guess as an infrequent post-er i'm trolling here, too. if i may:
a comic book treatment of zinn's book, you say? nah, hate it when sarcasm is too easy. so let me just say - so many of my old friends thought it should have been a text book, i was never swept up by it, though he throws some daggers & he ain't wrong. my feeling always was that he's trying to lay a guilt trip on us. thought that was religion's job.
and no, don't think young kiddo's today are reactionary. self-righteous, maybe, but you shoulda got a load of yours truly in my teens & 20's

at our (the consumer) request, communications have become a nearly completely deregulated industry, so go for it. don't get caught though, it'll get federal/Homeland Security real quick.
computers & complex voice services have made eavesdropping & code breaking way too easy. best bet: use a regular land line & speak in some invented vocal code.
government sets up relatively few traps, it's just that they 'forget' to have them taken down & the telco happily keeps taking their monthly $$. then something gets their interest & it's blacked-out Suburban time with a legal bug in place

as a purist, i can dig preluded's post (#2), but the advent of ty-wraps was a serious labor saver for telephone techs. lashing cable proper takes a lotta string, you'd be tying Chicago knots in your sleep, so ty's were a welcome thing. there was a class & a Bell System spec, so when you saw a bad job, you'd laugh. i still have rolls of wax string, put them to use for crabbing drop lines.
back to T & B - by far the best, verizon buys crap now (of course), so i've hoarded the old ones. and i have a lot of black tape...and curly cords...and...

not cool at all. mike watts' bass is kind of renowned among rock bassists, if the stuff gets found, it's going to be because bass players will go underground ninja throughout the world & find it. oh, now you know too much, gotta go

them Boston hats & shirts look dangerous, too. new rule: confiscate them at the gate of tonight's game

but does he have an subterranean indoor turntable parking garage?

hey, my daughter & her husband live there! Cali is freaky scary. we don't have that kinda stuff in Jersey.
i mean that axel foley-bongo music, fires can always be arranged

we were there last month, it was nuts. had a ferry boat ride, it was like evacuating Dunkirk. Downtown Disney? Capitalism's finest hour, i bought the full-scale working Lego Space Shuttle. ate so much at the buffet, the carver needed rotator cuff surgery. went on Everest twice & bought some shirts. really, it was all so bad, but we laughed like drunken baboons. Mickey got me years ago when i sat an inch away from the TV, a mesmerized, immigrant kid. i'll be looking forward to what else Lileks writes

for a few years i worked in his building in Holmdel, NJ. when i saw some moron co-worker sitting where these men did their work, i would make them move. every time. speaking of morons, Lucent sold the building. it sits vacant & glorious. iron men & wooden poles, a great human contribution, RIP

the motive for the phone company is always profit. in this case by bad-mouthing a competitor to improve market position. if there was money to be made, let's say the govt paying for content to be censored, they would do it.

in my experience, the greed of the telco's creates a surprising byproduct: they absolutely don't care what you do with their product as long as you pay the bill. trust me, who would they be to judge someone's ethics? but then again, they're regulated by the govt, so when govt tells them to do something...

and by the way, i think it was just today that AT&T announced a $5 a mo. raise in broadband services, guess they found a way to fund the cost of filtering

oi! genuine telco drone here ( on the job right now, bro ). going back, switches kept those messages on annunciators, so you hit a dialstring the machine don't like, it directs to one of these. sometimes a failure of some kind took out some cards, you'd have to record these yourself until you could run the original outgoing messages back in. if you couldn't get to it or forgot, like a month later you'd hit the announcement & go "hey, that's Dave".