Month: December 2015

High fantasy is having something of a moment on television. Game of Thrones is the biggest and most obvious example, but shows like Vampire Diaries, its Originals spin-off, Once Upon a Time, Grimm, and the somehow-still-running Supernatural have made the genre increasingly visible. SyFy’s current bid for a conversation-worthy bite of this apple is its adaptation of The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s New York Times bestselling novel about a young man who attends a magical school and struggles to defeat a world-threatening Big Bad.

If this premise sounds familiar, you wouldn’t be the first person to feel a sense of wizardly déjà vu. The books, especially the first in the trilogy, have been frequently described as “adult Harry Potter,” an assessment that is both understandable and catchy. While that meme-ified judgment of Grossman’s books is seriously reductionist, it’s also a useful way of thinking about just how tricky it’s going to be to get this adaptation right. So before the pilot’s launch on Wednesday night—and ahead of the series’ official January 2016 premiere—we got to the bottom of our “the book is always better” bias one kind of question in mind. What kind of magic are we in for?

The un-Harry Potter

The Magicians is less “adult Harry Potter” than it is an “un-Harry.” In his protagonist Quentin Coldwater, in the magical education Quentin receives, and in the foundational structure of the series, Grossman carefully and meticulously smashes the lovely, sparkly romanticism of the Harry Potter story to pieces. Brakebills, the Magicians universe’s Hogwarts equivalent, is a frustrating and demanding place. Quentin is stuck for endless, mind-numbling hours working on rote memorization in order to master the fickle language of magic in his universe. The book is full of passages like this: “The room was the same, and the days were always, always, always the same: empty, relentless, interminable wastelands of repetition.”

Amid the brouhaha surrounding Microsoft's decision to backtrack on its offer of unlimited OneDrive storage for home Office 365 subscribers, one issue remained unaddressed: what about the related OneDrive for Business storage that's offered to enterprise Office 365 subscribers?

The company has finally laid out its plans for these users, and unlimited storage is back for at least some. Enterprise and government customers on the E3, E4, and E5 plans, education customers, and OneDrive for Business Plan 2 and SharePoint Online Plan 2 customers will all see their storage allocation increased provided that the organization has at least five subscribers.

This move to unlimited storage will be phased in two parts. The first part will be an automatic increase from the current 1TB to a new 5TB per user, expected to complete by the end of March 2016. Subsequently, customers will be able to request additional storage.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said Wednesday he was investigating if Texas Senator Ted Cruz released classified surveillance data at Tuesday's GOP presidential debate.

The probe concerns what Cruz said during a back-and-forth talk with Florida Senator Marco Rubio about the USA Freedom Act, which President Barack Obama signed in June. Cruz said that, under that law, "nearly 100 percent" of phone calling metadata can be surveilled with the new spy program compared with "20 percent to 30 percent" under the Patriot Act provisions that the USA Freedom Act replaced.

Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, said the committee's staff is looking into the statements.

A German woman who stayed at an apartment rented through Airbnb has sued the company, saying she was filmed by a hidden camera while she walked around naked.

The plaintiff, Yvonne Schumacher, says that the camera captured "personal and intimate" conversations with her partner, Kevin Stockton. She's also suing the residents who listed the Irvine, California unit on the site, Fariah Hassim and Jamil Jiva. Schumacher's lawyer says his client has "limited English skills" and it was Stockton, who is not a party to the case, who handled the rental details.

According to the complaint (PDF), Schumacher arrived at the property on December 16, 2013, intending to stay for about a month. She didn't know then that "her privacy would be violated on a daily basis," she states. Schumacher's lawyer states that his client has "limited English skills" and was invited to the apartment by Stockton.

Today, Volkswagen Group said that German regulators approved its proposed fixes to vehicles with EA 189 engines, the infamous engines that include defeat devices and released illegal amounts of nitrogen oxide (NOx) while VW vehicles were being driven under normal conditions.

The fixes will apply to 1.2 liter, 1.6 liter, and 2.0 liter diesel engines. The 1.2 and 2.0 liter engines will only require a software update that Volkswagen group says should take “under half an hour.” The 1.6 liter engine vehicles require a software update as well as a “flow rectifier” that mechanics will fit in front of the air mass sensor. Volkswagen estimates that labor for that job will take “under an hour.”

Volkswagen says it will send out letters to customers in the European Union as soon as the German Federal Motor Transport Authority gets the company the appropriate addresses. Volkswagen Group says it estimates repairs will start in January 2016.

Regardless of the negative opinions of Martin Shkreli, no one can deny that he has sparked a much-needed discussion about drug pricing and access—and maybe that was his goal?

The founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals has been publicly lambasted for jacking up the price of a life-saving drug—often used to treat AIDS patients and babies—by more than 5,000 percent. But he says in an exclusive interview with HipHopDX that it may all be an elaborate performance:

“To me, what I’m doing right now in the media, raising prices, all this shit, believe what you want, but it’s interesting," he said. "It gets people talking. At the end of the day, that’s what art is.”