Satellite Communication Quotes

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...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Bluebeard)
I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on. I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives -- maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on. That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astair or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.' How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, 'Wow! Were you ever _drunk_ last night!
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Bluebeard)
On Friday the 13th, April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, we named it Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier)
Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
On Friday the 13th of April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth, that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, it's named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death. If the trajectory of Apophis at close approach passes within a narrow range of altitudes called the 'keyhole,' the precise influence of Earth's gravity on its orbit will guarantee that seven years later in 2036, on its next time around, the asteroid will hit Earth directly, slamming in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. The tsunami it creates will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim. If Apophis misses the keyhole in 2029, then, of course, we have nothing to worry about in 2036.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other kind of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Bluebeard)
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites. It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.
Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1))
A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
Arthur C. Clarke
Affordable global satellite communication and the Internet offer a 'time-place compression', where the world as we know it is getting smaller and what happens in one place often has instant impact on others economically, politically,technologically and culturally.
Chua Beng-Huat
Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located “within bazooka range” of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites.
Eric Schlosser (Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety)
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites.
Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1))
We have lift off of the third Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF-3) communication satellite at 4:44 a.m
Antonia Perdu
Incredible in retrospect, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications. This was how he arrived in this airport: he’d boarded a machine that transported him at high speed a mile above the surface of the earth. This was how he’d told Miranda Carroll of her ex-husband’s death: he’d pressed a series of buttons on a device that had connected him within seconds to an instrument on the other side of the world, and Miranda—barefoot on a white sand beach with a shipping fleet shining before her in the dark—had pressed a button that had connected her via satellite to New York. These taken-for-granted miracles that had persisted all around them.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
I Remember Babylon First published in Playboy, March 1960 Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds This is one of the rare cases where I violated Sam Goldwyn’s excellent rule: ‘If you gotta message, use Western Union.’ This story was a message, five years before the first commercial communications satellite was launched, warning of their possible danger. Apart from some minor political earthquakes, everything in it has since come true.
Arthur C. Clarke (The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke)
I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Bluebeard)
I wish I could blame the solar storm that blitzed the earth with electromagnetic rays, rerouted several commercial airlines, and caused all the geese to mistakenly fly west, the secret compass needles in their heads playing spin the bottle over a rowdy Pacific. Satellite communications were disrupted, electric eels in Peru forgot how to sing, and for a few seconds all the iPhones in the world flickered to black, during which time everyone raised their eyes and noticed moths shivering like tiny chandeliers. The truth is your glance shortcuts every traffic light in my heart and now no one’s in charge, I’m accelerating down the expressway of a tuba’s gold dream. With one outburst from your hair, I sputter like a firefly drowning in champagne. Just imagining the charged particles of your lips colliding with mine and I’m watching the northern lights, those bodies flaring across midwinter sheets of sky
Katherine Rauk
And he carefully stored what he considered the most vital piece of equipment: a satellite phone with solar-powered batteries, which would allow the men not only to record short audio dispatches but also to check in every day with an ALE operator and report their coordinates and medical condition. If the team failed to communicate for two consecutive days, ALE would dispatch a search-and-rescue plane—what Worsley called “the most expensive taxi ride in the world.
David Grann (The White Darkness)
There is a tendency for people affected by this epidemic to police each other or prescribe what the most important gestures would be for dealing with this experience of loss. I resent that. At the same time, I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death of their lovers, friends, and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets. I worry because of the urgency of the situations, because of seeing death coming in from the edges of abstraction where those with the luxury of time have cast it. I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way. But, bottom line, this is my own feelings of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person's response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication. You can never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.
David Wojnarowicz (Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration)
our safest bet is that the era of high-technology communication, in the beginning of which we are now immersed, will continue to develop and amplify. We may look forward to more numerous and more versatile communications satellites, laser beams replacing microwaves in space and providing millions of times as many audio and video channels, optical fibers carrying light replacing copper wires carrying electricity, and elaborate computerization making the world more responsive to our needs.
Isaac Asimov (The Roving Mind)
products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more. A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.
Richard Rhodes (Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World)
God said, 'Let there be light.' Here's a paraphrase: Let there be electromagnetic radiation with varying wavelengths traveling at 186,282 miles per second. Let there be radiowaves, microwaves, and X-rays. Let there be photosynthesis and fiber optics. Let there be LASIK surgery, satellite communication, and suntans. Oh, and let there be rainbows after rainstorms. 'Let there be light.' These are God's first recorded words. This is God's first recorded miracle. Light is the source of vision; without it we can't see a thing. Light is the key to technology; it's how we can talk to someone halfway around the world without so much as a second's delay because light can circle the globe seven and a half times a second. Light is the first link in the food chain; no photosynthesis equals no food. Light is the basis of health; the absence of light causes everything from vitamin D deficiency to depression. Light is the origin of energy; in Einstein's equation E = MC squared, energy (E) is defined as mass (M) times the speed of light (C) squared. The speed of light is the constant. And light is the measuring stick for space-time; a meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. Light is the alpha and omega of everything, and that includes you.
