As the command ship of the fleet based in Naples, Italy, it has special electronic and communications equipment it uses to transmit orders and information.
The hand-held devices have been used for administrative duties ranging from transmitting orders of the day via the infrared ports installed around the ship to downloading e-mail.
"He is the person who was totally trusted by many different people in the various countries and was able to coordinate and transmit orders from bin Laden," a Spanish judicial official said.
Stephen Brough of Profile Books, a London publisher affiliated with The Economist, says that faxes are still useful in transmitting orders to distributors, and in allowing authors to indicate changes on page proofs easily.
The pioneer of network theory, Walter Powell, summed up the reasons for this as follows: the network is better at adapting to a situation where the quality of information is crucial to success, but where information itself is fluid; a hierarchy is better if you are only transmitting orders and responses, and the surrounding situation is predictable.
He was in the more straightforward business of transmitting orders to fire prosecutors, and tapping journalists' phones.The ghost shipHe went to Reagan's White House, fresh from a five-year stint as NATO's supreme commander, with, he supposed, a guarantee from the ever genial president that he would be the spokesman on foreign policy ("I'll look to you, Al").
And hundreds of millions have been spent on building straighter cables to shave a few fractions of a second off the time it takes to transmit orders between the world's big trading centres: London, New York, Chicago and Tokyo.
Until Amazon recently began building its own book warehouses, the online booksellers sole task was to transmit orders to two of the country's biggest book distributors, Ingram Books and Baker & Taylor, which then drop shipped to customers.
However, with no sign of the cruiser by 23 November, shore-based wireless stations began transmitting orders for Sydney to break silence and report in.
