[EAS] Fallout Over False Alert Continues

[Dave Turnmire]

Well, I know nothing about Bobby Bones and to the best of my knowledge 
have never heard the show.  But as a general rule, I think it is an 
unrealistic expectation that everyone that produces programming content 
would be knowledgeable about FCC rules.  Just how is someone outside of 
our business... or for that matter... most who are inside our business 
but aren't engineers... supposed to imagine that including a recording 
of "some tones" is going to cause a problem or might have legal 
prohibitions?  It seems obvious to many of us on this mail list... but 
out there in the world of "normal people"?  I don't think so.

We can try... and should... to educate content producers on this topic.  
But doing so is going to have limited affect.  Some problems need to get 
fixed systemically and in this case, IMHO, the problem is basically a 
technical one at its heart.  As is often the case, fixing a technical 
problem involves politics and bureaucracy to approve the fixes.  And 
some fixes aren't easy in practice due to "backwards compatibility" 
issues.  But at the heart... we need a technical fix.  As long as we 
have a system that "breaks" simply because someone re-played a recording 
of an earlier alert... that system is going to keep getting broke.  
Blaming people who innocently (in some cases at least) made a bad 
content decision that they had no realistic way to know was a bad 
decision... is... IMHO... wrong.  We are engineers (mostly).  Lets do 
what we do best and engineer a fix....

Dave