Mark Batterson (Whisper: How to Hear the Voice of God)
After hearing visionaries like Vikram Sarabhai and working at T.E.R.L.S. I began to understand that being self sufficient also meant developing our own technologies and using that for the good of the nation. Our satellites provide many benefits to the ordinary people of the country—from communication to information that is utilized by soldiers, fishermen, farmers, teachers, students and people from almost every walk of life. By making our own rockets that could go into space and put satellites into orbit or touch the surface of the moon or even reach Mars, we have become a nation that is respected for our technological capabilities. Our satellite launch vehicles and facilities bring in valuable revenue when they are used by other countries.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (My Life: An Illustrated Biography: An Illustrated Autobiography)
Moving satellites, the term for testing and tracking the source, or sources, of originating signals, was rarely done. However, there didn’t seem to be a choice in this case. They could not figure out with whom Gaines was talking, and even more problematic was his method of communication. Jaeger jumped rope while waiting for the results. He knew the NSA had some exposure during the maneuvers, namely the loss of surveillance, but it would just be a few minutes of darkness. Then they’d have an answer. In a solar-powered bunker located on the same Taos property where he’d met Gale, Booker sucked down a yerba mate power smoothie filled with one of his special blend of herbs. He needed to stay up all night, and this would do it. Two aides assisted him in handling the fast-breaking situations.
Brandt Legg (Cosega Shift (The Cosega Sequence, #3))
It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the “developed” and the latter as the “developing” world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of “development” are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of “development”? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more “developed” than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter?
Vinoth Ramachandra (Gods That Fail, Revised Edition: Modern Idolatry and Christian Mission)
An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history—and history was thrusting them aside. Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten.
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)
Space Rockets as Power Symbols The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica. [M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button. Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground. [V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. [W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. [T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that! There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran". [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. [T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure.
Isaac Asimov
This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders. For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
It is raining.  The clock ticks.  I am leaning on my elbow.  The wind blows through the cracks.  The door rattles in its frame.  My arm is tired of staying in one position.  There is a pressure on the wrist.  My temple burns on one side.  I wonder what will happen next.  Someone laughs.  If he had heard the rain, the clock, and the door, he would have kept silent.  Had I been laughing, I would not have heard these things. Gaze into a cat's eye or a gorilla's.  You will notice a peculiar thing that will make you shudder.  sometimes cats claw at human eyes.  Some- times gorillas enrage. Telepathy and death are wound inextricably together.  To see why this is so, you must understand consciousness.  When, late at night in your bed, you hear a distant automobile, you and the driver are parts of yourself.  When you speak, you are alone and the listener is both you and himself.  Two men, one on the mountain and the other in the village, cannot communicate.  Each is looking into a mirror.  Wave, and *he* waves - shout, and *he* replies.  All of us see the same moon and feel the same heartbeat, but we can never admit it.  One says the moon is a pale disc, another that it is a satellite of the Earth, a third that it is a silver world.  My heart thumps, yours clatters, and his booms.  Consciousness is distortion. But much telepathy passes unnoticed.  Dogs in the night, a dream of Mabel, Dr. Rhines' dice games - these are self-conscious tricks that mean nothing.  What of the more obvious examples?  You know when another is lying.  You know who is going down the stair.  You know emotion without seeing it.  You know the intelligence of others.  Some sign gives them away.  It is coincidence?  Guessing games again?   Then think of what you could not possibly know, what no one could tell you.  Is there any doubt you do not know that fellow on the gibbet or the thought of that girl on the stake?  Watch someone die and you may read his mind at ease. You need not got so far.  We human beings understand one another better than we think.  Argue, deny, shout, denounce, destroy.  Nothing alters truth.  You, reader, see my flaws and concentrate on them.  You wonder why I choose this word and not that. My arguments are weak and you can drum up stronger ones against them.  But we are eye to eye for all of that.
E.E. Rehmus
Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.
Henry Kissinger (Leadership : Six Studies in World Strategy)
Cheolian, the first Korean-made communications satellite, was built and launched in the same year. Furthermore, the Advanced
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One reason for this debacle, according to Dan Colussy, who drove Iridium’s buyout in 2000, was the company’s refusal to update business assumptions. “The Iridium business plan was locked in place twelve years before the system became operational,” he recalls. That’s a long time, long enough that it was almost impossible to predict where the state of the art in digital communications would be by the time the satellite system was at last in place. We thus label this an Iridium Moment—using linear tools and the trends of the past to predict an accelerating future.
Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it))
Well,” Harry said, “look at it this way: Suppose you were an intelligent bacterium floating in space, and you came upon one of our communication satellites, in orbit around the Earth. You would think, What a strange, alien object this is, let’s explore it. Suppose you opened it up and crawled inside. You would find it very interesting in there, with lots of huge things to puzzle over. But eventually you might climb into one of the fuel cells, and the hydrogen would kill you. And your last thought would be: This alien device was obviously made to test bacterial intelligence and to kill us if we make a false step. “Now, that would be correct from the standpoint of the dying bacterium. But that wouldn’t be correct at all from the standpoint of the beings who made the satellite. From our point of view, the communications satellite has nothing to do with intelligent bacteria. We don’t even know that there are intelligent bacteria out there. We’re just trying to communicate, and we’ve made what we consider a quite ordinary device to do it.
Michael Crichton
She said, “Where is Lydia?” “I’m calling you from a comsat phone with a scrambler. Do you know what that is?” “Why the fuck would I know what that is?” “Comsat is an abbreviation for a series of communication satellites,” he explained, his voice maddeningly pedantic. “The phone relays calls through geostationary satellites instead of land-based cell towers. The scrambler masks the number and location, which means this call can’t be traced, not even by the NSA.
