Andrew

The long-gestating Ready Player One movie has a director, and its one perfectly suited for a story full of 1980s references: Steven Spielberg. Deadline reports that he'll take on the film after the Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG.

Written by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One takes place in a dystopian future where everyone jacks into an artificial VR world known as OASIS. After its creator dies, people discover that an elaborate easter egg has been left somewhere inside OASIS, and whoever finds the prize first inherits the creator's entire estate. Central to the search for the easter egg are a litany of pop culture references, many focused around the 1980s. A number of Spielberg films, and the filmmaker himself, are all referenced in the...

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It was a few minutes before the US premiere of Game of Thrones' fifth season, and George R. R. Martin didn't know what to expect. "A year ago I saw a rough outline for it, but that's the extent of my knowledge," he said as he made his way down the red carpet.

When it comes to the creative relationship between himself and the series' showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, "They do the show. I write the books," Martin says. But as Game of Thrones enters its fifth season, the differences between the show and the books have never been more apparent. While previous seasons have followed a single book (or half a book, as was the case with seasons three and four), season five draws from two of them simultaneously: A Feast for Crows and A...

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Most burglars are only interested in a place when it's obvious that there is nobody home . If you're going on vacation, this DIY build makes it look like there's always someone home watching TV, without you having to actually run your TV the whole time.

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Tennessee is suing the FCC over the commission's decision last month to preempt state laws that have stalled the deployment of municipal broadband. The FCC's action came in response to a petition from the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which found itself handcuffed by state regulations and barred from offering municipal broadband outside areas where it was already providing electric service.

But with its 3-2 vote last month, the FCC gave EPB in Chattanooga (and another muni broadband network in Wilson, North Carolina) the go-ahead to expand their service areas. The FCC said its move was justified under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, which authorizes the agency to "remove barriers to broadband...

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Jesse Eisenberg's is set to take on the founding members of the Justice League as Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. He certainly looks menacing enough in this first photo from Entertainment Weekly, as he's already a far cry from Gene Hackman and Kevin Spacey's take on the classic character. He might not be the actor you'd expect, but Snyder clearly trusts his abilities. "Our Lex is disarming and he’s not fake," he told EW. "He says what he believes and he says what’s on his mind." Expect to see more of this face in the run up to the film's premiere on March 26th, 2016.

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Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a writer on the first two seasons of the classic ABC sci-fi series Lost and a member of the original brain trust that dreamed up the underpinnings of the series' mythology, has written his own story of what happened behind the scenes in those first two seasons. He paints a picture of an ultra-competitive, ultra-creative environment, where genius happened in sudden, furious bursts of inspiration.

Grillo-Marxuach wrote the post, which is almost 17,000 words long, in order to answer the eternal question of whether the Lost writers knew what was going to happen or were making it up as they went along. The answer he gives is complicated but suggests the writers had most of the series' backstory in mind in those first two seasons, while leaving plenty of room for improvisation. (The character of Jacob, for instance, so important to the final seasons of the show, was not mentioned once while Grillo-Marxuach was on staff.)

The entire post is well worth a read, and not just for Lost superfans. If you have any interest in how the behind-the-scenes TV sausage is made, check it out. When you're done with that, check out our lengthy interview with co-creator and showrunner Damon Lindelof about the series' earliest days. And from there, check out Grillo-Marxuach's recent book, Shoot This One.

Here are five quick revelations from this monumental post.

1) The writers all pitched ideas for what was in the mysterious Hatch before Lindelof came up with the idea out of the blue

As a writers' room, and a think tank before that, we kept pitching possibilities, but nothing we threw out ever overrode Damon's concern that if we shat the bed on that reveal, the audience would depart in droves. The hatch was pitched as a gateway to a frozen polar bear habitat, the mouth of a cave full of treasure that would so entrance the castaways with dreams of avarice that Jack would ultimately be forced to seal it shut with dynamite, the door to a bio-dome whose inhabitants could only breathe carbon dioxide, and even a threshold to an Atlantis-style lost civilization.

I believe that my idea was that it led into the conning tower of a nuclear submarine that had run aground and been buried in an epic mudslide (I thought this could be a rich area for stories about salvaging equipment, and loose nukes, and such things).

As we trudged through the first half of season one, Damon rushed into the writers room one day with an uncharacteristic bounce in his step and declared that "inside the hatch there’s a room with a guy in it and if he doesn’t press a button every 108 minutes, the world will end."

2) Several writers gathered before a pilot script was even finished to hammer out the series' mythology

During these sessions — which began on February 24th of 2004, exactly one day before Damon and JJ [Abrams, co-creator] finished writing their very first draft of the pilot — a lot of the ideas that became the show’s mythology and format were discussed, pitched, and put into play for what would eventually become the series. Also, to be fair, more often than not, we were paving the way for the good ideas by coming up with a lot of bad ones. Very bad ones.

