Tonight on GeekNights, we consider what it means to truly be obsolete technology. In the news, the Pixii camera is a ridiculous waste of money, Olympus exits the camera business, and the Supreme Court upholds the 1991 law that bars robocalls to cellphones.
Things of the Day
Episode Links
On Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/39052396
Live Stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLvs3PT8liY
Whenever the words “obsolete technology” are mentioned, two things immediately come to mind:
Joe Walsh
That is not the Joe Walsh that first came to mind.
Fun game. Whoever listens to this episode with the most obsolete technology wins. 
The way to win that game is have a bot transcript the episode and have someone read it to you like an old town crier.
Re:logic.ly This is pretty popular. https://fritzing.org
That’s fantastic, but I think it serves a different purpose. logic.ly is just about learning computational logic. There are no resistors, capacitors, diodes, etc. fritzing is for actual electronic circuits. Sure, you can put gates into your circuits, but dealing with the electronic aspect might make it a little harder to learn the logic aspect.
A good video about the birth, death and afterlife of the Steam controller.
AM radio in the US is alive, for now, but it’s on life support. Radio is still really only a thing because cars are still a thing. Even though people have had cassette, CD, satellite radio, iPods and streaming, radios in cars still get used. There’s just something about it being live and free, despite the ads.
Even today, there is content on there you just don’t get so easily elsewhere. Live local sports is big. Hyperlocal news reporting is often better on radio than elsewhere. Lots of those morning programs these days are just people reading the Internet news, but that can be good, actually, since you can’t read while driving.
All that isn’t really enough, though. Lots of the things people actually listen to have moved to FM. In places with less population, there are often hardly any AM stations at all.
Now they are starting to make cars that just don’t have AM radios period. Well, this has gotten some people in congress mad, and they want to mandate it.
On the one hand, I have feelings for AM radio. I also believe is still has value.
On the other hand, I am fully in favor of killing it for two pragmatic reasons.
First, I’m not a radio expert, but that spectrum could be used for something else. I don’t know how useful those frequencies are for anything, but they aren’t useless. Someone will find value in them.
More importantly, remember the reality of AM radio today. It’s mostly filled with right wing nutjobs. All these people you’ve never heard of that are replacements for Rush Limbaugh. Get rid of AM radio, and we get them out of the earholes of a lot of citizens, making the world a better place.
The arguments for keeping it are really weak. FM radio is still far from dead, and can serve all the same purposes. Why keep AM around exactly? I’m sure some radio nerds have reasons, but I don’t think any of those matter for the actual every day lives of US citizens that I imagine mostly listen to no radio whatsoever.
Area coverage. If you want ~everywhere to have some kind of radio station, like phone service, AM has a lot more range.
Despite this, there are areas with few to no AM stations left. Many areas have only FM, no AM. You would think with wider range, that wouldn’t be the case, but there are just more FM antennas.
Not data, but I dropped a random pin on the map and found a rural place in the US. Ashby Nebraska. Zip code 69333.
10 FM station, 0 AM.
They already pressured Ford to change their mind, no law needed.
Meh.
Isn’t every radio station available on the Internet nowadays?
Just bring your phone and open the station’s website/app of your choice, and if your car radio has online features, it’s even easier. It will also sound cleaner if you’re in an area with interference.
Radio stations are actually pretty redundant nowadays.
We can’t under-estimate the modern “American AM radio to kook fascist” pipeline. I dare you to drive though rural America and listen to the first English-language people talking show you find.
It’s gonna make Glen Beck sound perfectly sane in comparison.