Karin Slaughter (Pretty Girls)
smart leaders who want to influence kids figure out how to influence those who have the most influence with kids. That’s why you should use every tool you have to locate and communicate with every parent. Hire a detective. Use a GPS satellite-tracking device. Interrogate their children. Do whatever you have to do to find out how you can connect with them. And use social media, email, snail mail, text messaging, apps, UPS deliveries, and whatever other techniques you can to engage every parent.
Reggie Joiner (Win Every Week: How to Help Every Parent and Every Small Group Leader Win Every Week (You Lead Series Book 1))
Son, in all moments of your life, keep your consciousness as a separate entity from your body, which is ego. Then become skilled in disconnecting the former from the latter at any time of your wish. In your beatific moments of meditation, whether with closed or open eyes, place your separated consciousness far above your head such as a satellite. Place it suitably high so that it can keep a watch over your thoughts and activities. Now establish an uninterrupted communication between that satellite and your mind. Once you master in this Kriya, all kinds of secrets that you may want to acquaint in the eternity, will unfold before you. You will discover that your life, as lived through the vision of such satellite, has become a permanent bliss. Son, it's alone the bliss that I wish you ever." I
Sudhir Mittal (The Secret World on the Other Side of Mind)
Everything tends to become a satellite - even our brains may be said to be outside us now, floating around us in the countless Hertzian ramifications of waves and circuits. This is not science fiction, merely a generalization of McLuhan's theory of the 'extensions of man' . Every aspect of human beings - their bodies in their biological, mental, muscular or cerebral manifestations - now floats free in the shape of mechanical or computer-aided replacement parts. McLuhan, however, conceives of all this as a positive expansion - as the universalization of man - through media. This is a very sanguine view. The fact is that all the functions of man's body, so far from gravitating around him in concentric order, have become satellites ordered excentrically with respect to him. They have gone into orbit on their own account; consequently it is man himself, in view of this orbital extraversion of his own functions, his own technologies, who is now in a position of ex-orbitation and ex-centricity. Vis-a-vis the satellites that he has created and put into orbit, it is man with his planet Earth, with his territory, with his body, who is now the satellite. Once transcendent, he has become exorbitate. It is not just the functions of man's body which, by becoming satellites, make man himself into a satellite. All those functions of our societies - notably the higher ones - which break off and go into orbit, contribute to the process. Loan, finance, the technosphere, communications - all have become satellites in an inaccessible space and left everything else to go to rack and ruin. Whatever fails to achieve orbital power is left in a state of abandonment which is permanent, since there is now no way out of it via some kind of transcendence.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
Recently, two target satellites were launched from Jiuquan. The test attacks by Red Coast were completely successful. Temperature inside the satellites reached nearly a thousand degrees, and all instruments and photographic equipment onboard were destroyed. In future wars, Red Coast can effectively strike at the enemy’s communication and reconnaissance satellites, like the KH-8 spy satellites on which the American Imperialists rely, as well as the KH-9, which are about to be launched. The lower-orbit spy satellites of the Soviet Revisionists are even more vulnerable. If necessary, we even have the capacity to destroy the Salyut space station of the Soviet Revisionists and the Skylab station that American Imperialists plan on launching next year.
Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1))
Airplanes are the poor man’s satellites.
Steven Magee
the late 1950s, two Italian brothers Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia set up a listening post in an abandoned German bunker known as Torre-Bert in Turin, Italy. The brothers claimed they were able to pick up radio transmissions from Sputnik 1 and Explorer 1, the world’s first artificial satellites. They were even were able to hear communication between Yuri Gagarin and his handlers on the ground. However, they also claim Gagarin was not the first to attempt to communicate with ground control. On 28 November 1960,
Tyler Butcher (Secrets!: 20 Conspiracies and other tales of intrigue)
I do not consent to be irradiated by biologically harmful satellites.
Steven Magee
The common wealth has been used to build highways, develop the Internet and the satellite system, uphold the banking system, regulate the stock market, and support the court system, which guarantees contracts. No business functioning in the market could exist
George Lakoff (Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision)
Because our tragedy is that we diverge as countrymen further and further away from one another, like a space ship broken apart in flight which now drifts mournfully in isolated orbits, satellites to each other, planets none, communications faint.
Norman Mailer
At one point during his second term, agents say Clinton managed to lose the plastic authenticator card with the codes he would need to verify his identity to launch nuclear weapons. “He has to keep those codes with him at all times, at all costs,” says a former agent. “With the codes, the White House Communications Agency can set up communications through the nuclear football and hit the satellites.” Retired general Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed in his book Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior that in Clinton’s last year in office, the required codes for launching a nuclear strike were missing for months. “This is a big deal—a gargantuan deal—and we dodged a silver bullet,” Shelton wrote. As the Secret Service sees it, Hillary and Bill Clinton have a business relationship, not a marriage.
Ronald Kessler (The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents)
Populism actually reinforces this elitism, because the celebration of ignorance cannot launch communications satellites, negotiate the rights of US citizens overseas, or provide for effective medications, all of which are daunting tasks even the dimmest citizens now demand and take for granted. Faced with a public that has no idea how most things work, experts likewise disengage, choosing to speak mostly to each other rather than to laypeople.
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
The inevitable fact is that satellite technology and space exploration are far more accessible to large institutions, military and corporate, and are hundreds of times more likely to benefit their goals than yours or mine or the Sierra Club's. These space communications technologies were invented to provide a competitive edge to the institutions that invented them, and to assist their intended exploitation of nature. People who wish to live within the confines of the planet's organic limits, and who are not committed to a constantly expanding economy, or to seeking control of resources or land, do not need satellites to map resources. The people who live near what we call "resources" already know they are there, and are happy to leave them in place.