On the first day alone, Damon downloaded on us the notion that the island was a nexus of conflict between good and evil: an uncharted and unchartable place with a mysterious force at its core that called humanity to it to play out a primal contest between light and dark.

In that meeting — we had an assistant taking the notes I am consulting as I write this — Damon also pitched out the idea of "The Medusa Corporation" a Rand Corporation-like entity that knew the nature of the island and had thus chosen it as a place in which to perform a series of behavior modification experiments in a series of scientific stations... and who had brought the polar bears in for these experiments.

For all doubters, in the post Grillo-Marxuach provides a picture of the notes from that meeting.

3) Grillo-Marxuach on the notion of killing main character Jack in the pilot: "You can't kill the white guy."

Lost was anything but fully-baked in late February of 2004. As has been reported elsewhere, one of the out-of-the-box ideas featured in both the greenlit outline and the first draft of the pilot was that Jack Shephard — the main character of the series that ultimately aired — was to be killed at the end of the first act by the mysterious smoke monster. At the time, the scuttlebutt around the office was that JJ had reached out to Michael Keaton, who had — at least in principle — agreed to appear in the pilot and even do press pretending that he was going to be a series regular, only to be killed fifteen minutes in. ...

On our second day at work, JJ and Damon brought in numbered hard copies of the pilot for the think tank to read and on which to give feedback. My most salient note on the pilot was that murdering the one white male character with a discernible skillset that could serve to generate stories — at the very least Jack was a doctor — would not go over well with the network.

In truth, my response was a lot less politically correct, informed as it was by my decade-plus experience as a Puerto Rican working in Hollywood.

What I really said was "You can't kill the white guy."

Grillo-Marxuach admits he and the others were later amused when the network said the same thing.

4) Yeah, the young boy Walt was totally supposed to be psychic

Even though we assumed from jump street that the polar bears had been brought to the island as part of the Medusa Corporation's work — there was also a very strong drive from Damon and JJ to advance the story that Walt was a powerful psychic. This explained, for example, the bird hitting the window in the episode "Special." Walt-as-psychic would also help us explain why The Others had such an interest in Walt and would ultimately kidnap him.

Although the genre-averse Powers That Be at network and studio were resolutely opposed to the science-fictional idea of a psychic boy who could manifest polar bears on a tropical island through the strength of will alone, Damon and JJ nevertheless gave themselves a backdoor into this area by putting the bear in a comic book that appeared both in the pilot and thereafter in series.

Frankly, it's hard for me to look at an episode like "Special" and not completely take from it that Walt is a powerful psychic who manifested the polar bear in order to test his father's love once and for all ... but the execution of the episode apparently left plenty of wiggle room to give us plausible deniability — even as Damon would regularly come into the writers' room, throw up his arms and declare "Of course Walt's psychic."

5) Lindelof almost left the show. A terrible story idea brought him back around.

A week later, Damon came back from a retreat to the Palm Desert. No, people, he wasn't out wandering the wastes in sackcloth and confronting the devil, he had been at Two Bunch Palms — which you might remember as that nice spa featured in the Robert Altman film The Player. If he didn't look tanned, rested, and ready, Damon at least appeared willing to climb back into the ring with the now-confirmed-as-pop-culture-defining, massive-audience-gathering, monster hit that was Lost.

If anything seemed to convince Damon of how badly Lost needed him, it was probably hearing the story break developing on the white-board in his absence. Now, there had been times — and, again, I have heard him say as much in interviews — when Damon expressed to us that he felt the show was literally sucking away his soul and that he wished he could jump. Sometimes he would even threaten to do it off a cliff...

However, when Damon Lindelof heard the beats to a story in which Hurley was revealed to be an amateur hypnotist who would use his abilities to pry to the location of the kidnapped Claire from the now-amnesiac Charlie, his pride of ownership came roaring back with bull force.

If ever there was a moment when I knew that there was no way Damon Lindelof would ever leave Lost again it was when he told us what he thought of that idea.

Never forget that we've got more than one robot on Mars. While Curiosity has been busy finding signs of an ancient nitrogen cycle on the Red Planet, Opportunity — which touched down in January 2004 — has just completed the first ever extraterrestrial marathon. NASA confirmed this week that the six-wheeled robot has now traveled more than 26.219 miles in 11 years and two months. "This is the first time any human enterprise has exceeded the distance of a marathon on the surface of another world," said Opportunity's project manager John Callas. "A first time happens only once."

Opportunity has already wildly exceeded expectations. The rover was originally scheduled to operate for only 90 Martian days (a Martian day or sol is around 40...

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Ravi Somaiya, Mike Isaac, and Vindu Goel, reporting for the NYT:

Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The initial partners are expected to be The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic, although others may be added since discussions are continuing. The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal, one person said.

To make the proposal more appealing to publishers, Facebook has discussed ways for publishers to make money from advertising that would run alongside the content.

I can see why these news sites are tempted by the offer, but I think they’re going to regret it. It’s like Lando’s deal with Vader in The Empire Strikes Back.

