Anyone with a telephone (wireless, wired or otherwise) should be now accustomed to our modern culture where you are getting calls from scammers.  Many times, these are automatic dialers that will call you and play a message, usually in a synthesized voice.  These calls will sometimes claim to come from Social Security or from Internal Revenue Services.  They will threaten you with an arrest warrant or like the one that I got the other day, cancel my social security number.  

A recent Facebook post on 100 Watts and a Wire triggered a debate on the claims that IP-based linked amateur radio systems like Echolink are not "real" amateur radio and that for it to be true radio, it must be a complete radio connection without the use of any terrestrial facilities such as wireline or IP.

Radio, historically has had used different forms of "non-radio" in order to connect people. For many years, many public safety providers have used wireline links to connect a dispatch console (control point) at a police or fire department to a hilltop 2-way radio site. Broadcast stations, have used a mix of radio and wireline methods of establishing studio to transmitter communications. The early national radio networks (i.e. NBC, CBS) were AT&T phone lines. Are these things not "radio"?