Station To Station...

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The sublime irony of modern communications devices is that they hinder absolutely their intended, original purpose by their very nature and being. In providing a computing platform [for that is what they are these days] of a capability unimaginable even a decade ago: think orders of magnitude of power greater than the supercomputers of a less than a generation ago, they are harnessed to the service of providing access to gazillion-bytes-per-second trivia and fluff, and we have lost the actual point of the 'phone in the noise and chaff of modern 'life'. I know most people these days [at least those younger than forty] don't even attempt to use their mobile phones as actual telephones, except in extremis, but given the data transfer and interpolation capabilities of these devices, would it be too much to ask that these 'telephones' actually functioned adequately as 'telephones', so that one-to-one conversation might be had without random blanks and blackouts? It wouldn't be so bad if the vagaries of traditional analogue landlines were artificially injected into a call to signal that there was an issue with the connection, in the form of noise on the line, for instance. Nope: with modern mobile calls, they can be two-way, one-way, or no-way, all in the space of a short - attempted - call: with no warning, whatsoever. Pathetic, really...

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