When you're managing a startup consisting of nearly a dozen remote team members and over thirty live products, the technology you have makes all the difference. This workstation is packed with the gear to run a ton of apps and tasks at the same time.

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This month, the Senate was expected to pass a bill to fight human trafficking and help victims of it. Most of the bill is overwhelmingly popular among politicians of both parties. And who would want to vote against a bill cracking down on sex traffickers?

Yet the effort now lies in shambles — because of controversy over one provision of the bill that blocks federal funding for abortions. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) calls the provision "offensive language," and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has framed the fight over it as "a battle for our identity." Most of their Democratic colleagues have joined them, and have voted five times to filibuster the bill.

Republicans profess outrage. "Democrats actually filibustered a bill to help victims of modern slavery, apparently because left-wing lobbyists told them to," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said. Now, McConnell's pledging that President Obama's nominee for attorney general, Loretta Lynch, won't get a confirmation vote until the trafficking bill is passed.

The particulars of the controversy are complex. But overall, the mess is yet another testament to the polarization of our politics in general, and the dysfunction of the Senate in particular. If Congress can't find a way to pass this slam-dunk bill, it's difficult to imagine them accomplishing much else of significance.

What does the anti-trafficking bill actually do?

The Justice for Victims of Human Trafficking Act is designed to improve US enforcement of anti-trafficking laws, more strongly penalize offenders, and help the victims of trafficking crimes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would:

• Create a fine of $5,000 for people convicted of offenses related to trafficking or sexual abuse
• Put those fines into a new Domestic Trafficking Victim's Fund, to be spent by DOJ on programs helping trafficking victims
• Let lawful permanent resident victims of "severe forms of trafficking" be eligible for federal benefits (food stamps and Supplemental Security Income) more quickly
• Require DOJ to better train enforcement officers and prosecutors working on trafficking
• Create an annual DOJ report on how states are enforcing sex-trafficking laws

But there's one more thing: that new fund for trafficking victims? None of its money would be allowed to be spent on abortion or health coverage that includes abortion services, except in cases of rape, incest, or risk to the life of the mother. This is what's derailed the bill.

What's the controversy over this abortion section?

Watch Jon Stewart's take on the controversy above.

Republicans maintain that the provision is perfectly ordinary. They argue it simply reflects the existing Hyde Amendment, versions of which have regularly been attached to yearly appropriations bills for decades. The Hyde Amendment blocks federal funds from being used for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother's life.

But most Democrats say they were unaware the provision was even in this year's version of the anti-trafficking bill. Democrats initially said the GOP "pulled a fast one" on them, but a staffer's mistake seems to have been at fault. A spokesperson for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) eventually admitted that one of her aides was aware of the new provision but "did not inform the senator."

Whatever the reason, in February, the bill sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously, and seemed headed for likely passage. But by mid-March, pro-choice groups finally noticed the provision, and began raising an outcry. Nearly all Democrats took up their banner, successfully voting five times since March 17 to filibuster the bill.

Democrats and pro-choice groups argued that abortion access for trafficking victims was particularly important considering the sexual nature of many of these crimes. "The majority of human trafficking victims are women and girls, and they need access to the full range of reproductive health care services without barriers," Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said in a statement.

Democrats are also arguing that since the anti-trafficking bill isn't an appropriations bill, it would in fact be an expansion of how the Hyde Amendment has traditionally been adopted — it would be applied to a new pot of money (the fines on trafficking criminals) rather than traditional federal appropriations (which are funded mainly through taxpayer dollars). They also complain that the Hyde language would apply to this program for five years, rather than having to be renewed every year, as is currently the custom for appropriations bills.

A potential compromise could involve defining trafficking victims as rape victims, since abortions in cases of rape can be funded under the Hyde language. Already, the Daily Beast's Eleanor Clift wrote, "A source familiar with the language in the trafficking bill, and who supports it, concedes that the victims of trafficking likely could claim rape, and the language could be moot."

But for now, both sides are in a standoff over the provision. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) says that removing the Hyde language "looks like we are not maintaining the status quo; it looks like it's an erosion." Democrats are similarly reluctant to cave. "Over the years, we have lost virtually every battle that has been on this floor, and we are tired of it. So we are taking a stand, and we are going to hold that stand," Sen. Feinstein said. "Once advocates on both sides became actively engaged in this, it is difficult for either side to make a change," Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told Susan Milligan of US News & World Report.

So the bill has been temporarily shelved, as the Senate is tackling a federal budget resolution this week.

What does this tell us about Congress?