Jerry Mander (In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations)
Synthetics diminished the great powers' need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access. Innovations in medicine and engineering - such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and "world-proofed" electronic equipment - further reduced the need for territorial control. They allowed objects and humans to safely travel to hostile terrains, meaning that colonizers didn't have to soften the ground beforehand. Standardization, similarly, made foreign places more accessible. (Page 314, 315)
Daniel Immerwahr (How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States)
The next break came from statute law, namely from the Equal Science Act. This says that “no scientific theory, hypothesis, principle, law definition, program, procedure or statement may be taught in any California school while in conflict with any other theory etc arising from any religious teaching, unless both theories etc are given equal emphasis as equally valid”. The idea was to give Genesis equal time with evolution as a creation theory, but it soon got out of hand, with Ptolemaic Anabaptists insisting on equal time with the Copernican theory, and finally with the Christian Flat Earth Assembly (Swiss Synod), whose representatives brought a suit against a California teacher for mentioning satellites. These are no satellites orbiting a flat earth, they pointed out, and so anyone mentioning satellites should also express doubt about their existence. A group of astronomers filed a countersuit, claiming that if satellites were unreal, their livelihood was in jeopardy. Moreover, satellite communications could not work and could not therefore be licensed by the government. ‘The state legislature had to meet quickly and draft an amendment to the California Comsat Act of 1998. In effect, the amendment hedged on the question of the reality of satellites by considering them as “sentient devices”. Thus if satellites believed in their own existence, they had a right to be real. Of course this opened up the whole question of freedom of religious belief for robots
John Sladek (Tik-Tok (Gateway Essentials Book 143))
There’s no ultimate manstopper, (Except for maybe a nuke.) Shot placement is the most important. The mob killed more people with .22 caliber bullets than any other. Fear is natural, embrace it, and learn to use it to your own advantage. Being fearless means you’re stupid. The more combat someone has seen, the less they talk about it. Courage is the first requirement of success in a crisis. Even a rugged, fully redundant, satellite enhanced, broadband, multimillion dollar tactical communications system will break down when you need it the most. Learn how to make decisions and carry out the plan without comms. A sense of humor will get you through anything from a gunshot wound to a divorce. Being alert will prevent 99% of the problems. Do unto others as they would do unto you; just make sure you do it first. There’s no such thing as a fair fight. If you fight, don’t be fair. If you know it all—you don’t. The first rule of a knife fight, is don’t get into a knife fight. The best defense to a knife fight is a full large capacity magazine used before the knife wielding person comes close enough to use their knife. Anything and everything can and WILL fail at the worst possible moment. If you don’t practice a movement at least 500 times, you’ll never do it under stress. You’ll never wake up knowing today is the day, so don’t sweat it. Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfectly practicing makes perfect. Our enemy is frequently smarter than we give them credit for. Train yourself to relax after the fight. We go into battle with what we have on our backs. The human mind is the deadliest weapon ever invented.
Ira Tabankin (Behind Every Blade of Grass (Behind Every Blade of Grass #4))
Chris was told he had been assigned to work in a communications vault that was the nerve center for this system of international espionage—a code room linking the TRW plant with CIA Headquarters and Rhyolite’s major ground stations in Australia. The continuing disclosures about the secret world fascinated Chris, and he was especially intrigued by what he saw as a bizarre contrast between the mechanical spies he had been told about and the location of the ground stations. The Rhyolite earth stations had been planted in a world that was about as close as man could find now to the Stone Age; they were situated near Alice Springs in the harsh Outback of Australia, an oasis in a desert where aborigines still lived much as Stone Age men did thousands of years ago. Under an Executive Agreement between the United States and Australia, Chris was told, all intelligence information collected by the satellites and relayed to the network of dish-shaped microwave antennas at Alice Springs was to be shared with the Australian intelligence service. However, Rogers told Chris, the United States, by design, was not living up to the agreement: certain information was not being passed to Australia. He explained that TRW was designing a new, larger satellite with a new array of sensors; the Australians, Rogers emphasized, were never to be told about it; anytime Chris sent messages that would reach Australia, he must delete any reference to the new satellite. Its name was Argus, or AR—for Advanced Rhyolite. Whoever in the CIA had selected the cryptonym must have enjoyed his choice, because it was appropriate. In Greek mythology, Argus was a giant with one hundred eyes … a vigilant guardian.
