Brendan I. Koerner

Human beings are self-absorbed creatures, so the response to Hurricane Katrina has naturally included some hand-wringing over the question: Could this happen to my hometown? Depending on the worrywart's location, the theoretical catastrophe could be a flash flood, a wildfire, or an earthquake rather than a hurricane; no corner of the United States is immune to lethal natural disasters.

Still, some corners are safer than others. If an American wants to minimize his chances of dying at Mother Nature's hands,… more

Coffee is the drug that changed my life. Without its brain-perking effects, it's doubtful that I could have passed astronomy in college, read The Wealth of Nations cover to cover, or made a favorable first impression on my girlfriend's parents despite suffering from a colossal hangover. In fact, this very review would be immeasurably harder to write were it not for the steaming cup of milk-tinged joe to my laptop's left.

But I seem to have derived less benefit from… more

Toyota promised me 60. The spec sheet on the 2005 Prius clearly states that the car gets five dozen miles per gallon of gas on city streets. But I'm test-driving a beige hatchback along Sepulveda Boulevard on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and according to the touchscreen on the dash, I'm topping out at 49.7.

Granted, 49.7 miles per gallon is at least twice what all the gas hogs around me are getting. But whenever I hit the… more

A successful scam consists of two essential parts: the fraud and the getaway. An ill-gotten fortune, no matter how spectacular, isn't very useful if it can only be spent on cigarettes and candy bars at the prison commissary. So a competent con artist will figure out from square one not only how to part the suckers from their cash, but also how to disappear when the inevitable end becomes imminent.

Casual fans of flim-flam history are already aware that Charles… more

That serious problems plague our new, computerized voting machines -- on which 29 percent of U.S. voters are poised to cast their votes in November -- has been apparent ever since $3.9 billion in federal funding for the machines was made available in 2002, in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. In the years since, report after report has cautioned that the machines lack the security and robustness necessary to withstand the assaults of hackers or unscrupulous technicians. But… more

From this side of the Pacific, we've always shuddered at the prospects for young people in a place like Japan. The routine of archetypal sarariman, or corporate drone, sure sounds dreadful: a drab college education followed by a youth of low-paid toil, long commutes into Tokyo, and little chance for advancement beyond middle management. The very best a sarariman can hope for, we're led to believe, is to someday go into hock for a suburban condo and to scrape together… more

As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust -- fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas.… more

Like prison wardens marveling at an escapee's spoon-dug tunnel, computer-security professionals acknowledge grudging admiration for the author of SoBig.F, the virus that deluged e-mail In boxes last month. At the epidemic's peak in mid-August, according to the antivirus company Central Command, SoBig.F-related messages accounted for 73 percent of e-mail traffic worldwide, making it history's most aggressive online contagion.

"You have to think the person who did this has some awareness of the Internet's infrastructure," said Mark Carey, an independent computer security… more

"My dream is big, OK?"

Coming from a man who used to boast of having a 300-year business plan, that's saying a lot. But Masayoshi Son isn't exaggerating. His latest master plan includes nothing less than the demolition of Japan's telecom industry, and, not incidentally, the revival of his moribund company, Softbank. To get there, he's hawking next-generation, superfast, supercheap DSL to the Japanese masses.

He may no longer be the world's eighth-richest man -- Softbank's stock price is down 98 percent… more

If you purchased a new cellphone over the past 18 months or so, odds are that one of the features listed in small print on the side of the box was "E911 capable." Or, as in the case of my latest Motorola, "Location technology for piece [sic] of mind." Perhaps you asked the salesman to explain the feature, and he replied that it means that cops can home in on your phone in case of an emergency, a potentially important… more