Slashdot Mirror
Is the Number Up For the Residential Phone Book?
Hugh Pickens writes "The first phone directory was issued in 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and for decades regulators across the US have required phone companies to distribute directories in paper form. But now the Washington Post reports that Verizon, the largest provider of landline phones in the Washington DC region, is asking state regulators for permission to stop delivering the residential white pages in Virginia and Maryland. About a dozen other states are also doing away with printed phone books as surveys show that the number of households relying on residential white pages dropped from 25 percent in 2005 to 11 percent in 2008. The directories will be available online, printed or on CD-ROM upon request but the inches-thick white pages, a fixture in American households for more than a century, will no longer land on porches with a thud each year. 'I'm kind of amazed they lasted as long as they have,' says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. 'But there are some people nostalgic about this. Some people like to go to the shelf and look up a number.'"
Phone lines work in a power outage. your caps suggest you don't know this.
http://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/
This site will search, based on your zip code, for all opt-out options available in your area.
This site made the rounds last month on a number of blogs....
Here's me looking up the pizza place: grab one of the multitude of computers in the house, wait two seconds while it wakes from sleep. Cmd-Tab to browser, Cmd-T for a new tab, type "$PIZZA_PLACE redmond" in the search box, click (what is typically) the first link if the phone number isn't already displayed in the link preview. Oh, who am I kidding? I have their website bookmarked and ordered it online.
To each their own, and your task flow is obviously different than mine (what is this "boot" you speak of?), but there's no way the pizza would get here any quicker if I used a phone book.
"how I was going to look up the number without Internet access"
It's printed on the bill they send you every month.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!