Robert Lindsey (The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage)
Das Abenteuer als anarchisches Tun in archaischen Räumen ist auch deshalb ein spannendes Experiment, weil damit primäre Erkenntnisse verbunden sind: größtmögliche Risiken bei größtmöglicher Freiheit. Wir leben heute in einer Zivilisation, die uns Freiräume nur vortäuscht. Und wir werden immer mehr davon aufgeben müssen. Auch weil wir so viele auf der Erde sind. Die Gesetze, die dem Grad der Freiheit des Individuums den Rahmen geben, werden deshalb immer enger. Auf dass die Gesellschaft funktionsfähig bleibt. Mir scheint aber, dass wir längst bei einem Minimum an Freiraum angekommen sind. Mit der »totalen Freiheit im Netz« sind wir dabei, den letzten Rest davon aufzugeben. Ich persönlich gehe lieber in die Berge als ins Internet. Einer Lawine kann ich ausweichen, einem Shitstorm nicht. Mit dem Argument größtmöglicher Meinungsfreiheit wird zuletzt ebendiese zerstört, weil der Einzelne im Netz diskreditiert werden kann, ohne dass irgendjemand dafür zur Rechenschaft gezogen wird. Freiheit ohne Verantwortung aber ist gefährlich. Wie jene kollektive im Netz. In Shitstürmen schwimmen meist Überheblichkeit, Oberflächlichkeit und Aggression mit – oft auch Rassismus und Fremdenhass, alles andere als Toleranz. Freiheit, sagt man, habe immer auch die Freiheit der Andersdenkenden zu sein. Wenn sich diese aber nicht mehr wehren können, bleibt sie Illusion. Als Illusion darf der Begriff »Freiheit« von Berggipfeln schallen – dort richtet er wenigstens keinen Schaden an. Sogar das Abenteuer hat sich inzwischen der digitalen Kontrollgesellschaft unterworfen. Als bräuchten Akteure heute zuallererst Öffentlichkeit. Sie stellen ihre Grenzgänge als Ankündigung ins Netz, stellen über Satellit eine »Wildnis« zur Schau und posten zuletzt ein »Abenteuer«, das seine archaische Dimension längst verloren hat, weil Freiraum und kontrollierter Raum damit ein und dasselbe geworden sind, der einstige Gefahrenraum zum Als-ob-Gefahrenraum geformt wurde. Mein ABC des traditionellen Abenteuers – »no artificial oxygen, no bolts, no communications, no drugs« – ist damit ad absurdum geführt.
Reinhold Messner (Über Leben)
The various branches of the US military have special operations forces. These are made up of units of soldiers who have been specially trained to tackle the most risky and dangerous military operations in the world—most of which are never heard about by the general public. Special-ops forces such as the Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Marine RECONs, and Air Force Special Tactics are comprised of the most elite soldiers in the world. Their training is beyond rigorous, and the qualifications to join such exclusive groups of warriors are extremely high. These elite soldiers make up a small percentage of the total military, but they are the tip of the spear when it comes to critical combat operations. These units usually operate in small numbers, drop behind enemy lines, practice tactics repetitively before executing a given operation, and train for every combat condition they might encounter. But even with an exceptional level of training and expertise, there is one critical component that is absolutely necessary for them to successfully reach their objective: communication. These elite special-ops fighters are part of a larger overarching entity with which they must stay in communication—SOCOM. This acronym stands for Special Operations Command.1 Key to their success from the elite soldier on the field all the way to the commander-in-chief is communication through SOCOM. A unit or soldier on mission in the theater of battle can have the latest weapons and technology, but they cannot access the fuller power and might of the military without the critical link—communications. If a satellite phone goes down or can’t access a signal, this life-or-death communication is broken. Without the ability to call in for air support when being overrun, medical evacuation when someone is injured, or passing on key intelligence information to SOCOM, an operation can be compromised. When communication is absent, things can go south in a hurry. In the realm of special military operations, communication is life.
Todd Hampson (The Non-Prophet's Guide™ to Spiritual Warfare (Non-Prophet's Guide(tm)))
Pierce was thinking about the New York fair around the same time that a modest display of Bell Labs innovations was being demonstrated at Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, which was being marked by the construction of a huge “space needle” on the city’s fairgrounds. At the Seattle fair visitors could ride a monorail to a Bell exhibit intimating a future of startling convenience: phones with speedy touch-tone buttons (which would soon replace dials), direct long-distance calling (which would soon replace operators), and rapid electronic switching (which would soon be powered by transistors). A visitor could also try something called a portable “pager,” a big, blocky device that could alert doctors and other busy professionals when they received urgent calls.2 New York’s fair would dwarf Seattle’s. The crowds were expected to be immense—probably somewhere around 50 or 60 million people in total. Pierce and David’s 1961 memo recommended a number of exhibits: “personal hand-carried telephones,” “business letters in machine-readable form, transmitted by wire,” “information retrieval from a distant computer-automated library,” and “satellite and space communications.” By the time the fair opened in April 1964, though, the Bell System exhibits, housed in a huge white cantilevered building nicknamed the “floating wing,” described a more conservative future than the one Pierce and David had envisioned.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
Respect for the problem places all that we're struggling with into the landscape of the conversation itself. It lets us step back and take a satellite view of the way our tough conversation is playing out. The conversation is no longer a battlefield, but a course of obstacles through which we move.
Holly Weeks (Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them)
Pierce considered himself conservative about any satellite gambit. He wasn’t certain that Bell engineers knew enough yet to build a foolproof and durable active satellite—one that could operate for more than a few weeks or months. He also knew that the small research department at Bell Labs, unlike the huge development department, lacked the manpower and budget necessary for an active project. “There’s a difference, you see, in thinking idly about something, and in setting out to do something,” he explained to an interviewer in the early 1960s. “You begin to see what the problems are when you set out to do things, and that’s why we thought [passive] would be a good idea.” A passive satellite, he added, probably wouldn’t be useful in terms of the business of communications. But it tested the possibility of orbiting relays before they were developed into something more. A passive satellite, in other words, was an experiment. Ten years earlier, Pierce had witnessed how problems with the transistor didn’t show up until the device entered the development and production stage. Here, too, was a relatively low-risk opportunity to confront and solve the practical challenges of this new technology—“to get one’s hands dirty”—before making a slew of big and expensive mistakes.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
AT&T, he believed, should not be in the space business. But all of these concerns may have been magnified by Kelly’s opposition to the kind of innovation that might later be described as “discontinuous.”14 Bell Labs had just completed the successful transatlantic cable; the future of communications to Europe and beyond appeared to reside in new and better cables. These would be incremental innovations. In such a vision of the future, orbiting satellites weren’t only a risky and unproven technology; they were also—at least to a telephone executive with a well-defined, step-by-step ten-year plan for improving the system—a strange sideways leap.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
Among the companies vying to control space communications, one possibility was to launch several satellites that circled the earth at about 22,300 miles, which was the height at which their orbits would keep pace with the earth’s rotation. Such “geostationary” satellites would stay fixed in the sky above a particular point on earth, and could theoretically be available for transmission at any time.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
A forecast from SpaceWorks in 2019 further predicted 2,000–2,800 nano or microsatellites will launch in over the next five years between the military, commercial, and civil sectors. This segment of satellites already increased in launch and production by 25 percent from 2017 to 2018; in 2018, 253 of the planned 262 nanosatellites actually launched, reflecting “Greater launch consistency and better execution on the part of small satellite operators.”5 Factors like the Internet of Things (IoT), demand for communications data, and increased need for Earth observation are all helping to drive this market.
