"Any of you that have ever felt stepped on, left out, picked on, put down, whether you think you're a nerd or not, why don't you just come down here and join us. OK?" lobbies Lewis Skolnick of the hit movie Revenge of the Nerds. While nerd persecution was rampant in the mid-1980s, great strides in technology and the boom in Silicon Valley have all but eliminated the problem two decades later. In our 21st-century Geekopoly, nerds have taken to jobs once thought outside their realm of cool or, at the very least, their reputed expertise. Some have even taken positions with the U.S. military ... Read More
Broadband Needs Truth in Labeling
August 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The Federal Communications Commission recently released a technical paper confirming what most technology insiders - and many movie fans who have tried to stream a high-definition Netflix trilogy at 8 o'clock at night — have long suspected. Actual download speeds on broadband connections in America lag way behind what most providers advertise. On average, the FCC concluded, you're probably only getting about half the speed you signed up for. The figure highlights a unique quirk of the broadband industry in the U.S. General Mills isn't allowed to sell you cereal labeled with "as many ... Read More
Don’t Panic. It’s Only the Internet.
August 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The U.S. established a new military brain center in Maryland this year called Cyber Command, the geek soldier's answer to Central Command, where our military hackers work to protect military networks from enemy hackers abroad. Along with this year's "cybersecurity bill" in Congress, the command center belongs to a larger effort to protect the nation from "cyberwar" ... whatever that might mean. Cyberwar has become one of the "foreign frights of 2010," and not just in the U.S. Some 20 nations have been setting up cyberdefense headquarters to develop new "weapons" and steel their networks ... Read More
The Benefits of Broadband on Internet Use
April 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A decision by a D.C. federal appeals court earlier this month allowing telecommunications companies to block users from accessing certain content sparked a major debate over Net neutrality, and now the Federal Communications Commission is fighting to regulate Internet broadband services. The FCC, which rolled out its National Broadband Plan in March, wants to phase out the Universal Service Fund, a program initially designed to keep telecommunications costs low in rural communities and instead impose a 15 percent tax on current broadband users that would be used to connect rural America to ... Read More
Google Street View Ruffles European Feathers
April 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Recent controversies over the volume of information about ordinary Europeans that U.S. agencies have demanded in the wake of 9/11 — including banking details, flight-customer data and passport biometrics — show a strange difference between America and the Old World. Americans make noise about small government and individual freedom, but they tend to be more willing to give up private data than your average European. Why? One reason is that Europeans have darker memories of "big government" from the last century than Americans do, just as they have a closer relationship to major wars. In ... Read More
Court Decision Could Lead FCC to Redefine Internet
April 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A federal appeals court in D.C. earlier this week threw up a roadblock to the Federal Communications Commission's plans for the future of the Internet in America. The details of the case were relatively straight-forward: Comcast was caught interfering with traffic by customers using the cumbersome file-sharing application BitTorrent, flouting a 2005 FCC Internet policy stating that Web users are entitled to access the content and applications of their choice. The FCC tried to sanction Comcast. Comcast sued. And on Tuesday — to the surprise of no one who has been following the case — the ... Read More
Nelson Mandela’s Penalty Kick
April 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Yesterday I noticed an e-mail in my inbox from the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Unlike many other e-mails whose subject matter contains various innovative ways of spelling Viagra, this one seemed at first glance to be a legitimate organization's communication. I read the following message: "Your email address has been selected as one of the winners of the Nelson Mandela Foundation/Fifa 2010 World Cup Lottery Draw. Kindly review the attached letter for instructions on how you will claim your prize. Thanks." The reply email address was listed as: NELSON MANDELA FOUNDATION (with an ... Read More
Watchdog 2.0
April 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Since yesterday morning, a disturbing and an unusual video has been making the rounds on YouTube. It shows gun camera footage of a strike by two U.S. Apache helicopters on a group of pedestrians in Baghdad, including two Reuters reporters, the soldiers mistook for insurgents. The footage is remarkably clear, and it's accompanied by audio transcript of the soldiers' comments during the attack and in its aftermath. The video, which is titled Collateral Murder, is particularly disturbing because the attack appears to be unprovoked, although it may have been preceded by gunfire on the ground ... Read More
Our New Look
April 1, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
Welcome to the new, or new-ish, look for Miller-McCune.com. To showcase more of our stories, and to make it easier for us to offer other types of multimedia presentations, we decided the "old" Miller-McCune.com needed some sprucing up. And as Pandora discovered a few millennia ago, once we opened the box to make some minor changes lots of opportunities to fix or improve other aspects of the site tumbled out. We liked our look before, but stories there had a very limited period for public viewing. The homepage isn't the only way to get to those stories, of course, but we felt that people ... Read More
