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The X-Men movies are often pyrotechnic affairs, full of flashy CGI and casts of thousands. But then Deadpool changed everything, with its loner snarkface anti-hero who isn't interested in Saving The World. Logan feels like a movie that learned the best lessons from Deadpool: keep it small, keep it real, and keep it focused on lots and lots of stabbing. The result is not just the only Wolverine movie that's worth seeing (which—we know that's a low bar); Logan is also a brilliant standalone entry in the ever-evolving cinematic world of the X-Men.

Set in 2029, Logan takes place in a trashed future America where a heavily guarded wall divides the US from Mexico. No new mutants have been born in at least a decade, thanks to mad scientist Dr. Rice (a delightfully hammy Richard E. Grant), who has spiked the world's energy drinks with anti-mutant GMO corn syrup. Logan is working as a limo driver in a series of no-name cities north of the wall, sleeping in his car, and slowly losing his healing abilities. He's broken down, his knuckles constantly leaking pus and his confident stride hobbled by a limp. All his money goes to keeping Professor X (Patrick Stewart) safe in the husk of an old factory in Mexico, far from anyone who could be affected by the terrible consequences of Charles' early stage Alzheimers.

Enlarge / Sid Meier (left) and Bruce Shelley appeared at GDC 2017 to reflect on the very first Civilization video game. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

SAN FRANCISCO—"Let's go back in time to 1990," game developer Sid Meier said to a Thursday crowd at the annual Game Developers Conference. "Back when there was no Civilization."

Meier's silly double entendre framed a "post-mortem" look at the origins and lessons learned from the landmark PC game. With the help of producer and developing partner Bruce Shelley, the hour-long conversation was marked by equal parts history, depth, and humor—which seemed appropriate, considering the game in question juggled the same three elements so elegantly back in 1991.

A children's-history take on Genghis Khan

Development on Civilization began after the completion of Railroad Tycoon, during the development of Covert Action, and with the momentum of Pirates!, "one of the first open-world games." All those games put wind into the duo's PC game-making sails. "We were young and audacious," Meier says. "It was a time where we thought we could do anything, so, sure, let's take on 'civilization.'"

Enlarge / Genetics background. 3D render. (credit: NIH)

With humanity's seemingly insatiable desire for data, archiving it safely has become a bit of a problem. The various means we've been using all have tradeoffs in terms of energy and space efficiency, many of which change as the technologies mature. And, as new tech moves in, many earlier storage media become obsolete—to the point where it's essentially impossible to read some old formats.

What if there were a storage medium that would be guaranteed to be readable for as long as humanity's around and didn't need any energy to maintain? It's called DNA, and we've become very good at both making and decoding it. Now, two researchers have pushed the limits of DNA storage close to its theoretical maximum using a coding scheme that was originally designed for noisy communication channels. The result: an operating system and some movies were stuffed into genetic code at a density of 215 Petabytes per gram.

The new work comes courtesy of Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, who work at the New York Genome Center. They have built on a variety of earlier work. Not much challenge is involved in putting data into DNA: each place in the sequence can hold one of four bases: A, T, C, or G. That lets us write two bits per position. The trick is getting things back out reliably.

Enlarge / Porsche's Cayman GT4 has been lauded as one of the company's best-ever driver's cars, but it's actually even better with one of DSC Sport's controllers on it. (credit: Jordan Edwards)

A constant source of fascination for me is the software-defined car. Back in ye olden days, reconfiguring your car to suit the racetrack and then back again for the grocery run meant spending time wielding tools and getting your hands dirty. Today, it's all done with the push of a button. Our new cars are coming preconfigured from the factory with a range of different driving flavors from which to pick. Want a re-mapped throttle pedal? Done. A completely different shift strategy for the gearbox? Easy. But to my mind, the ability to recalibrate a car's suspension on the fly makes the biggest change to its character.

You would think this would make me a fan of magnetorheological dampers. These are shock absorbers that use a damping fluid that changes viscosity—and therefore damping behavior—upon the application of a magnetic field. (The fluid is full of micron-scale magnetic particles that align when subjected to a magnetic field, stiffening the fluid as a result.) But when I think of the best-riding cars I've been lucky enough to drive, they all have one thing in common: conventional valved dampers.

More conventional dampers don't have to be any less clever than their magnet-empowered relatives. McLaren's 650S is a great example, with its "banned in F1" system that links the front and rear of the car through a complex arrangement of hydraulic plumbing. But maybe the most impressive ride I've encountered was behind the wheel of DSC Sport's Porsche Cayman GT4.

