Charles Platt Quotes

#1. The always-on economy, by definition, depends upon continuous energy.

Charles Platt

#2. 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.

Charles Platt

#3. 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.

Charles Platt

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

Charles Platt

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

Charles Platt

#6. 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.

Charles Platt

#7. 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.

Charles Platt

#8. 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.

Charles Platt

#9. A future at Wal-Mart may sound a less-than-stellar prospect, but it's a whole lot better than no future at all.

Charles Platt

#10. 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.

Charles Platt

#11. 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?

Charles Platt

#12. Teachers don't just teach; they can be vital personalities who help young people to mature, to understand the world, and to understand themselves. A good education consists of much more than useful facts and marketable skills.

Charles Platt

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

Charles Platt

#14. If low-temperature fusion does exist and can be perfected, power generation could be decentralized. Each home could heat itself and produce its own electricity, probably using a form of water as fuel. Even automobiles might be cold-fusion powered.

Charles Platt

#15. 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.

Charles Platt

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

Charles Platt

#17. 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.

Charles Platt

#18. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

Charles Platt

#19. 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

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

Charles Platt