Robert C. Jacobson (Space Is Open for Business: The Industry That Can Transform Humanity)
The list of secrets that, if passed to a foreign power, could bring the death penalty for espionage includes data about nuclear weapons, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, war plans, codes or communications intelligence, major weapons systems, or any “major element of defense strategy.” 30 The Mind of Robert Hanssen Robert Philip Hanssen was a walking paradox—a zealous
David Wise (Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America)
If you had to boil down the Wal-Mart system to one single idea, it would probably be communication, because it is one of the real keys to our success. We do it in so many ways, from the Saturday morning meeting to the very simple phone call, to our satellite system. The necessity for good communication in a big company like this is so vital it can’t be overstated. What good is figuring out a better way to sell beach towels if you aren’t going to tell everybody in your company about it?
Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
We have plenty of information to contrast the post-1960 advances in computing capacities and speeds with the gains in all other key sectors of modern economies, and the verdict is clear. Rapid exponential growth has been an admirable reality in the advances of solid-state electronics and its applications in devices and designs ranging from personal computers and mobile phones to communication and Earth-observation satellites and data and image processing, but there has been no evidence of any ever-faster innovations in nearly all other sectors of modern economies, from food production to long-distance transportation.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
Their fight is not against me and you only, but against all humanity, they are afraid of something we do not know! They know, Robert, they know where we come from, where we are going, but they do not want us to know that. Perhaps the first humans knew, and over the years, Satan gained control over us and began to distort our goals in this life, until we became what we are, mere slaves to imaginary systems created by their minds. Nationalities, religions, cultures, races, and everything noble in this world, are distorted by our minds to become a cause of division and a source of conflict and clash, internal wars in which people of the same nationality kill each other due to differences in skin color, or the length of the nose! Watch the march of technical and scientific development! When scientists were able to probe the mysteries of space, this turned into a source of conflict between the great powers! And instead of uniting to go further, their minds froze as we arrived, around the Earth, investing all these technologies in spying, encryption, and communications satellites, to protect ourselves from ourselves! We were drained as well as our time and resources in side struggles. Atomic, nuclear, and hydrogen energy, instead of focusing most of our focus on becoming a source of scientific exploration and jumping towards finding answers, their minds have devised to become an arms race to threaten each other and annihilate each other! The bulk of the discovery has been frozen in Bombs and Weapons! Why does a country have thousands of nuclear and hydrogen bombs? What is the purpose of pushing all these capabilities on this huge number of bombs? A hundred hydrogen bombs are enough to destroy the earth and those on it, but it has become a source of attrition. They are like parasites, Robert, whose job it is to seize control of every discovery, invention, and idea, which will advance us forward, lay their hands on them, freeze and drain them in strife, divisions, and competition with their supposed opponents. Humans do not fight for food or life, they fight for distraction, attrition, and all the other reasons you may hear, beliefs, ideologies, and racism, they are all just excuses our minds have been able to find to mislead us, they are nothing but a cover to hide the reality of our permanent occupation in infighting. We are of three types: A few are enlightened, they control their minds, but they are marginalized, warriors, they have no means. Most are absent, savages, busy with their daily sustenance, tools used by Satan to suppress the few who are enlightened. And the few that Satan has control over them, those who control everything around us, they enslave us. A vast secret purge that takes place in secret, whoever understands, realizes, decides to get out of the box, his fate is in the army of Satan, or death, they will take him to their secret societies, to become one of their soldiers, or get rid of him. They are not ghosts, Robert, they are among us, they have headquarters in various parts of the world, and internal laws, and ranks and ranks of their associates, and internal order. I am not talking about a secret group whose name you have previously heard, blown up by the media, like Freemasonry. No, it is not like this. These groups are nothing but distractions for our work on them, so we keep looking in the wrong place. He was afraid of her words, and he was afraid of what was happening around him recently, and he feared for her, she seemed to believe in every letter of it as if she was repeating a speech she was told, which she memorized by heart. What scared me the most, was that everything she said sounded like Mousa said, quite logical…
Ahmad I. AlKhalel (Zero Moment: Do not be afraid, this is only a passing novel and will end (Son of Chaos Book 1))
From the point of view of admiralty law, this was a smart position for Morrell to take. The Limitation of Liability Act, passed in 1851, caps a shipowner’s liability to the value of the ship, if the accident is not caused by the vessel owner’s neglect or malfeasance. In other words, as long as a shipping company doesn’t interfere with its captain’s decisions while he or she is at sea, explains admiralty and maritime lawyer Chris Hug, vessel owners can limit their liability when the causes of the accident occurred without their “privity or knowledge.” Shipping was a risky business throughout the nineteenth century; Congress believed that its role was to shelter owners from lawsuits and egregious payouts. Now much of American admiralty law focuses on who is responsible for what, and much of it favors the shipowners. One could say that before the age of satellite communication, the Limitation of Liability Act made a certain amount of sense. When a vessel was out of sight of land, its owners had no means of contacting it. At that point, how could they prevent their officers from making fatal decisions? Holding a shipping company accountable didn’t seem fair. But these days, the law seems profoundly anachronistic. It could even encourage deliberate negligence.
