Who was it who said, "Most scientific discoveries aren't hailed with 'Eureka!', but rather with, 'Hmmm, that's weird.'"?

There once was a babe born in space
The first of the whole human race
But the kid's DNA
Looked like bad macrame
Cos nobody shielded that place

Don't give me none of your aggravation, YIC!

Wouldn't a few humans amount to a small hill of beans pretty well?

Who would fight whom?

That's a serious question. What two (or more) large groups of Americans would organize themselves into armies of any respectable amount of strength?

Anyone trying to fight a loyal US military would get squashed faster than you can say "daisy cutter", I don't care how many M-16s and RPGs you have in your basement bunker. Maybe mutiny, turning the US Army into God's Army? Or how about Walmart and Monsanto *really* putting the competition out of business?

The states that keep threatening secession: Would we go to war to keep them, or just tell them not to let the door hit 'em where the Lord split 'em?

What's most likely is that the next civil war will be manufactured by the people selling arms to both sides.

We're in a similar situation in our build/release group. The problem is that they want senior level talent at junior level wages, and until they can find such a sucker^Wcandidate, we continue to do without.

But does a Cue:Cat count?

You sign up for a free number from something like Google Voice and you can text only over WiFi with that...

This is why for a long time, 50% of your phone bill was the cost of the bill.

CO-supplied POE sounds like a tall order. One of the reasons CO-powered POTS works is because the CO supplies 48VDC (90VAC@20Hz ring), but the telephone equipment has to be able to work with much less voltage than that, and serious noise on the line. I suspect most POE devices expect much cleaner power.

Also, large chunks of the switch can go down, but as long as power stays up, existing calls through that switch stay up. New calls may not happen (no dial tone), though. This was true even in the days of mechanical step-switches. The calls always stayed connected until and unless something proactively broke the connection. When they went to electronic switching in the 1970s and 1980s, much effort was spent making sure this was still true. This was one of the weapons on the circuit side of the packet-switching versus circuit-switching wars.

The present issue is the last skirmish in that war. IMO packet-switching won that war the first time a telco installed a VOIP trunk from one CO to another. Everything since has been nuts-and-bolts buildout.

(Claimer: I wrote call processing software for telephone switches in the mid-1980s.)

How long ago were those lines put in? How often are they inspected? You'd kind of expect an unmaintained 100-year-old sewer line to fail.

And there are ample anti-malware/anti-virus apps available for Android in the Play Store. I'm on my 4th Android phone and have installed all kinds of software, legit and less so, and have yet to encounter any malware or viruses. Know how many are available in the Apple iTunes store? Zero. If they allowed one to be listed, it would be admitting that their precious iPhones are vulnerable.

Part me out, pull the plug, burn me up, flush me down.

yet...