Overall, despite the changeover to Republican leadership, it's clear that the upper chamber remains intensely polarized and dysfunctional, unable to get seemingly uncontroversial things done. The human trafficking debate is a case study in how the modern Senate — and our political system in general — works to block action:

• First, there's the filibuster, which still trumps all. Fifty-eight senators want the human trafficking bill to advance — two short of the crucial 60-vote threshold. If not for the filibuster, this bill would be on its way to President Obama by now. Newly in the minority, the Democrats have quickly seized on the leverage the filibuster offers to try to extract concessions from the GOP.
• Second, there's partisan polarization, both in general and on the abortion issue in particular. All 54 Republicans support advancing this bill, but just four Democrats do — Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN). The abortion issue is so polarized that it's turned a bill that got a unanimous committee vote into a partisan litmus test.
• Third, and relatedly, moderates have declined in each party. In previous years, one could imagine a larger moderate faction of red-state Democrats concerned with burnishing their pro-life and moderate credentials. But there simply are fewer Senate Democrats from red states nowadays — after their 2014 losses, just five Democratic senators represent states Mitt Romney won in 2012.
• Fourth, there are the outside groups. Both pro-choice and pro-life groups are watching this battle very closely and don't want their respective allies to cave on it. And this isn't unique to the Senate — in January, a pro-life provision derailed a bill in the House, when it was viewed as going too far by a group of GOP moderates.

All of these factors interact together. Polarization, the lack of moderates, and the vigilant outside groups make it very difficult for McConnell to pick up the six Democratic votes he needs to break a filibuster. And they make it clear that despite the Senate's new leadership, the chamber has a long way to go before it can be considered functional.

Did you know that the Hubble Space Telescope is only able to capture black-and-white photos? In order to capture a maximum amount of information in their space photos, NASA captures multiple black-and-white images using different filters in the camera. These images are then combined in post to create the iconic color photographs that you see published by the space agency.

The video above shows how NASA goes about colorizing the photos by compositing the individual shots.

The retoucher has blue, green, and red layers for light from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur, respectively:

By combining the three layers, a colorized version of the shot appears.

After some tweaking and adjustments, we get to the final shot:

It’s the updated “Pillars of Creation” photo that NASA released last year to mark the 20th anniversary of the original shot.

(via National Geographic)

Thanks for sending in the tip, Hugh!

Airport codes are an enigma. We see them constantly but only know what about half of them mean.

You might know ATL stands for Atlanta, but can you identify the cities for BDL, MSY, and SNA? (If you're curious, they're the codes for airports in Hartford, Connecticut; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Orange County, California.)

Now there's an easy way to find out what airport codes actually mean. Developers Lynn Fisher and Nick Crohn have created Airport Codes, a site where you can read about (and submit) your own decoding of airport codes. The highlights are the codes that don't match up with their cities:

• EWR (Newark): Newark is called EWR because the Navy reserved all the codes that begin with "N."
• PDX (Portland): Why do some airport codes have an X at the end? Portland's is an illustrative case: when airport codes switched from two to three letters in the 1930s, some cities that already had airport codes added an X to the end as a quick fix. Portland started as PD, and then added X. Some, like San Francisco's airport, added other letters (which is why its code is SFO).
• YVR (Vancouver): Canadian airport codes start with a "Y", which is why Vancouver has one before the more predictable VR.
• PEK (Beijing): Sometimes airport codes are historical artifacts. PEK refers to an older, English name used for Beijing, Peking. Similarly, Mumbai's airport code is BOM, a reference to its former English name, Bombay.
• Sometimes the reasons are particular to an airport. BDL, Hartford's airport, is named for US Air Force Lieutenant Eugene M. Bradley. MSY in New Orleans is named for Louis Armstrong today, but it used to be named for aviator John Moisant and the Moisant Stock Yards. Finally, SNA, John Wayne International Airport, is named for its mailing address in Santa Ana.

Three-letter airport codes came about because pilots found the National Weather System's two-letter codes inadequate to identify all the available airports. Today, airport codes are called International Air Transport Association Airport Codes (IATA) and are established by the airline trade association, founded in the 1940s.

You can visit the site for beautiful, common codes, or see a more comprehensive list here.

iOS: If you want to create an iOS app or a Mac app, Apple would like you to use their new programming language, Swift. For those new to coding, Swifty is one of the easiest and simplest way to get started learning.

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It's one of the most fundamental rules of online security: if you're asking for sensitive information such as a credit card number, you should use a technology called SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer. This type of encryption is built into all modern web browsers, and it prevents people who are eavesdropping on your communications from snatching your sensitive data.

This morning, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced his presidential campaign, and he launched a website that solicits campaign donations. But it doesn't show the little icon that indicates SSL is enabled:

On SSL-protected websites, there should be a padlock icon in the address bar, like this:

As it turns out, the website does use SSL when users actually submit their credit card information. But there are two big problems with the way this is implemented. One is that the lack of SSL protection for the donation page as a whole means that the user is vulnerable to a "man in the middle" attack, where someone impersonates the Cruz website and directs the user to a malicious site instead.

Second, there's no way for ordinary users to know if their credit card details are encrypted or not. For more than a decade, users have been trained to look for that lock icon before submitting personal information. The way Cruz built his website encourages users to do something dangerous: submit personal credit card information without knowing if it's secure or not. If this practice became widespread, users will be more vulnerable because they'll never know if their information is secure or not.

