Charles Platt

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

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

At 3-D Imax theaters, audiences have shown they are willing to pay a premium to wear headgear fitted with liquid-crystal lenses synchronized via infrared signals with the movie projector, which runs at twice the normal frame rate. These movie viewers plumb new depths in depth perception - they experience extreme realism. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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

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. ”