Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed for August 10, 2022

Go for the bean dip.

Parental problems, much?

Thus begins the war over Intellectual Property in movies and music that continues to this day.

I’m sure that, with a little encouragement, Oliver could figure a way around it.

I always wondered why Oliver did not use his hacking skills to figure out a way to unscramble the signals for Frank or somehow use the dish for his own personal amusement!

I remember this well, I live in a small city of 150,000 and before they started scrambling their signals our sat tv station guide was over 50 pages, channels from all over the world in every language, it was awesome…lol

We had one of the satellite dishes early on. Thing was 8-9 feet across and if you wanted to pick up a feed from a different satellite, you went out and used a hand crank to change the position. If it rained, very windy (its always windy here in the spring and summer) or was heavily overcast, the reception was pitiful.

When we sold the house to buy the one we are in now, the purchaser demanded the satellite dish stay with the house. It wasn’t a big deal to us as we had no intention of getting another. It was fairly soon (8-10 months or so) after we sold the house the satellite stations began encoding the broadcasts and the purchaser was distinctly unhappy with us. I thought it funny because he was such a jerk insisting on the satellite dish staying with the house.

I’m sure Oliver will figure out a way to pirate the signals.

Way back in the early days of having Cable, the Pay Channels were scrambled, but they didn’t do a particularly good job of it, at least in my area. Showtime I could get kind of snowy, but watchable, and the sound was fine. HBO was a bit different. I needed two TVs, one tuned to the good sound, and the other to the viewable picture, although it was black-and-white only. Later, I cancelled the cable, but the serviceman only snipped the cable right at the house, didn’t do anything at the telephone pole cable box. A trip to Radio Shack and zip-zop, free cable!

I was one of those people who spent big bucks for a huge satellite dish in my backyard so I could watch typically fuzzy TV. The good part was getting so much free programming including premium channels until they began scrambling them. Compared to that, it’s a modern marvel that nowadays we get high definition TV with such a small antenna that doesn’t have to be physically moved to switch channels.

Oliver is an accomplished hacker – I have no doubt that he could figure out an unscrambler

I remember those times clearly! Our ten foot diameter antenna could pick up feeds from just about anything, but the good times did not last.

anyone else remember those huge satellite dishes?

As would I!

Ah, the days of the Autoroll chip for the C-Band receiver

Like Scrambled Eggs, Scrambled Signals are so “Yesterday and Today.”

Those Earth-stations with the big dish antennas have been replaced with those little C-band and Ku-band dish antennas. The signal is still encrypted. I hear that it is still possible to operate an Earth-station with those large antennas, but you have to buy decoder keys from every channel provider now, with a couple of exceptions.

I had one before all the coast to coast signals were scrambled, you could find some very interesting stuff if you tried.

Proud Never-Cabler! No satellite, either. Get by with broadcast TV just fine, thank you!