It turns out that the Ted Cruz for president site does offer SSL protection if you navigate to it directly by adding an "https://" in front of the address. However, when I go there with Chrome, I get the not-very-reassuring message that "this page includes other resources which are not secure," meaning that some parts of the webpage are encrypted and others are not. And then there's this:

This is the SSL certificate for tedcruz.org, the digitally signed document that's supposed to prove you're really visiting tedcruz.org rather than an imposter site trying to steal your credit card number. SSL certificates sometimes list alternative addresses for the same website. For example, if Cruz also owned tedcruz.com, the SSL certificate could list that as an alternative domain.

For some reason, the SSL certificate for tedcruz.org lists nigerian-prince.com as another valid address for Cruz's website. (Update: the Cruz campaign appears to have removed nigerian-prince.com from the certificate around 11am.)

Thanks to Twitter user Pwn All the Things for pointing this out.

A Ted Cruz campaign spokesman responded in an email statement: "The donate form embedded on TedCruz.org has SSL. All donations are and have always been secure. Our website earns an A-grade for its SSL."

Correction: This article originally stated that the site doesn't use SSL encryption at all. In fact, the submission of the credit card data is encrypted, but the lack of encryption for the donation page as a whole creates unnecessary risks for user security, as explained above.

Amidst all the liberties HBO's Game of Thrones has taken with the source material so far, and despite the promise that beloved characters alive in the books will die in the series, fans might have hoped that there was enough time not spoil the novels. But we all saw this coming. In a recent appearance at the Oxford Union, showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff revealed that upcoming seasons of the show will have to start to outpacing the books. That means that major developments author George R.R. Martin hasn't had time to commit to the page will show up onscreen first.

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It turns out the new female Thor isn't just helping Marvel update its comic books for the world we live in today — it's also good business. The first five issues featuring the mysterious new female Thor have handily outsold the five issues that launched the previous Thor series, Thor: God of Thunder, in 2012.

According to data from comic book store distributor Diamond Comic Distributors, which has exclusive agreements with Marvel, DC, and others in North America, each issue in the new series Thor Vol 4 has routinely sold 30 percent more copies than the corresponding original five issues of Thor: God of Thunder. For instance, last fall's "Thor #1" sold 150,862 copies compared to 110,443 copies of "Thor: God of Thunder #1" in 2012 — a 36...

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College graduates generally rode out the recession better than people with less education. But job prospects were especially bleak for some of the most educated people out there: new Ph.Ds. Job openings for new Ph.D's in history, English, philosophy, and foreign languages dropped in 2008 and they've never really recovered.

Individual disciplines reported dismal numbers of new job postings for years. But those reports aren't always accurate — they can sometimes double-count jobs, or miss jobs posted outside of the main academic journals. A new report from Jeffrey Groen at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though, cross-correlates job listing data with unemployment rates and other information, and says they're accurate enough to worry about. A chart from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences shows a significant downward trend:

(American Academy of Arts and Sciences)

In 2001, there were more than 1,800 jobs for new English Ph.Ds; in 2013, that had fallen to just over 1,000. The drops for other disciplines are slightly less steep, but equally pronounced. (The exception is classical studies, which has been fairly stable.)

That chart should scare you if you're thinking about pursuing a doctorate in English, a foreign language, or history. But it doesn't seem to be working that way. Despite the lack of labor market demand, humanities Ph.D. programs aren't suffering. New enrollments grew about 1 percent per year in the 2000s, and in 2012, they jumped almost 8 percent, according to the Council of Graduate Schools.

The job market won't feel the effects for awhile: the typical humanities Ph.D takes at least eight years to complete, according to Groen's research. But this means more and more Ph.Ds will hit the job market, and there's no sign that there will be jobs there waiting for them.

(h/t Vitae)

WATCH: '10 things they don't talk about at graduation'

Pinky and the Brain was nothing if not a testament to the tenacity of lab mice. The Brain was always plotting some kind of world domination and Pinky was always... eating.  It's a nice reminder that anything can happen — as long as you remove yourself from reality entirely. Now, the team over at Animation Domination High-Def has brought reality back into the picture with a "scientifically accurate" version of the adored '90s TV show. Spoiler alert: "scientifically accurate" here just means "horrifying."

In the video above, bloated, bruised versions of the rodent characters go through a series of unpleasant tests often associated with animal-based research. They're electrocuted, prodded with giant needles, forced into complex mazes, and...

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Glee — remember Glee? — the once enjoyable, then completely baffling, musical comedy about high-school glee club members ends its six-season run Friday, March 20, on Fox at 8 pm Eastern. The show ends with 121 episodes, seemingly every one a little more incoherent than the last.

I reviewed the first three seasons of the show for the A.V. Club and kept up fitfully with later seasons. The general consensus is that Glee's best season was its 22-episode first season, which is true. But I would go further than that. The best "season" of Glee is actually its first 13 episodes, produced in one chunk, before the last nine episodes of season one were produced later.