Rachel Slade (Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro)
Governments continue to be motivated by the idea that the better they comprehend the world, the better they will be able to control and exploit it. They have been joined by large corporations, which also see the value in quantifying and classifying our world. From high-resolution drone and satellite images, to geographically tagged photos and tweets, mobile phones that constantly ping their location to colossal databases, and the “Internet of things”—the idea that most of the objects around us will soon be capable of communicating their whereabouts and status—one way or another, we continue to wander through the world, size it up, and digitally hammer colored nails into it.
Tim Harford (Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives)
Fucking whole country’s filled with nasty, unhappy, confused, pissed-off people, and not one of them with the brain power to honestly deal with their situation. They talk about simpler times—before there was AIDS and crack and gangs and mass communications and satellites and airplanes and global warming—like it’s something they could possibly get back to. And they can’t figure out why they’re so fucked up, so they find someone to blame. Niggers, Jews, whites, Chinks, Arabs, Russians, pro-choicers, pro-lifers—who do you got?
Dennis Lehane (A Drink Before the War (Kenzie & Gennaro, #1))
I can claim a few successes as a minor prophet. I placed the first lunar impact in 1959, and Luna II hit the Mare Imbrium at 21:01 GMT on September 13, 1959. I was watching hopefully through my Questar telescope in Columbo as the Moon sank into the Indian Ocean, but saw nothing. Prelude to Space was written just two years after my 1945 paper on synchronous communications satellites and was, therefore, the first work of fiction in which the idea of “comsats” was advocated. I have reason to believe that it had some influence on the men who turned this dream into reality.
Arthur C. Clarke (Prelude to Space)
China launched the first quantum satellite, making hack proof communication possible for the first time ever.  This was such an amazing feat that it has left the United States decades behind China in the realm of quantum technology.  This event can also be compared in significance to the Soviet Union being the first country to launch a man into space, which was plastered all over the front page of every newspaper, but no one’s really talking about China’s satellite now because most people don’t have any idea what quantum physics is all about. *
D.E. Boyer (Master Your Mind: The More You Think, The Easier It Gets)
A major challenge in constructing theories and models is to identify the important quantities that capture the essential dynamics at each organizational level of a system. For instance, in thinking about the solar system, the masses of the planets and the sun are clearly of central importance in determining the motion of the planets, but their color (Mars red, the Earth mottled blue, Venus white, etc.) is irrelevant: the color of the planets is irrelevant for calculating the details of their motion. Similarly, we don’t need to know the color of the satellites that allow us to communicate on our cell phones when calculating their detailed motion.
Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies)
A major challenge in constructing theories and models is to identify the important quantities that capture the essential dynamics at each organizational level of a system. For instance, in thinking about the solar system, the masses of the planets and the sun are clearly of central importance in determining the motion of the planets, but their color (Mars red, the Earth mottled blue, Venus white, etc.) is irrelevant: the color of the planets is irrelevant for calculating the details of their motion. Similarly, we don’t need to know the color of the satellites that allow us to communicate on our cell phones when calculating their detailed motion. However, this is clearly a scale-dependent statement in that if we look at the Earth from a very close distance of, say, just a few miles above its surface rather than from millions of miles away in space, then what was perceived as its color is now revealed as a manifestation of the huge diversity of the Earth’s surface phenomena, which include everything from mountains and rivers to lions, oceans, cities, forests, and us. So what was irrelevant at one scale can become dominant at another. The challenge at every level of observation is to abstract the important variables that determine the dominant behavior of the system.
Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies)
Their biggest problem was connectivity––having a communication link to the system.  Even though Borger could bundle enough satellite links to make it work anywhere, the signal would still be traceable.  And relatively easily for someone with the right skills. This made Arecibo the perfect camouflage.
Michael C. Grumley (Ripple (Breakthrough, #4))
The world of communications was diametrically opposed to the ethos of software. The communications industry was built upon a century of physical infrastructure investments: digging millions of miles of ditches and laying down wire, launching satellites into space, or spending billions buying wireless spectrum from governments. These were big, high-risk activities, so they moved at a slow pace.
Jeff Lawson (Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century)
The Device consists of a small telescreen, headset, and keypad. It combines the functions of telephone, radio, television, newspaper, and encyclopedia. Users are warned not to attempt to open the housing of the Device, or the power supply will explode. Every Device is keyed to a specific user, by means of electrodes built into the headset that recognize his unique brain-wave pattern. Signals from the Device are relayed by a network of thousands of tiny satellites in Low Earth Orbit, collectively known as the Cloud. The Device is so cheap and so useful that it soon becomes an indispensable part of daily life. It’s impossible to buy, sell, communicate, or travel without one. The Device becomes a de facto national ID card, to be carried at all times. Children are issued their own Device at the age of eight.
