I remember someone telling me a long time ago that in the old days, telephone lines could trigger a signal through close (if not complete) contact with each other, with a run of consecutive contacts corresponding to its respective dialled number on the telephone set (e.g. the dull noise pips you may hear over the earpiece when dialling out a number). If the emergency number was something like "111" then it would trigger too many false alarms too easily simply by having adjacent lines rubbing against each other by accident, so a sufficiently large number was chosen instead, hence 999. I found this article on the subject too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8675000/8675199.stm
I'm slightly disturbed that you can just ring up the Carabinieri. It seems that, if the regular police isn't good enough, they should be the ones to make the call on whether to upgrade.
Well. Historically, the Carabinieri were created as a military force with police duties (i.e. crowd control and suppression of civic unrest), which means their presence is very dense on the territory. There is no town, village, hamlet without at least one tiny Carabinieri post/detachment. They are also specifically trained against violent criminals. So when a crime of violence is involved and time is critical, Carabinieri are probably the guys you want to call.
I guess on the topic of phones: [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyi_q7hIOmw[/yt] PUSH-BUTTON PHONING! And in forty years there will still be a $2 surcharge for this service despite this technology having proliferated everywhere on the planet!
Fair enough. I just figured the police themselves can decide whether or not we're dealing with violent criminals, which warrants using the Carabinieiri. Otherwise, I would think some moron would call them because their neighbor is being a dick.
Don't have a microwave at the moment, but if I pick one up I am totally wiring the popcorn button to play a little music while it's popping: [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBYjZTdrJlA[/yt]
You can do that. But then you'll have to deal with a couple of pissed-off Carabinieri, and I don't think anyone would have that.
Back in the late 1950s and '60s, some of us Yanks had Swedish Ericofon one-piece phones which were terribly, terribly modern. They were awkward to use with the dial on the bottom, but they still look retro-cool. Sorry if I sound like an Ugly American, but to me that phone looks like a toy.
Maybe it's the angle of view, but I don't see how it's much different from the one posted by J.Allen. On the other hand "small and playful" is kinda our shtick, so no biggies.
They were alone in having the build-in bill-reducing feature; your calls tended to be quite short -Those phones weigh a TON. ETA: I've found an image of the first model we had when my parents first were talked around to actually having a phone... Only, our brick walls were painted white... Plus: I've found on-line prices for that model: 250 DKR (~45 USD) and the Ericofon Cobra (in the same gray): 600 DKR (~106 USD).