And I might go one further than even that. Though it produced better episodes, the best version of Glee is the one presented in the pilot — a story about high-school kids with big dreams and a teacher who screwed up all of his own dreams but wanted to give these kids a better shot.

Yes, it was funny. Yes, it was a little caustic. But it was, at its core, about sad, desperate people longing for a better life. It was the kind of conflict great shows are built around — think a sort of Friday Night Lights for kids who were really into show choir.

So if you want to know when Glee "turned bad," it wasn't somewhere in season two or three. No, it was in the second episode.

The moment Glee got bad

Near the end of the pilot, Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), the teacher who never saw his own performing career advance past his high-school glee club days, learns that his wife (Jessalyn Gilsig) is pregnant. The two don't have a healthy marriage, and they're clearly trying to have a child to save that marriage.

Facing the birth of his child, Will decides to stop teaching and become an accountant, where at least he'll make more money, even if he finds the work less rewarding. Then he walks into the school's auditorium and sees this:

End of pilot.

It's a great TV moment, filled with hope and sadness and dozens of conflicting emotions. You know Will is going to stay. You know he's going to put his life on the line to stay. And you know that these kids and their teacher are going to push one another to their furthest limits.

In the very next episode, though, the series completely reverses itself. Will's wife isn't pregnant. She's faking a pregnancy to keep her husband interested, and she'll fake that pregnancy for most of those first 13 episodes. That fake pregnancy was an early example of some of the show's faults, like its propensity to stack up campy, melodramatic storytelling against honest human emotion and its occasionally awful attitudes toward its female characters.

But this moment signaled that Glee was always going to fall apart in a more concrete way, as well. It indicated this was going to be a show where the characters never actually had to make hard choices or do difficult things. Will wouldn't have to choose between his dreams and his child, because he wasn't actually going to have a child. It immediately diminished the dramatic stakes, and it was indicative of many other choices the show would make in this regard through the years.

TV shows can't succeed without stakes — dramatic, for the plot, and emotional, for the characters. Yes, having Will choose his own happiness over his child's financial wellbeing might have made him harder to "like" on a superficial level, but giving him exactly what he wants without him having to work for it eventually made him insufferable.

By its end, Glee did something like that with nearly every character. Rachel (Lea Michele) didn't get into the performing arts school of her dreams, until she did. Quinn (Dianna Agron) gave up her baby for adoption, then became a part of the baby's life. And so on. Sacrifice was only illusory at best.

There were plenty of great moments, but one choice in episode two indicated that everything that came next would always be a little hollow. And, ultimately, that's what happened.

The Glee finale airs at 8 pm Eastern on March 20, 2015. Previous seasons are available on Netflix.

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For many taxpayers, the annual refund check from the IRS is one of the year's biggest paydays. But thousands of taxpayers will get a nasty shock this year when the IRS tells them their refund has already been collected by someone else. In the best-case scenario, it will take these unlucky taxpayers months to convince the IRS to send them the refund they're entitled to.

This is not a new problem — I wrote about it last year, in fact. In the 2013 filing season, according to the Government Accountability Office, the IRS blocked $24.2 billion in fraudulent refund requests, while the agency paid out at least $5.8 billion (and possibly a lot more) in refunds that later proved fraudulent.

This year the refund-theft discussion has focused specifically on TurboTax, the nation's most popular tax-prep software. Two former employees of Intuit, the company behind the program, have charged that their bosses turned a blind eye to rampant use of TurboTax for refund theft.

Intuit denies it's done anything wrong. The company says stolen tax refunds are an industry-wide problem, and that Intuit has done more than any of its rivals to help the IRS combat the problem.

Here are the two big things you need to know about the story:

• Intuit probably deserves a lot of the bad press it's getting for its lax security procedures, but Congress deserves more blame for failing to address the refund-theft problem despite years of warnings.
• If you take sensible precautions — like choosing a strong password and enabling two-factor authentication — your tax refund should be just as safe filing with TurboTax as with other software.

How crooks steal refunds with TurboTax

(Barry Chin/the Boston Globe via Getty Images)

There are two basic ways criminals can use TurboTax to steal tax refunds. One takes advantage of the fact that our tax system doesn't have any reliable way of verifying people's identities.

When it comes to tax returns, the IRS takes a "send checks first, ask questions later" approach. The IRS might not discover that a return was fraudulent for weeks or even months — long after the refund check is out the door.

Fraudsters can use TurboTax to exploit this flaw. They just need to get their hands on basic identifying information, such as a victim's Social Security number, address, and date of birth. And thanks to a string of major data breaches, this kind of information is available to a lot of criminals.

Another way to steal tax refunds is by obtaining a victim's TurboTax username and password. In most cases, this is possible because people use the same passwords on multiple sites. Criminals find lists of usernames and passwords elsewhere on the internet, and then try those same credentials with TurboTax. If it works, they can hijack the user's account — using identifying information entered in previous years to submit a new, fraudulent return and direct the refund to an account controlled by the thief.