Enlarge / USPTO Director Michelle Lee, at right, touring the Denver office in 2014. At that time, she was Deputy Director. (credit: Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

The US Patent and Trademark Office has offered the first indication in weeks about who's in charge. Yesterday, at an event for lawyers who practice at USPTO, Michelle Lee was introduced as the office's director.

Lee has been running the office for years, so such an introduction would normally be the ultimate non-event. But yesterday's acknowledgement comes after several weeks during which the office refused to answer a simple question: Who is the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office?

When President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, DC-centric publications including The Hill and Politico reported that Lee, a former Google lawyer who is favored by the tech sector, would remain in her office. But weeks later, the USPTO director position continues to be listed as "vacant" on the Commerce Department's website. Official USPTO spokespersons simply declined to comment in response to inquiries from Ars Technica and other publications. The USPTO did not respond to an additional inquiry by Ars sent this morning.

Enlarge / The announcement of the Creators Update in October 2016.

The Windows 10 Creators Update, due some time in the next couple of months, enables differential updates as part of what Microsoft calls the Unified Update Platform. These updates only contain the changes between one major Windows update and the next, which should make for smaller, faster downloads.

Windows Insiders have been receiving these new differential updates since early December, and Microsoft has reported on the effectiveness of the new scheme. Compared to a "canonical" update (which includes full files rather than just the changed portions), the savings are substantial: the median differential download size of build 15025 was 910MB. The media canonical size of build 15031 was 2.56GB.

This is particularly attractive to members of the Insider program because each new build is delivered as a major update that performs a full in-place Windows 10 install. To take advantage of the differential updates, you'll have to make sure to never skip any releases; if you're updating an older build to the very latest, a full download is required. This represents a trade-off on Microsoft's part: The company doesn't want to have to maintain a differential update between any and every pair of builds.

Enlarge / Sen. John Thune (R-SD). (credit: Getty Images | Joe Raedle)

US Senator John Thune (R-SD), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, is a guest opinion writer for Ars today. Thune argues that Congress should overhaul the net neutrality rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission. This piece is a counterpoint to an Ars op-ed written by US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Let’s put the scare tactics and apocalyptic rhetoric aside. The Internet worked great in 2014 when there were no net neutrality rules. And it still works great today after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) applied Ma Bell regulations from 1934 to broadband.

In fact, I am quite confident that the online experience for the overwhelming majority of users has not really changed for better or worse because of the new regulations. The Internet’s future, however, is uncertain because of ideological bureaucrats at the FCC who adopted a misguided regulatory approach that has chilled investment and offers no protections against excessive bureaucratic interference in the years ahead.

Enlarge / Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee)

US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is a guest opinion writer for Ars today, arguing that the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules should remain in place. While Republican lawmakers have proposed overturning or changing the rules, Schumer writes that Congress should codify the full rules into statute to prevent the FCC from throwing them out. We're also publishing a counterpoint by US Sen. John Thune (R-SD), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my father owned a small pest-control business. If his competitor down the street had received preferred electricity service, he would have been rightly outraged—and the law would have protected him from that unfair treatment. We don’t reserve certain highways for a single trucking company, and we don’t limit phone service to hand-picked stores.

In today’s economy, it is equally important that access to the backbone of twenty-first century infrastructure, the Internet, be similarly unfettered. That is why it is critical that we maintain the net neutrality protections and clear oversight authority that the Federal Communications Commission put in place in 2015 through the Open Internet Order.

Enlarge / Chad Coleman as Fred Johnson (L), Steven Strait as James Holden (R) (credit: Rafy/Syfy)

It sure was a busy week on The Expanse. For one thing, we learned the story of Solomon Epstein, this universe's equivalent of Zephram Cochrane. The needs of the story are always going to trump scientific accuracy, and the Epstein drive solves two big problems for the show. First, it cuts the transit times around the solar system. And second, it's a handy way of adding gravity. The show takes place at least two hundred years from now; that's sufficiently far out that it's reasonable to suggest propulsion breakthroughs that seem like magic to us now.

Holden remains charmingly naïve. Why wouldn't Fred Johnson want 30 planet-busters? And why would he think there were no more samples of the protomolecule left? I hope everyone noticed that Naomi ran a simulation rather than shooting their sample into the Sun.

Then there's the Venus situation. We saw Chrisjen Avasarala for the badass she really is, but Earth has been planning for war with Mars, not with aliens. A war that Bobbie Draper is all too happy to bring to the Earthers.