Enrob Annual Report 2001

The Enrob Annual Report is hysterical. As painful as the situation is for the many employees that suffer from the real Enron collapse, even they might take comfort from the pointedly acidic portrayal of executives gone power-hungry mad. This doesn't let anyone off the hook.

Anyone who has read through an annual report and wondered what it actually meant and how truthful can it be, will enjoy this report, written with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Give it to your favorite CFO or congressman - might wake them up a little!

Very funny and beautifully designed! Sprinkled with hand written, politically incorrect comments to give it the look of a real Annual Report that has been given the "once-over" buy the clueless corporate muckety mucks. The photo illustrations are hilarious and the dialogue is classic corporate double talk. If you're sick of corporate greed (or just want to learn how to get in on all of the action) buy this book!

With the Enrob Annual Report 2001 Platt and Narita have humorously captured the essence of corporate greed in the 21st century, from that money hungry guy on the cover, through the myriad of outrageously immoral financial schemes presented in this clever parody. I have read many of Mr. Platt's science and technical articles in Wired magazine and his expertise in this area has resulted here in a great collection of techno-babble schemes replete with "we're in the money" charts and graphs. Off planet accounting, government bribery, retirement fund theft, investor fraud, environmental destruction, and commodity manipulation; all areas are completely covered in Enrob's misguided quest for profits.

This is the lighter side of the Enron mess. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Charles Platt describes how to write, and includes complete BASIC source code for 15 computer applications. The subject matter for these applications range from games to utilities to a very cool simulation called "Rat-Race" that lets you make AI-like decisions about your life (you will suffer the consequences of some actions). For 1985, when the PC market was still emerging, he put together an incredibly useful little book for new programmers and wannabe programmers (like I was). I got my first taste of real programming from this book.

He actually covered the BASIC language for Commodore, several Apple PCs, Columbia, Adam, Franklin, IBM and clones, Kaypro, Osborne, TRS-80, Zenith, and more. It's a very complete list.

I highly recommend this book for people who want to look at what programming was like in the 80s, or those who want to get neat ideas for new student projects.

By no means was I disappointed, but frankly a lot of the plot was weak enough to allow the fact that is was merely there to display the concepts show thru.

However, the concepts themselves were very well detailed and quite plausible, even if I /would/ prefer to think you could record someone NONdestructively.

Overall, it was worth the money and definitely worth reading. But if you're not obsessed with the idea of digital immortality, I don't know how much you'll like it.

Can you live forever by electronically replicating your brain in the form of a computer program? "Uploading," as the concept is sometimes referred to, has been around in science fiction for a long time: variations of it were kicked around in episodes of the old Star Trek ("What Are Little Girls Made Of?", "I, Mudd" and "Return to Tomorrow", among others), The X-Files ("Kill Switch"), and so on.

In "The Silicon Man," Charles Platt aims at providing a technically plausible approach to uploading. The plot, such as it is, involves an FBI agent who, while investigating illegal trafficking in a special kind of gun, stumbles upon a group of scientists working on a publicly-funded project thought to have been a money sink, but which has actually succeeded beyond the wildest dreams. The scientists have to get rid of the FBI agent, but they can't quite bring themselves to kill him, so they copy his mind and put him in their electronic universe -- which is kind of like the Matrix (from the movie), though without any of the bells and whistles. Instead of Agents (the computer programs in "The Matrix") to torment our hero, however, there's the main computer scientists, who is a megalomaniac with the power to alter the computer environment as he sees fit. Yikes!

Platt pushes the science and technology reasonably far, but the concept still seems a little unbelievable. Happily, that doesn't detract from the novel, which I finished in basically one sitting.

and they will be hooked. I devoured Platt's volume on a recent vacation and enjoyed it greatly. Two non-sci-fi readers have read my copy and they loved it. This is a gripping tale that begs to be made into a first-rate movie.

Nostalgically reminiscent of the seventies, this "Novel of the Near Future" shows that the future is NOW. Unfortunately for all of us, little has been done to address the issues raised by Platt; only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Suicide rock concerts, abandoned subdivisions scoured by gun-toting vigilantes, the pleasure palace, and a neighborhood-rage ending all intensify Platt's study of interpersonal relationships.

