by jnelson | Sep 5, 2019 | How the Net Works, News
Cosmic rays – the very name sounds like a futuristic beam weapon from a new sci-fi movie. But cosmic rays are quite real: powerful atomic particles hurled at near the speed of light by titanic explosions across the depths of intergalactic space. A hail of them, blown...
by jnelson | Feb 6, 2019 | How the Net Works, News
Fifteen years ago, Facebook was born in a dorm room at Harvard. Unheralded and little noticed at first, Mark Zuckerberg’s baby took over the campus with surprising rapidity. First Harvard, then the Ivy League, then high schools, and by September 2006, the world....
by jnelson | Nov 10, 2018 | How the Net Works, News
The Walt Disney Company is celebrating the 90th birthday of the world’s most famous rodent, Mickey Mouse(TM), with a TV special and an exhibit at a Manhattan gallery. Ever since he was first dreamed up by Uncle Walt nearly a century ago, his firm has been able...
by jnelson | Sep 12, 2018 | How the Net Works, News
In the future, September 11 may have another depressing association with infamy and loss. For on Tuesday, September 11, 2018, the European Parliament voted to wreck the internet. They authorized sweeping but ludicrously naive changes to how the net must fundamentally...
by jnelson | Aug 17, 2018 | How the Net Works, News
Our relationships with robots will be as complicated as our relationships with any beings possessing a certain amount of intelligence and free will. Like cats or small children, perhaps, though it is sincerely to be hoped that the machines will be far more obedient...
by jnelson | Dec 12, 2017 | How the Net Works, News
This holiday season, the government is about to give some rich corporations a wonderful present. They are about to butcher the goose that laid the golden egg for their feast, but consumers are going to have to pay for the fat cats’ dinners again and again – from...
