Phone System Quotes & Sayings

Honestly, Jared, one thing at a time. Why are you in a well with me? This is a really bad rescue!" [ ... ]
"I called the police as I was running to the well. I'm sure they're coming."
"Did they say they were coming?" Kami asked suspiciously. "Or did you shout, 'Kami's in the well!' before jumping in the well too, thus loosing your phone and making sure the police think it was some kids playing a dumb joke?"
Jared paused. [ ... ]
"Alternate plan," Jared said. "Do you have a very intelligent collie who might communicate through a system of barks to your parents that little Kami is in the well? — Sarah Rees Brennan

Paying for a taxi ride using your mobile phone is easier in Nairobi than it is in New York, thanks to Kenya's world-leading mobile-money system, M-PESA.'1 This was the opening paragraph in The Economist's article of 27 May 2013, 'Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money? — Victor Kgomoeswana

I was fascinated with the phone system and how it worked; I became a hacker to get better control over the phone company. — Kevin Mitnick

When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn't thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares. — Charles Stross

In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods
the long-distance phone call, the telegram
were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to "Yes, he's arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard he was in Oregon," and "We expect him back in a few weeks." I'm not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button's touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers. — Julian Barnes

Enabling people to make and receive phone calls during flight demonstrated the flexibility of a high-speed connectivity system. We allowed our guests to make calls to the ground while we flew over international waters. — Christopher Peterson

If your work is done on the phone, then surely you can set up some kind of wireless system. If your work involves reading or writing reports, then this too could be done outside. — Tom Hodgkinson

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you - and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. — Jonathan Zittrain

At first, sending the confession by real mail had felt like a genius device. I would not have to sit by my phone and watch for the signs that indicated it had been sent and seen. Slim but solid paper would, I hoped, convey me better. Now I had to consider the very real frailties of the system. Ludicrous, in fact, to entrust something of such magnitude to a mailman. A perfect stranger. I looked up stories of nefarious New York mailmen. There was one who has willfully upturned the lives of ordinary people like myself by hoarding 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail. The city was crawling with thieves and malcontents. — Olivia Sudjic

Observations. Therefore, the entire archbishop's residence, from the bedroom to the dining room, was bugged with listening devices. The communists were rather clumsy about it, pretending to show up as random technicians who needed to work on the phone lines or electrical system. — Jason Evert

An elaborate system of etiquette and social standards flowered around the home phone: how long a child might be allowed to stay on the phone, how late one could call without being impolite, and of course, the dread implications of a late night call which violated that norm. — John Battelle

To show what is still needed, let us examine how an ideal system might reason about the burglar alarm situation of Figure 1.2. Upon receiving the phone call from your neighbor, only the burglary hypothesis is triggered; your decision whether to drive home or stay at work is made solely on the basis of the parameter P(False alarm), which summarizes all other (unexplicated) causes for an alarm sound. After a moment's reflection, the possibility of an April Fools' Day joke may — Judea Pearl

Every scrape, site, range and page; every game, download, hack, song, movie and virrie on the Web. Everything on your phone. Everything on your 'puta. Even the content directories of your cupboards. Almost every system has been brute-forced; passwords cracked, firewalls breached. Nothing has been left untouched. — A. Ashley Straker

Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system. — Nick Hornby

I pick up the phone and press the few buttons until I can hear my heavy, creeper breathing over the PA system. I start beat boxing into the phone, making sure I spit more than necessary. Yo, Marky Mark. Please come to your office immediately, there's a funky bunch of manly stud waiting for you. — Jay McLean

Some logics get nervous breakdowns. Overloaded phone system behaves like frightened child. Mike did not have upsets, acquired sense of humor instead. Low one. If he were a man, you wouldn't dare stoop over. His idea of thigh-slapper would be to dump you out of bed - or put itch powder in pressure suit. — Robert A. Heinlein

system. Jobs was furious that Google had decided to compete with Apple in the phone business. "We did not enter the search business," he said. "They — Walter Isaacson

The insane rush of endorphins that flooded my system the moment my phone vibrated and her name popped up on screen was worrying. I'd never been addicted to anything before, but I thought maybe this is what it felt like to be a junkie in desperate need of a hit.
"Edward Cullen, you poor, miserable bastard," I said as I locked my phone screen and stared at the ceiling. "I should not have judged you so harshly. — Krystal Sutherland

I think of Twitter as a messaging system that you didn't know you needed until you had it. Think about when cell phones first started coming out. People said, "Why would I carry my phone around?" And now you'll drive back to your house thirty miles if you forget your cell phone. — Biz Stone

My opportunity to design school choice systems began in 2003 with a phone call from Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education. He knew of my work on the medical match and wondered if similar efforts might help reorganize the dysfunctional, congested system then used to match students to high schools. — Alvin E. Roth

In the early 1970s, phone phreaks manipulated the long-distance system using blue boxes that they built from sketchy photocopied schematics that were often riddled with errors. Not many had the skill to do this. Phreaking was restricted to a select few. — Charles Platt

[Texting] discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. E-mails take some time to work their way through the Internet, through switches and routers and servers, and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out More! More! Give me more! — Daniel J. Levitin

Unlike the phone system, the Internet has no Ma Bell or FCC to mandate new policies for the entire system. Not even Microsoft can make us all upgrade our routers. I think. — Paul Boutin

It's hardly a secret that I'm skeptical of declarations that the aliens are out and about on our planet. Still, I try to answer every one of these mails and phone calls because, after all, it's not a violation of physics to travel from one star system to another. — Seth Shostak

We all need a technological detox; we need to throw away our phones and computers instead of using them as our pseudo-defence system for anything that comes our way. We need to be bored and not have anything to use to shield the boredom away from us. We need to be lonely and see what it is we really feel when we are. If we continue to distract ourselves so we never have to face the realities in front of us, when the time comes and you are faced with something bigger than what your phone, food, or friends can fix, you will be in big trouble. — Evan Sutter

For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market. — Ethan Zuckerman

It occurred to Clark that he should call someone, actually everyone, that he should call everyone he'd ever loved and talk to them and tell them all the things that mattered, but it was apparently already too late for this, his phone displaying a message he'd never seen before: SYSTEM OVERLOAD EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY. — Emily St. John Mandel

The Internet is not nearly as fail-safe as the phone system. — David Filo

As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place. — Christopher Nolan

The government's rationale here is beautiful in its simplicity. American criminals have constitutional rights not because they are natural-born Americans but precisely because they are criminals. Deportations, however, are not part of the criminal justice system. "Removal proceedings," wrote the circuit judge in the Gutierrez-Berdin case, "are civil, not criminal, and the exclusionary rule does not generally apply to them." So the undocumented alien who kills a room full of Rotarians with an ax has a right to counsel, a phone call, and protection against improper searches. The alien caught crossing the street on his way to work has no rights at all. Strangest — Matt Taibbi

Unlike the phone system, which is engineered around an application, the Internet layered model allows you to, in essence, separate applications from infrastructure. — Michael K. Powell

Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not mitigate how little the system accounts for the patient's best interest. Just when you are at your weakest and least able to make all the phone calls, traverse the maze of insurance, and plead for health-care referrals is that one time when you have to - your life may depend on it. — Ross I. Donaldson

The infrastructure we provide is the same in a remote town in Africa or New York or an archipelago in Sweden: we use the same system, and the chips inside the phone are the same. — Hans Vestberg