Fenton Wood (Five Million Watts (Yankee Republic Book 2))
I’d sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
From the steam engine to the assembly line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it.
Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom)
His features were Middle Eastern, his eyes haunted but also defiant. They were all defiant, Gray had found. When he looked at someone like al-Omari, Gray couldn’t help but think of a Dostoyevsky creation, the displaced outsider, brooding, plotting and methodically stroking a weapon of anarchy. It was the face of a fanatic, of one possessed by a deranged evil. It was the same type of person who’d taken away forever the two people Gray had loved most in the world. Though al-Omari was thousands of miles away in a facility only a very few people even knew existed, the picture and sound were crystal clear thanks to the satellite downlink. Through his headset he asked al-Omari a question in English. The man promptly answered in Arabic and then smiled triumphantly. In flawless Arabic Gray said, “Mr. al-Omari, I am fluent in Arabic and can actually speak it better than you. I know that you lived in England for years and that you speak English better than you do Arabic. I strongly suggest that we communicate in that language so there is absolutely no misunderstanding between us.” Al-Omari’s smile faded, and he sat straighter in his chair. Gray explained his proposal. Al-Omari was to become a spy for the United States, infiltrating one of the deadliest terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East. The man promptly refused. Gray persisted and al-Omari refused yet again, adding that “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “There are currently ninety-three terrorist organizations in the world as recognized by the U.S. State Department, most of them originating in the Middle East,” Gray responded. “You have confirmed membership in at least three of them. In addition, you were found with forged passports, structural plans to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and bomb-making material. Now you’re going to work for us, or it will become distinctly unpleasant.” Al-Omari smiled and leaned toward the camera. “I was interrogated years ago in Jordan by your CIA and your military and your FBI, your so-called Tiger Teams. They sent females in wearing only their underwear. They wiped their menstrual blood on me, or at least what they called their menstrual blood, so I was unclean and could not perform my prayers. They rubbed their bodies against me, offered me sex if I talk. I say no to them and I am beaten afterward.” He sat back. “I have been threatened with rape, and they say I will get AIDS from it and die. I do not care. True followers of Muhammad do not fear death as you Christians do. It is your greatest weakness and will lead to your total destruction. Islam will triumph. It is written in the Qur’an. Islam will rule the world.
David Baldacci (The Camel Club (Camel Club, #1))
The birth of TERLS, and then VSSC, gave India the capability to design, develop and produce world-class rocket systems. India developed the capability of launching geo-synchronous, sun-synchronous and meteorology spacecraft, communication satellites and remote sensing satellites, thereby providing fast communication, weather forecasting and also locating water resources for the country.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
If you go back to 1980 – that’s a long time ago in computer land – there were two artists called Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz and they created a work called Hole in Space. They set up a video screen in Lincoln Center in New York and another video screen in Century City in Los Angeles with a live satellite link between them so that people could see and talk to each other in the other location. It was an unannounced event and the public’s reaction was ecstatic and spontaneous – you can see it if you put ‘hole in space’ into YouTube – they’re incredibly enthusiastic about it. The artists called it a public communication sculpture. In a way everyone involved was witnessing the grandmother of Skype!
Grayson Perry (Playing to the Gallery)
The driving force behind many of Israel’s most celebrated defense products is Unit 8200. The intelligence unit of the IDF, it is the equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US and is staffed by elite young recruits with an appetite for spying, computer hacking, and surveillance. Its primary goal is mass monitoring of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, detailing all their personal and political information, and listening to communications from allies and foes across the world. This is achieved principally through a base in the Negev desert where lines of satellite dishes suck up domestic and international calls and a range of other communications. The Urim base feeds information to Unit 8200 and Israel collates details from both the base and covert listening posts in its embassies around the globe. Urim is one of the world’s biggest signals intelligence stations.
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
AT&T developed cross-country systems of microwave relay towers, which marched across the countryside from coast to coast and border to border, every 20 to 30 miles. The function of the relay tower was to receive the microwave signal, amplify it, and send it on its way to the next tower. To transmit microwaves across the Atlantic Ocean, however, it was necessary to establish a single relay tower at least 400 miles high, or station ships every 30 miles, all the way across the ocean. Before the space age arrived, the 400-mile-high tower seemed to be as unlikely a prospect as the spectacle of 100 communications-relay ships strung out across the ocean. That possibility that a very high tower could be established by launching an orbital satellite was suggested first by the British science writer Arthur C. Clarke in an article, '*Extra-Terrestrial Relays," in Wireless World m October 1945. Nine years later, JohnR. Pierce, who directed communications research for the Bell Telephone Laboratories, described a practical communications-satellite system to the Princeton section of the Institute for Radio Engineers
Richard S. Lewis (Appointment on the Moon, Revised Edition)
A cavalry scout is generally thought to function as the eyes and ears of a commander during battle. But in fact, a scout’s role extends quite a bit further. We refer to ourselves as “jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none,” and we are trained to have a working familiarity with—quite literally—every job in the army. We are experts in reconnaissance, countersurveillance, and navigation, but we’re also extremely comfortable with all aspects of radio and satellite communications. We know how to assemble and deploy three-man hunter/killer teams. We’re pretty good at blowing things up using mines and high explosives. We can function as medics, vehicle mechanics, and combat engineers. And we have a thorough understanding of every single weapons system, from a 9-mm handgun to a 120-mm howitzer.
Clinton Romesha (Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor)