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Spam nostalgia, Annoyance Calls, good ideas with no analysis
From fork-admin@xent.com  Tue Aug 20 11:53:50 2002

Am I going to long for the good old days of Nigerian 419?
After picking up the land-line phone mid-day (always a bad idea) only to
slam it down before the telemarketer even spoke, I have in mind an
invention.  If my brain can detect the crosstalk from a call-center before
the human, sub-human, or machine starts speaking, why not have a box that
just hangs up for me?  Maybe it could blow a police whistle (play a
sample) into the phone first.
Currently, a strategy of leaving the machine on as a screener works pretty
well, but I still get Carey-on-RIAA style mad when the damn phone rings
and it's NOT anyone I want to talk to.
.....
I want to like Spider Robinson's works.  Really.  I mean having a "Bridge
of Birds" attraction in the "China that never was" portion of the theme
part in "The Free Lunch...."   But, I really fell for his anti-paparatzi
device (invented by a princess Diana fan).   Doggone.  I've now completely
reasoned my way around it.  It has a built-in defense against the first
obvious way of confounding it, but that leads directly to an exploit that
uses off the shelf hardware that a paparatzi ought to have in her kit.
That's so often the problem with Robinson.  He doesn't think that you the
reader are nearly so smart as he.  Heh.   I admit that reading a lot of
slushpile manuscripts does not improve one's opinion of fellow-man, but
I always resent him for not being thorough.
Eirikur
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