You can still buy 'free-to-air' (FTA) satellite dishes and equipment and there is a little programming available out there.  The main use of the new equipment is to buy a dish and receiver, then download the codes to flash your new receiver so you can steal Dish and other pay satellite systems programming.  The reason that the programming 'goes down' during the year is that the satellite providers make an attempt to prevent the theft of their programming by changing the codes occasionally.  This results in everyone that is decoding the signals with their 'FTA' receivers having to wait until someone cracks the new code and posts new flash codes on the internet to get their tv source back up.  There's all sorts of information available online and companies that sell packages of satellite dishes and receivers that will allow you to do this without actually doing it for you.  The prevailing attitude on the retailer's part seem to be, 'Hey, we're selling equipment for freely available, legal satellite television, how can we help it if the majority of our customers are using this equipment illegally and we advertise the features of our equipment to capitalize on this tendency?'  Most of the people that are doing it don't feel that it is stealing and realize that it would be almost impossible to get caught doing it, so they can rationalize the whole thing.

Mike