Intuit could have done more to stop refund theft

A key point here is that neither of these attacks is Intuit's fault — at least directly. If a criminal has a user's Social Security number and other identifying information, he can submit a fraudulent return using any number of tax-filing methods, including TurboTax competitors such as H&R Block and TaxAct. Similarly, TurboTax is far from the only website criminals have tried to break into by guessing users' passwords.

But it is fair to fault TurboTax if — as two whistleblowing employees have alleged — TurboTax refused to take obvious precautions against these kinds of attacks.

"We found literally millions of accounts that were 100 percent used only for fraud," former Intuit programmer Robert Lee told journalist Brian Krebs. "But management explicitly forbade us from either flagging the accounts as fraudulent or turning off those accounts."

Intuit also dragged its feet on adding features that would make it harder to take over the accounts of legitimate customers. For instance, two-factor authentication is a technology that improves security by requiring the user to enter a numeric code sent to his or her cellphone in addition to a password. A lot of websites have offered this feature for years, but Intuit just made it widely available earlier this year.

"When you give your most sensitive data and that of your family to a company, that company should offer you more security than you can get at Facebook or 'World of Warcraft,'" Lee told Krebs.

Why only Congress can fix the problem

(Julie Thurston Photography/Getty Images )

Intuit says it has voluntarily taken measures to combat fraud. The company says it's reluctant to do more because this is a problem the tax-preparation industry as a whole needs to solve. If Intuit is the only company to crack down on refund theft, the company fears the crooks will simply switch to other filing methods.

This argument might be self-serving, but it's also true. Private services can take steps to discourage fraud at the margins, but only Congress can overhaul the rules and make fraud harder system-wide.

One way the IRS could crack down on fraudulent returns would be to check that the wage information on a return matches the information submitted by employers on W-2 forms. The problem is that the IRS doesn't get this information in time to verify it before sending out refund checks.

Current law doesn't require an employer to submit this information to the IRS until two months after it's provided to employees. And small employers aren't required to submit the data electronically. Meanwhile, the law requires the IRS to send taxpayers their refunds promptly. So often, by the time the IRS discovers someone submitted a return with fraudulent W-2 data, the refund has already gone out the door.

Nina Olson, the IRS's official public advocate, has been calling for this system to be overhauled for years. But the IRS on its own can't require employers to file earlier, nor can it require all employers to file electronically. Only Congress can do that.

A more ambitious approach would be to establish a standard system for taxpayers to identify themselves. For example, when consumers request a copy of their credit report from the government-sponsored AnnualCreditReport.com, the site asks them a series of questions about the names of old employers, streets they used to live on, and so forth, to verify their identity. A similar approach could work for the IRS.

The IRS could ask taxpayers to supply a mobile phone number or email address. That would allow the agency to send taxpayers automated notices when a return is received the next year, allowing the taxpayer to notify the agency if a return is fraudulent.

There are a lot of options. The problem is that the body that's ultimately responsible for shaping the tax system — Congress — hasn't taken the problem seriously for many years.

How to use TurboTax safely

(Denise Taylor/Getty )

It's important to note that the recent allegations against TurboTax do not necessarily mean your tax refund is in greater danger if you sign up for TurboTax. If a fraudster gets your Social Security number and other data and uses it to impersonate you, it's going to be a huge headache no matter what tax prep software you use. Crooks using H&R Block can steal refunds from legitimate TurboTax customers, and vice versa. Avoiding TurboTax doesn't make you any safer from this kind of attack.

What about having your username and password stolen? That's a risk with any online service, but there are a couple of things you can do to minimize the risk.

One is to enable two-factor authentication. As I mentioned before, TurboTax dragged its feet on offering this security feature. But it finally started doing so this year. This feature will ensure the bad guys can't access your account even if they figure out your password.

Second, choose a good, long password for TurboTax that isn't used on any other website. If you're worried about forgetting your password, don't be afraid to just write it down and save it with your tax documents. Anyone who steals your previous year's tax return will be able to impersonate you with or without your TurboTax password.

Intuit responds

I asked Intuit to comment on the refund theft controversy. Here's what the company said:

As the challenge from cybercriminals evolves, we need to continually strengthen our efforts by helping the IRS detect fraud, while also protecting legitimate taxpayers from unnecessary burden and delay to their filings and refunds. And that is what we are doing. There are many different opinions about which security measures are most appropriate for a given threat level. We believe we offered appropriate features to address the threat level at the time and continue to evolve our security measures in response to the changing environment.

The New Hampshire state legislature is, as those of us who grew up in the state were repeatedly informed in school, the fourth-largest legislative body in the English-speaking world, surpassed only by Congress, the Indian Parliament, and the British Parliament. The State House is particularly enormous, with 400 representatives — one for every 3,317 residents. Each is paid $100 a year, plus mileage, for a job that, while not full-time, is still a substantial time-suck.

