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"There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough."
- Jerry Pournelle
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| Spy Beam | ||
| A surveillance device that projects energy into a room, revealing conversation taking place. |
| He said "The commission will, of course, have a spy beam on our conversation. This is against the law, but they will use one nonetheless..."
"However," and Avakim seated himself deliberately, "the recorder I have on the table - which is a perfectly ordinary recorder to all appearances and performs its duties well - has the additional property of completely blanketing the spy beam. This is something they will not discover at once." |
| Technovelgy from Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the object-finder beam from L.F. Stone's 1931 story The Conquest of Gola and the spy-ray goggles from 'Doc Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
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| India Ponders Always-On Smartphone Location Tracking |
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'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
