Hullo there. I'm tuckered tonight, so grab your pillow and a cup of warm tea while I tell you a tale of telephone trivia. You see, the notion of a public telephone, that any damn fool hooligan off the street could step up to a payphone or duck into a general store and borrow the phone to make a call is rooted in American culture; at the dawn of national telecommunication systems, foreign nations found the idea distasteful. According to research presented by Bruce Sterling in The Hacker Crackdown, no nation was so quick to adopt the public telephone (and the freedom of speech it embodied) as the U.S. The French eschewed the idea of a national telephone system in favor of visual telegraphs, which were safe from meddling by the afore-mentioned hooligans; after all, any fool with a pair of shears and a streak of anarchism could slice the phone lines in a dozen different places and disappear without a trace. Naturally, the British were opposed to the idea of a public telephone because nobody wanted the voice of the lower classes barging into a gentleman's household unannounced.

Of course I'm basically just regurgitating a smidgen of the fascinating narrative spun out within the pages of The Hacker Crackdown, which is the first book we're reading over at the PCWorld Book Club. It's awfully silly, but I assure you we're committed to doing this dorky project up right; join us, won't you? The book is brief, engaging and (best of all) free, so hop in and tell us what you think in the comments section.

/plug