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Jim Resnick

It's a cliché to call versatile cars—and Land Rovers in particular—Swiss Army Knives. It's inaccurate; knives can cut, carve, slice, pick, pinch, and screw. Land Rovers can't do any of those things. but the new 2017 Discovery can do plenty. With this vehicle, Land Rover is betting the whole farm, the livestock, and the apartment in the city that the Discovery will carve out an extra portion of the market.

The big stuff first: There's nothing within roughly $40,000 of the new Discovery (about $50,000 base price and roughly $64,000 as tested here) that can hang with it, in all its various roles including ne plus ultra off-roader, seven-seat transporter, capable tow rig, and luxury car.

Enlarge / William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, speaks in 2013. (credit: NASA)

On Wednesday, NASA's chief of human spaceflight, William Gerstenmaier, flashed an interesting slide during a presentation that showed 23 different rockets, from the small Orbital ATK Antares and Russian Soyuz boosters all the way to SpaceX's massive Interplanetary Transport System. Some of the boosters, such as the Soyuz, have flown often. Many, like the massive SpaceX ITS vehicle, remain PowerPoint rockets.

What was notable, however, was not the chart but what Gerstenmaier said. "My point of this chart is this is a great way to be," he told his audience at the Goddard Memorial Symposium in Maryland. "And I'm not picking any one of these, I love every one of these rockets. We will figure out some way to use some subset of these as they mature through the industry and come out the other side."

Gerstenmaier's public comments represent a significant shift from the attitude shown by NASA's former administrator, Charles Bolden, who left the agency in January. Bolden viewed efforts by SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop large boosters capable of delivering payloads into deep space as competition to the Space Launch System that NASA has contracted with Boeing to develop. "If you talk about launch vehicles, we believe our responsibility to the nation is to take care of things that normal people cannot do, or don’t want to do, like large launch vehicles," Bolden said last year. "I’m not a big fan of commercial investment in large launch vehicles just yet."

(credit: Getty Images | Jonathan Nackstrand)

Netflix reached another milestone that will worry traditional cable companies even further. According to a study by Leichtman Research Group, Inc., more people in the US report subscribing to Netflix than having a DVR in their households. Netflix narrowly eclipses the service offered by most cable providers, with 54 percent of US adults reporting they have Netflix in their households compared to the 53 percent of US adults that have DVR. This is the first time this shift has happened—Leichtman notes that back in 2011, 44 percent of US adults had a DVR while just 28 percent had Netflix.

"On-Demand and time shifting TV services like DVR, VOD, and Netflix have permanently changed the way that people can watch TV,"  writes Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst at Leichtman, in the report. "Today, over 50 percent of households have a DVR and, for the first time in the 15 years of this study, over half of households have Netflix. Yet traditional TV viewing still exists. For example, 46 percentof adults agree that they often flip through channels to see what's on TV."

The percentage of US adults that watch some form of subscription video on-demand service (SVOD) is even greater. Leichtman estimates that 64 percent of US adults subscribe to either Netflix, Amazon Prime, and/or Hulu, with 51 percent of them streaming at least monthly. The study estimates that 23 percent of US adults stream Netflix daily, which is up dramatically from 6 percent back in 2011.

There are lots of technical details on the Central Intelligence Agency's software development process for espionage tools in the documents dumped by WikiLeaks earlier this week—many of which we'll take a closer look at over the coming days and weeks as even more documents are published. But there's one thing that's immediately clear from perusing the personal pages of CIA Engineering Development Group software developers that were included in the dump: they are like the rest of us in tech. The liberal use of Internet memes, animated GIF images, as well as gamer- and pop-culture references sprinkled throughout the serious business of building software to support CIA's espionage mission makes this leak look like a peek inside any random development team's internal Wiki.

CIA developers used movie and game references for a number of project names, including "Ricky Bobby"—a backdoor for intelligence collection designed to be dropped from a USB stick inserted by a CIA "asset" named for Will Ferrell's role in Talladega Nights.  Ricky Bobby sent its data to a listener called "Cal"—named for John C. Reilly's character in that film, Ricky Bobby's teammate and friend. An "implant" for Apple iOS devices (effective on iOS versions 7 through 8.2) is named "DRBOOM," after a character from the card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

I find it odd that a room full of otherwise seemingly normal human beings (press excluded) would cheer at being charged £700/$700 for the GTX 1080 Ti, even if it does claim to be the fastest gaming graphics card money can buy.

After all, that £700 could otherwise be spent on an entire gaming PC, the latest iPhone, a return flight from London to Los Angeles, or 139 bottles of the finest Scottish craft beer. Besides, surely those Americans in attendance at Nvidia's grand GTX 1080 Ti reveal in San Francisco had more pressing things to worry about? After all, life isn't all graphics cards and iPhones when your health is on the line.

Still, Nvidia was true to its word: the GTX 1080 Ti is indeed the fastest gaming graphics card money can buy—even faster than the £1,100/$1,200 e-peen extension that is the Titan X Pascal. It's a hell of a lot faster than the GTX 1080 too—which now sits in a "cheaper" price bracket of £500/$500—by as much as 30 percent. It's the first graphics card since the Titan XP that can play many games in 4K at 60FPS without having to fiddle with settings—you just whack everything on ultra and start playing. Plus it's a quiet graphics card, in its Founders Edition form at least, thanks to the improvements Nvidia has made to its iconic all-metal shroud.

Volkswagen Group

Volkswagen's plans to develop fully autonomous vehicles that would offer greater comfort and convenience than current cars, while slashing the number of road deaths and truly democratizing mobility, have borne their first fruit. This is Sedric, designed to be a platform for cross-brand ideas, which will feed into subsequent concepts from the group's car brands. The biggest idea it introduces is its full "Level 5" autonomy: no human driver is required.

There's no VW badge on the front of Sedric because this is the first concept car built by the Volkswagen Group, rather than the Volkswagen car brand. It was devised, designed, developed and constructed by Volkswagen Group's Future Center Europe in Potsdam and Volkswagen Group Research in Wolfsburg. "We are systematically focusing on our customers, their wishes and requirements for the mobility of the future," says chief designer Michael Mauer. "The Volkswagen Group Future Centers give us the opportunity to conceptualize and develop new ideas of mobile life."