Trots out a handful of ideas that were new and exciting in 1984 science fiction and tiredly runs through an old plot without a single convincing (or interesting) moment. Most annoying are the bits of exposition stuck-in between chapters. I was looking for a bit of cyberpunkish adventure fun, and became mired in this dull mess. Don't let it happen to you.

Behind its modest appearence and lack of originality lies a little gem. Don't expect great revelations, it's only entertainment with a subtle social background that reminds Ian Banks' 'culture' books. The plot is simple, and the characters almost cardboard, but everything works as a well greased engine. Very satisfactory.

600 years from now human civilisation, known to its contemporaries as the Protektorate, has spread throughout the Galaxy to encompass some 100,000 inhabited worlds. Citizens of the Protektorate enjoy biological immortality, eternal youth, and a level of wealth that affords them as much self-indulgent leisure time as they wish - employment of any sort is entirely voluntary. Humans no longer govern themselves, having long ago decided to turn that task over to incorruptible, highly efficient and completely benevolent artificial intelligences whose primary goal is to ensure the happiness and well being of its charges. Life is very safe, and very dull.

Until, of course, something goes wrong. That's where people like Tom McCray, the narrator and eponymous hero of this novel, come in. McCray is a Protektorate troubleshooter, one of an elite body of humans tasked with investigating and resolving malfunctions in the vast computer networks that sustain the worlds of the Protektorate, everything from garbage disposal to power grids to aerial traffic control.

The novel takes place on the pleasure planet Agorima, home to a little over one million hedonistic tourists and permanent residents, where minor glitches and failures in the governing computer network have led to an increasing occurrence of inexplicable accidents. When an aeriel vehicle, supposedly under computer control, drops out of the sky, crashing into the ground and killing its occupants, Tom McCray is dispatched from the Galactic centre, beginning an investigation to discover the cause. Accompanied by his android assistant, and recruiting a smart news reporter to assist him, he discovers that someone has inserted a deadly virus into Agorima's computer systems. If the virus is not purged within two days those computer systems will be corrupted to the point that systems vital to the survival of the residents of Agorima will begin to malfunction, leading to starvation and death on a planet-wide scale. Drawing up a short-list of five powerful and influential Agoriman individuals who are hostile to the Protektorate form of governance, hostile enough perhaps to attempt to destroy it totally, McCray and his companions must work quickly to locate the source of the virus and then destroy it, utilising the vast Protektorate-madated resources at their disposal, before it is too late...

I quite enjoyed this book, the second of Charles Platts' novels which I have read, the other being the excellent and superior The Silicon Man. Platt does a fine job in constructing a believable future universe, although it is not one I would wish to visit for any length of time. The human civilisation he depicts is decadent, sluggish and rather torpid; all scientific progress has been halted by the governing artificial intelligences. They have been programmed by their human creators to be self-perpetuating, and since "dangerous" technologies like sentient machine intelligences and unrestricted nanotechnologies would threaten the status quo and hence their existence they have chosen to restrict humanity's scientific knowledge and know-how. The 100, 000 worlds of the Protektorate are thus kept in a kind of stasis, where pampered and cossetted humans are indulged and cared-for by their benevolent masters. I can't help but feel that the humans of the Protektorate could benefit greatly from an invasion by a hostile alien menace - perhaps this would shake them up enough to shrug off their scientific complacency!

I also thought that the Protektorate machines' method of terrafroming incompatible biospheres as described in the book was quite ghastly - entire ecosystems are destroyed to make way for human colonists, with no regard for native organisms. Samples of native life are preserved in greenhouses and put on display in the terrafromed planet's parklands, presumably for the colonists edification! For a supposedly benevolent entity the Protektorate doesn't rate highly with me either when it comes to crime and punishment - perpetrators of serious crimes are "genetically modified". I'll leave it for you to discover for yourself how horrible this punishment really is - 'cruel and unusual' indeed!

