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Tim Berners-Lee, knighted in 2004, persuaded his boss at CERN to load his team’s basic client-server protocol on an internal server in December 1990. The reality of the Internet was born at that moment, although it took another two years before the first server outside Europe was to join the nascent network – that being at Stanford in December 1992. It should not have been a surprise, to anyone who had been looking over the progression of events that led up to that birth. Berners Lee himself wrote a program that was divulged ten years earlier, in 1980, that could link computer nodes, and TCP (the transport control protocol) was invented even earlier by Cerf and Kahn in 1974 – which itself led to the definition of the IP a few years later. The reality of the Internet in relation to ARPANET – which initially consisted of four IMPs (interface message processors – what we would now call routers) at UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah – is often misunderstood. Alth...

Like many of us, I approach the upcoming holidays with mixed feelings as the anticipation of magical times with friends and loved ones collides with the realities of crowded malls, family squabbles, and the bills that arrive in January. But this year is a bit brighter for me thanks to the recent explosion of eco-friendly high-tech products. Now that so many electronic manufacturers having adopted meaningful changes to the way they design and produce their products, I can now buy nearly any kind of high-tech gadget without suffering the guilt of having launched another planet-wrecking piece of garbage into my grandchildren’s futures. 2010 may mark the year that green tech has really hit the mainstream with manufacturers like HP, Panasonic, Sony, Kodak, and Samsung offering products that offer uncompromising performance, high style, and deep green environmental characteristics. These companies have radically re-tooled their manufacturing technologies to use a high percentage of non-toxic recycled materi...

The legal woes of Julian Assange – the public face of WikiLeaks – are probably none of the business of a technical journal like EN-Genius, although the coincidence of their timing might suggest some interference by one or more states other than Sweden. But the release of huge quantities of information, which nobody has claimed to be inaccurate, is a freedom that the press (in all its forms) has a right and obligation to perform: something, albeit, that few allegedly news operations are willing or able to do these days. The reaction to the ‘official’ news operations handling the same information has not resulted in anything like the terrible noises that have been made in relation to Mr Assange; noises that are atrocious. From the suggestion from a Canadian politician that he should be assassinated, to the threats of charges of treason and/or espionage, that his operation should be treated as a terrorist one, are all dreadful outpourings of uneducated bile that we have, unfortunately, a...

Everybody in North America surely knows about the price sticker that is on a new vehicle. It has been there so long, normally attached on the passenger side window, that you might well have thought that it was something invented at the same time as the motor car itself. For some reason the sticker is often called the Maroni, or even the Moroni, or Maroney. (All three are incorrect, with Moroni, for example, being the name given to the alleged angel that Joseph Smith claimed visited him and whose supposed likeness adorns the top of every Mormon temple pointing towards Salt Lake City.) The name should be Monroney, named after Almer Stillwell “Mike” Monroney, who represented a congressional district in Oklahoma for twelve years, followed by eighteen years in the US Senate. And even when the name is gotten right the details are often incorrect. Sites like Wikipedia, that ubiquitous source of bad information, state that the sticker is required to give the recommended retail price of the base vehicle ...