Month: January 2016

A musical "dot comedy" (see what they did there?) about tech rivals Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will open on Broadway later this year. It will feature, amongst other things, on-stage holograms and projection mapping, and will actively encourage mobile phone use during the show with an app that lets audience members interact with each other and select the show's ending. No, I am not making this up.

The show, cringingly called "Nerds," will chronicle the rise of Jobs and Gates and the subsequent rivalry between their two companies. Jobs famously declared Microsoft had "no taste," of course, and that Gates was "basically unimaginative" and "shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas." So, lots of material to draw from then.

Nerds is penned by Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner, both of whom grew up in the tech hubs of Paolo Alto and San Francisco. Their writing credits include the hit Cartoon Network series Robot Chicken, as well as the 1999 play The Bomb-itty of Errors, a hip-hop adaptation of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.

Earlier this week, the upcoming Hitman reboot was quietly removed from the PlayStation Store in Europe, with Square Enix cancelling pre-orders for the PlayStation 4 version. With the game scheduled for release in just a few months, fans were understandably concerned. Was the game being pushed back? Was it being cancelled entirely? The accompanying message, that the "configuration of the product... has changed significantly," didn't help matters.

It turns out that Hitman was pulled because the game will now be released episodically. When it launches on March 11, Hitman will include a prologue mission and just one location, Paris, for the cost of £12/$15. Its next location, Italy, will launch in April, with Morocco following in May. Each additional episode will cost £8/$10, or £37/$50 for a season pass. "Regular monthly content updates" that will include three additional locations—Thailand, the US, and Japan—will arrive later in the year.

Or, players can pay for the whole lot upfront for £45/$60. The complete season will also launch on disc at the end of the year.

Seven years ago, Twitter began its rise to prominence by billing itself as a space where people could speak freely because nobody was censored. The company's rules enshrined this ideal, promising "we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances." But in 2015 all of that changed.

There were changes in Twitter's rules here and there before 2015, usually to make it easier for the company to ban people engaging in spam and fraud. But as more high-profile Twitter users began to experience abuse and harassment firsthand, the company began to reverse its earlier policies.

Writing for Motherboard, legal analyst Sarah Jeong offers a short history of how Twitter's rules changed over the year. Without ever touching the language in its rules page, Twitter began to add links out to other documents that explained the "limited circumstances" that could lead to censorship.

Enlarge / Standing back as far as I can get in the hangar and I still can't quite get the whole thing in frame. Pilot Rick Sharpe at frame left. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

HOUSTON—My first thought was that I should have rented a wider lens. Sitting in front of me was a vintage two-seat Douglas TA-4J Skyhawk, and this aircraft dominated the space. It loomed like a temporarily grounded raptor, simultaneously enormous and oddly toy-like. The Skyhawk sat poised on chocked gear with its nose cocked slightly upward, like it was ready to go, this very instant, decorate a jungle canopy with a long string of burning nape. A painted Playboy bunny perched impudently at the top of the empennage—the logo of Headquarters & Maintenance Squadron 11, based out of Danang, Vietnam.

No matter how far back I shuffled in the crowded hangar, I couldn’t quite fit the whole aircraft in frame. Let that be a lesson, would-be photographers: the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L is a hell of a lens, but sometimes, 24mm just isn’t wide enough.

Lee Hutchinson

Though it's the smallest jet we saw that day, the A-4's landing gear makes it stand tall in the hangar, towering above us.

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Four, on the floor

The Skyhawk—the first of four vintage jets I got to see this day—holds Bureau Number 153524 and first saw service in 1967 in "Fast FAC" missions over Vietnam (that is, "Forward Air Control" missions into "hot" areas). It is now the property of the Massachusetts-based Collings Foundation, an education nonprofit group that maintains a large number of historical aircraft from various eras. Several of the Foundation’s Vietnam-era aircraft are stabled in Ellington Field, southeast of Houston in Clear Lake and just a few miles away from the Johnson Space Center. The Foundation’s website features detailed write-ups on the provenance of each of its aircraft, including 153524, but my visit to the hangars in Ellington wasn’t an official Foundation activity—rather, it was the result of a personal request to professional pilot and family friend Rick Sharpe.