Throughout the book, Platt peppers the text with "context-sensitive" text boxes detailing various aspects of the Protektorate universe as they are encountered by Tom McCray. These are little more than shameless info-dumps, and perhaps Platt and his editor(s) deserve some criticism for not attempting to work these info-dumps into the story with a little more subtlety than they do. Still, I personally didn't find them distracting, but rather enlightening and diverting, and I often found myselft flipping forwards through the pages to see when the next text-box would appear.

I look forward to reading Platt's next book.

I read this on the reccomendation of an aquaintance. The author's idea is to explore what might happen if everyone's sexual inhibitions were elimitaed by "the gas". I didn't find it very interesting. Mosttly it's just porno. I wasn't offended, just bored.

i first read this book when i was working at a popular bookstore in a mall. the store did not stock this book so my coworkers and i had to special order it. we all bought a copy and within the first chapter we were gripping our stomachs. we were laughing so hard that it hurt, but at the same time, we were totally nauseated! this book is very graphic, so if you are offended by extreme sexual situations (including taboo/illegal ones to boot), you don't want to pick up this novel. the book actually came with a plain, brown wrapper to hide the pornographic images on the front cover. i read the entire book, wasn't turned on at all, but at the same time wasn't turned off. this book just made me laugh out loud. i wish i still had it, but I gave it to a college friend so he could read it on his trip back to Chicago. I heard it was banned in much of Europe and was an underground sensation in the 70's here in the US. Buy it for the novelty, not for the story...

Readers of science fiction, or Mr. Platt's columns, will be surprised by this foray. The gas of the title is an accidental release from a laboratory in England that strips people of all their inhibitions, revealing their darkest, taboo desires. The author is extremely passionate and explicit in his descriptions. I would rank this as one of the best, and dirtiest, rants on the nature of our subconscious. It will offend or disturb many readers, as the author freely admits. This is a paean to a time (the late 60's), when writers often challenged themselves to purge their psyches. So now you are properly informed. Dare you read this?

Platt's book caters to people who subscribe to stereotypes about the Internet. The main problem with this book is it's misleading title: "Anarchy Online." It totally leaves out all of the online content being created by anarchists today, especially the hundreds of really useful websites. Platt should stick to fiction, although this book could be classified as fiction.

I enjoyed this book but found 'Life and Death on the Internet' by Keith Schroeder to be more useful, informitive and interesting. Personally, I would pass on this book and get Mr. Schroeder's.

I quite enjoyed both parts of this book. "Net Crime" does a lot to put real computer crime in perspective -- not the media hype that most people are used to. It's not very technical, so non-techies could understand and appreciate it. The section on satellite piracy doesn't seem directly relevant, but it's very interesting and does well to illustrate some basic "hacker principles" without actually saying so. (All you hackers that don't believe in piracy, don't trip, Platt doesn't tend to overgeneralize.)

On the flip side, "Net Sex" provides (afaik) an accurate historical account of the 'net (and BBS) pr0n scare and some of the aftermath. There's a lot of serious discussion about freedom of speech, but the author's bias doesn't stop him from carefully portraying both sides of the issues.

All in all, these were two very interesting books. Anyone interested in studying hacking (from a social/legal point of view, not a technical one) and/or the Internet porno industry should read this book. So should people who just want to learn a little more about computer crime and porn laws and how they came to be.

Today class, your assignment is to write a science fiction novel which uses at least fifty common science fiction themes. Free Zone is Charles Platt's answer to this challenge, and he proudly lists 71 themes at the end of the book. It's as light as a souffle, totally without substance. The characters are almost as hackneyed as the multitudinous themes, and the less said about them, the better. The one thing I really liked about the story was the idea of the Free Zone itself: after most state & federal government has collapsed, a section of Los Angeles secedes from the rest of the city and establishes formal anarchy, if that isn't a contradition in terms. The Zone includes LoveLand, the Mafia's X-rated answer to Disneyland. I wish Mr. Platt had stuck with that idea and developed it a little more, instead of running hog wild trying to bring off a meaningless literary stunt.