Charles Platt Quotes

Everyone knows that the broadband era will breed a new generation of online services, but this is only half of the story. Like any innovation, broadband will inflict major changes on its environment. It will destroy, once and for all, the egalitarian vision of the Internet.

Even if major funding is obtained for cold fusion, conceivably the phenomenon could suffer from problems as intractable as those of hot fusion. It may never work reliably or generate enough energy to be commercially viable.

When the International Space Station is finally launched, it will be fitted with special nickel-hydrogen batteries weighing a total of several tons, with a lifetime of just five years, requiring spares to be brought up from Earth at literally astronomical expense.

We can laugh all we like at Micromaniacs, but they will have the last laugh - because they are designing the future that the rest of us will have to live in.

The idea of an e-book has been around since the late 1970s, when researchers at Xerox PARC got on the case. Their prototype used millions of little magnetic particles, black on one side and white on the other, loosely embedded in the surface of a soft sheet of rubber.

Any man who's got a big hoard has the right to be first in line, the way I see it. He's earned it see. Them that have got nothing to their name, well, they don't deserve nothing, do they?

The public is eager for stories of True Cybercrime, and the media is happy to glamorize the subject. But when teenagers take the bait and live out our fantasies for us, we punish them for frightening us too much.

In Finland in the winter, when the sky is totally choked with clouds, the country becomes one big sensory deprivation tank.

I've always resented the force of attraction that traps me here on Planet Earth. It makes me feel like a bug stuck to a piece of duct tape. Ever since my teenage years, when I used to read a lot of science fiction and took it much too seriously, I've dreamed of somehow reaching escape velocity. I am, you might say, anti-gravity.

Unsurprisingly, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) - once a luxury for room-sized computer installations - is now a standard item both in home offices and all the networked tiers above, protecting servers and online service providers, Internet backbones, phone companies, and even cable TV networks.

If smart technology can transform 3-D from a crude novelty to a genuine visual enhancement, why shouldn't a sophisticated odor synthesizer follow a similar path?

Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban.

Scaremongering is an age-old political ritual. There are public officials who have benefited by playing up the 'hacker threat' so that they can win approval by cracking down on it.

Our information network is much better protected than our railroad network, and someone who cracks a system is able to cause far less human damage than someone who derails a train. Why, then, has 'computer crime' caused so much hysteria? Perhaps because the public is so willing - eager, even - to be scared by bogeymen.

Misery is the stuff of comedy, if one can just live long enough to get over it.

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.

Personally, I believe that government, rather than money, tends to be the primary factor limiting the development of new technologies.

The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don't create an equal amount of additional value, there's no net gain.

As cyberspace matures into a totally immersive experience, I'm betting it will turn out to be fully odor-enabled.

The landscape of the Net has changed; that cyberfrontier of the past has become a teeming city of people, transactions, and businesses.