James Gleick Quotes

GPS are everywhere. They are in cars. They were even in the half-tracks that, initially at least, were going to make the ground invasion in Kosovo possible.

All of us know today the value of communications satellites, weather satellites, resources satellites, etc.

In this new age of GPS, Google Earth and multidimensional digital maps, mapping is suddenly hugely relevant again.

Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space.

The electronic spectrum is the only natural resource in which there's no such thing as private property rights. You can't own a piece of the spectrum.

I began my career at Teledyne, where I worked on various navigation systems, including Inertial, Doppler radar, and other conventional radio navigation systems.

Acting is like a high wire act. Your margin for error is very slim.

Mobile communications had been around for a long time, but always as a limited market, constrained by the radio spectrum.

Consider: The human genome consists of about 3.3 billion base pairs. Since there are only four types of pair, that amounts to 0.8 gigabytes of information, or about what you can fit on a CD. With a microwave radio transmitter, you could beam that amount of information into space in a few minutes, and have it travel to anyone at light speed.

We are a communicating nation which needs access to space, access to the seas.

Digital is a disaster. No digital radio has the correct time and they don't even agree with each other.

GPS is expensive because it is a very slow communication channel - you need to communicate with three or four satellites for an extended duration at 50 bits per second.

Government must make spectrum free. There should be free network, but it is not happening.

The transmission systems are still regulated.

When the government allocates monopoly rights to frequency, and there are only a handful in each community, it's picking the winners in the competition.

Bob Hope was totally regimented. I go in and say a line like, 'Hi Bob' and I'd have to do it five times, and then Bob would take me to the writers to say the line different ways. He wouldn't let me ad-lib.

Technology is at a point where we should allow multiple parties to occupy the same spectral space.

Radio has no future. Wireless [telegraphy] is all very well but I'd rather send a message by a boy on a pony

I joined Bell Laboratories at Crawford Hill in 1963 as part of A. B. Crawford's Radio Research department in R. Kompfner's laboratory.

The Federal Communications Commission licensed satellite radio to be a national-only radio service.

Well, the United States will continue to be a world leader in wireless communications.

The mobile phone is not a toy; it's a device that uses radio waves.

The notion that there's finite spectrum is mostly wrong.

Ideally, the ITU must be made up of truly visionary leaders - those willing to do the hard work to get critical spectrum bands realigned and put to their highest use.

The amount of subtle and beautiful physics that's necessary to make a smartphone work is enormous.