Free Republic

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “America Reports” that people who do not want electric cars were like those who wanted “landline phones forever.” Buttigieg said, “Let’s be clear consumers have wanted and purchased more EVs every single year than the year before. Tesla is facing more competition as GM and Ford and Stellantis and other competitive players make sure they get a piece of the EV market. Let’s be clear, the automotive sector is moving toward EVs and we can’t pretend otherwise. Sometimes, when these debates happen, I feel like it’s the early 2000s...

A proposal by phone and internet service provider, AT&T, to end landline service for most Californians is drawing backlash.

It is a very modern dilemma. Should you hand your child a smartphone, or keep them away from the devices as long as possible? As a parent, you'd be forgiven for thinking of a smartphone as a sort of Pandora's box with the ability to unleash all the world's evils on your child's wholesome life. The bewildering array of headlines relating to the possible impact of children's phone and social media use are enough to make anyone want to opt out. Apparently, even celebrities are not immune to this modern parenting problem: Madonna has said that she regretted giving her...

I have been working on ways to economize. One glaring monthly cost is paying $100 to Verizon for my landline service, which is a ridiculous amount of money. I don't find cell phones to be physically comfortable to talk on for long period of time, and I like the features of my cordless phone (for example, it can block 250 unwanted callers, like telemarketers, etc.). So I wanted a way to keep my comfortable feature rich cordless phone but at a much more affordable rate. I called Verizon and found that they have a plan wherein you can use a...

FULL TITLE FCC COMISSIONER ON INTERNET OVERSIGHT SWITCH "IF YOU CHERISH FREE EXPRESSION," "YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED" THIS IS "IRREVERSIBLE" HANNITY RADIO INTERVIEW ON WEBPAGE On Wednesday’s “Sean Hannity Show,” FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai (R) stated that the plan to “essentially give up the US oversight role…of the Internet” to ICANN is something that should worry anyone who cherishes “free expression, and free speech rights generally,” and could potentially cede oversight of the Internet to “foreign governments who might not share our values.” He further stated that such a move is “irreversible.” Pai said, “This proposal is to essentially give...

A California academic whose criticisms of science behind the nation’s most expensive diesel emissions rules has won a legal victory and effectively erased his termination. James Enstrom, an epidemiologist and researcher at UCLA for 35 years, learned last week he had won $140,000 and retains his ability to keep an office and use laboratory facilities on campus. He’ll also have the ability to gain an appointment to perform additional research. “It’s gratifying to get any kind of decision against the university,” Enstrom told Land Line Magazine by telephone Monday. “It’s really a brutal process. They go out of their way...

We are thinking of getting rid of our landline. We no longer use our fax machine and our internet is a five spot. We have scaled down our one remaining phone line to just the dial tone. We called to cancel the line completely and at&t threw in free caller ID/call waiting for a year, so we still have the line.We are trying to cut costs everywhere we can, and we rarely use the phone. Not to mention that at&t is aligned with satan and always overcharges us (we keep changing companies to get away from them and then they...

Ever greater numbers of Americans are disconnecting their home telephones, with momentous consequences MUCH has been made of the precipitous decline of America’s newspapers. According to one much-cited calculation, the country’s last printed newspaper will land on a doorstep sometime in the first quarter of 2043. That is a positively healthy outlook, however, compared with another staple of American life: the home telephone. Telecoms operators are seeing customers abandon landlines at a rate of 700,000 per month. Some analysts now estimate that 25% of households in America rely entirely on mobile phones (or cellphones, as Americans call them)—a share that...

The concept of a home phone may soon be going the way of the corner pay phone. Government research shows that more and more households are getting rid of their land line. And for the first time, cell-phone-only homes outnumber those with just land lines. Kelly Fitzsimmons did not give up her phone without a fight. The instrument of gossip and grand plans, and the bearer of bad news and good, the land line to her was a lifeline. "I just had in my head you gotta have a land line. You gotta have a land line," she says. "That's...

Almost all polling is still done with people who have landlines. Who has landlines? I don’t. A couple of years ago I did but I dropped mine, and I’ll bet a lot of other people dropped theirs too. If you have a cellphone, you can call anybody anytime you want. Why bother paying two bills? So who are the people with landlines? I’d venture to say that poor people and older people are probably more likely to have landlines. Young people, rich people and conservative spenders, those who are smart enough to figure out that 1 bill is better than...

Nip and tuck. That’s what most political polls describe the race between Barrack Obama and John McCain. Might as well throw the polls in the trash. Turns out that standard political polls exclude cell-phone only voters-those young, tech savvy, largely Democratic (but not always) voters-who no longer bother to install a landline in their homes or apartments. If that is the case, we know every little about true public opinion and this presidential election is probably not close at all.

Preliminary results from the January–June 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that more than one out of every eight American homes (13.6%) had only wireless telephones during the first half of 2007.

CHARLESTON (AP) -- About 1,200 Marshall University students are among more than 2.7 million young Americans who have been silenced by political polls because they use only cell phones. Pollsters can be fined $500 if they violate a Federal Communications Commission rule against calling wireless phones because the phones' owners must pay for every call received. That means the 6 percent of Americans and 14 percent of young Americans who have no landline phone never show up in political polls, according to a July estimate by the Yankee Group, the consultant whose estimates the FCC uses in its annual reports...