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(credit: CSPAN)

On Wednesday, the inspector general of the Department of State issued a scathing report on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private mail server during her tenure there, further securing the episode's legacy as perhaps the most historic case of "shadow IT" ever. Paying a State Department employee on the side to set up and administer her personal mail server, Clinton claims she just was doing what her predecessors did—but you'd be hard-pressed to find any government executive who ignored rules, regulations, and federal law so audaciously just to get mobile e-mail access.

If you've worked in IT for any amount of time, you've run across the shadow IT syndrome—employees using outside services to fix a problem rather than using internally supported tools. Sometimes (but rarely), it's actually mission-essential. For example, at a previous employer, when half the company lost access to e-mail and the content management system because a network card was stolen in a smash-and-grab at the telco's co-location facility, I set up a password-secured Wiki on my personal Web server to handle workflow and communications for a day. (The CIO was not happy, particularly when my boss wanted me to write an article about it. The corporate counsel had the story spiked because it exposed a Sarbanes-Oxley breach—not exposed by me, but by the company's failure to have a backup system.)

Often, people use shadow IT at work because of a lack of official IT resources to support a need. But they also use shadow IT for personal convenience—especially the personal convenience of executives and managers who want what they want and will twist the arm of someone in IT to support it whether it's within policy or not (or find someone else to do it for them and then tell IT they have to support it).

Normally Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft would require three parachutes to land. (credit: Blue Origin)

Spaceflight entrepreneur Jeff Bezos has promised to test his New Shepard spacecraft to the limit, and perhaps it is time to take him at his word. On Thursday, the founder of Blue Origin said his company has nearly finished planning the next test flight for his space capsule, and this time the crew vehicle will attempt to land with one of its three parachutes intentionally failing. The goal, Bezos said, is to demonstrate New Shepard’s ability to safely handle such a scenario. “It promises to be an exciting demonstration,” he wrote, perhaps understatedly, in an e-mail.

One of the maxims of spaceflight is that every launch is a test flight—rockets and spacecraft just don’t fly frequently enough, like airplanes, for spaceflight to become routine. So every time the space shuttle, or Saturn V or any other vehicle flew, engineers on the ground would learn more about the launch system, and how it operated. The same is true today, even for frequently flown rockets such as the Atlas V or Soyuz launch vehicle.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? With the New Shepard architecture, a capsule atop a propulsion module powered by a single BE-3 engine, Blue Origin has fashioned a suborbital launch system that is not only completely reusable but is one that also appears to be relatively inexpensive to fly, costing a few tens of thousands of dollars to turn around. Critically for testing purposes, it is also completely autonomous. This means Blue Origin can test New Shepard as much as it likes to ensure the vehicle is safe without taking any meaningful risk. It might even get to the point where, one day, each flight is not a test flight.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Why am I wearing this weird greenish-blue outfit and prosthetics on my face? Maybe this is why I'm so angry all the time!

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The best way to approach X-Men: Apocalypse is to think of it as an actual series of comics—some of the individual books are incredible, and other ones are absolutely meh. Translated into movie terms, that means you'll flip from a scene of holy-shit awesomepants to a subplot where you know exactly what's about to happen because it's so grindingly obvious. Whether the movie as a whole works for you depends on your investment in these characters and how much filler you're willing to endure to reach those transcendent moments that genuinely shine with a sense of wonder and fascination.

Apocalypse is the third in the latest X-Men trilogy, finishing off a timeline that took us back to the origins of the X-Men in the 1960s with First Class, went all timey-wimey in Days of Future Past, and has now landed solidly in the 1980s, complete with bad hair and new-wave music. Directed by Bryan Singer, who helmed two of the original X-Men movies as well as Days of Future Past, it's a perfectly competent action movie with a few dazzling effects. Singer has continued the trilogy's theme of history affecting the future by picking Apocalypse as his lead villain. Possibly the very first mutant on Earth, Apocalypse is virtually immortal and was last seen ruling over ancient Egypt, sucking the powers out of mutants using a weird slab of glowing rock. A series of superpowered shenanigans left him buried in rubble for thousands of years, only to be resurrected by cultists who want him to rule the world again with his extremely old-school values.

Great characters, and missed opportunities

As Apocalypse gathers his new gang of mutant buddies and plots to destroy everything in a way that is unbelievably predictable, we're treated to little pyrotechnic snippets of mutant life after the events of Days of Future Past. If you recall, that movie ended with Mystique revealing herself to the world in an intense "coming out" moment for all mutantkind. Now everyone knows about mutants, and the classes at Professor X's school are growing ever larger. Xavier has just recruited Jean Gray (a terrific Sophie Turner, taking a break from playing Sansa Stark), as well as Cyclops, who doesn't quite have control of his burning eyes yet. The relationships that bloom in the first trilogy are just getting started here. Be on the lookout for the first meeting between Jean and Wolverine, who have a very "it's complicated" relationship in the comics that's gracefully evoked here.