "channel" would be the pseudo-random sequence you use. We might for a long time need restrictions on the spectrum to protect the legacy emergency bands (applying some narrow band filters to the UWB signal isnt really a problem). Setting the majority of the spectrum aside for broadcasting will more and more become a gigantic waste of bandwith though.
 
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Yeah, but now you're talking about regulating transmitter strength. Why would the government have the right to do that? :)

Yes, UWB is the natural approach, if you want to be within a few dozen meters of your transmitter. UMB cannot replace broadcast radio, TV, and mobile networks. AM Radio stations can be reliably received thousands of miles away.

The GNU people are certaily nutters Back in the 80s, before the Morris worm, and before script kiddies, Stallman used to leave his RMS account at gnu.ai.mit.edu open for anyone to log in. He didn't "believe" in a society with passwords. The GNU/FSF systems were running with very low security. As a result, vandals frequently fucked over their systems and they were eventually forced to institute security.

Anyway, what would be an enormous waste of bandwidth would be to do away with broadcast. Video on demand is an enormous waste of bandwidth. The time-shifting PVR approach is a much better technique. Broadcast on a schedule, playback and watch when you want.
 
As a next step, they will probably develop their own open-source traffic laws. Why should anyone else dictate how and where I drive? Our traffic code does not even have to cover every situation, people will it patch up over time because they can make their own revisions of it.

And the ultimate step - WTF is that government thinking to accomplish in printing only one type of money? Who are those economists to say how our economy is doing?
 
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