It's fertile ground for demagogues who offer glib, bogus answers and, boy, do they plough it.
Ringing landlines and bogus answering machine technology were several times more interruptive than smartphone notifications, and you couldn't really opt out of them.
Enquiring whether this or any other empire was a "good" or a "bad" thing is historically bogus, because answers to this question vary so much according to when, what and who you choose to look at, and, critically, according to who you are.
Well, that and the spammed links in Google as well as questionable sites that try to manipulate you into downloading a shitty plugin or answer a bogus survey.
Rae stands accused of murdering John Devine in 1989 at his home in west Belfast and taxi driver John O'Hara, who was shot dead while answering a bogus phone call in 1991.
The killings in Belfast last week started with the shooting of Trevor Kell, 35, a Protestant cabdriver who was gunned down at the wheel of his car on Tuesday night after answering a bogus call.
PC Nicola Hughes and PC Fiona Bone were fatally injured in a gun and grenade attack as they answered a bogus 999 call made by fugitive Cregan on 18 September last year.
7 ONSET users who declared being older than 85 years old were excluded from further analyses due to inconsistencies in their answers suggesting a bogus self-report.
My goal was to use the answer to this question to distinguish bogus rules of usage from defensible ones.