The upshot is that it's much, much easier to get elected to the House there than in any other state — and much, much less appealing — so you can imagine the caliber of politician New Hampshire is left with. In that context, it's not so surprising the State House decided to go out of its way to shatter the dreams of a group of fourth-graders from Hampton Falls:

NH1.com's Shari Small explains that the students had proposed House Bill 373, which would name the red-tailed hawk as the official "state raptor" of New Hampshire. The bill cleared the Environment and Agriculture committee, leading to a floor debate in which Rep. Warren Groen (R-Rochester) decided to make an extended joke about the red-tailed hawk and Planned Parenthood that also, in all likelihood, taught the children what abortion is:

"[The Red Tail Hawk] grasps [its prey] with its talons then uses its razor sharp beak to basically tear it apart limb by limb, and I guess the shame about making this a state bird is it would serve as a much better mascot for Planned Parenthood."

Rep. John Burt (R-Goffstown) took a softer tack, instead informing the children that their concerns were frivolous and unworthy of his and the legislature's time: "Bottom line, if we keep bringing more of these bills, and bills, and bills forward that really I think we shouldn't have in front of us, we'll be picking a state hot dog next."

The bill, along with the children's remaining faith in representative democracy, was killed. The vote was 133 to 160, because the other thing about having a 400-person legislative body is that sometimes hundreds of representatives just don't show up.

For the record, this is what a red-tailed hawk looks like. Behold its majesty:

(Scot Campbell)

Live free or die.

Mike Fahey, writing for Kotaku:

This is a company the owners of beloved properties trust with their brands. Why? Because DeNA knows how to make free-to-play work.

Look at those two screenshots. Every one of the games there is free-to-play. Every one of them features in-app purchases. Several of them have been among the top-grossing free-to-play games in the world.

Many of DeNA and Mobage’s most popular games rely on collectible card tactics to make revenue, building on rampant success of Rage of Bahamut. Players are given certain items for free — trading cards, Transformers, G.I. Joe squad members — and can play though a large portion of each game using them, but to be competitive they must purchase a chance at a rare item using real money.

Sure hope Nintendo has the wherewithal to pursue this in a balanced, non-scammy way.

Update: Steve Lubitz captures my skepticism:

“Nintendo games on mobile” is to “games with Nintendo IP on mobile” as Assistant Regional Manager is to Assistant to the Regional Manager.

For the first time in 30 years and only the second time in his career, John Williams won't be scoring a new Steven Spielberg movie. It was announced today that composer Thomas Newman, who did American Beauty, will instead be scoring Spielberg's next film, a cold war thriller called Bridge of Spies. Williams and Spielberg have famously been working together for over 40 years now, with Williams scoring every Spielberg feature but 1985's The Color Purple. Their collaborations have resulted in incredibly iconic musical themes, like those for Jaws and Jurassic Park.

Continue reading…

Benedict Evans:

“Android” means lots of different things, and there’s a lot of confusion about forks, Xiaomi, China and AOSP, as well as “the next billion”. So this is how I try to think about this. First, there are actually (at least) six types of “Android” in the market today.

Read 44 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Jason Momoa is on the warpath. In a recent appearance at Indiana Comic-Con, DC's future Aquaman was asked by a fan to send a message to the "DC haters" out there. The Khal of Khals had two words: "Fuck Marvel."

Shots fired. In my mind, if Jason Momoa could rain sharks on Kevin Feige's house, he would. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Continue reading…

Today is Pi Day, the date that aligns with the first three digits of π, 3.14. Hurray!

How best to celebrate Pi Day? With some pie charts, of course. Here are our favorites.

This is a delicious classic: a pie chart made out of pie

And then there is the more informative pie chart about pie. So helpful!

(Modern Farmer)

If there were a prize for "most informative pie chart about pies," Modern Farmer would win in a landslide. Go over here to see more details on each seasonal pie, and reveal in the magazine's pie chart mastery.

And don't forget that all sorts of pies — even pizza pies — are fantastic for the pie chart genre

(Bloomberg Businessweek)

This is one of many charts from Businessweek's excellent piece on the surprisingly powerful pizza lobby, showing how each major pizza chain donates to political parties. Definitely go see the other ones here.

Some pie charts are great for reliving beloved childhood memories

(The Oatmeal)

This one too

(Boing Boing)

Why do we even bother with music really when pie charts can convey information so much better?

(Blog CDN)

Wouldn't it be more exciting to get pie-chart-rolled than Rick-rolled?

(Mental Floss)

This is the most honest pie chart of them all

(Someecards)

And this, arguably, is the most dishonest

(YouTube/ThinkProgress)

Then there is this pi chart, which honestly just turns the concept of a pie chart on its head

(KPloy on Threadless)

Yes, that was overwhelming. Let's regroup with a more typical pie chart.

(Vulture)

The geniuses over Vulture should get a Pulitzer for having the good sense to chart the movie Life of Pi in a pie chart.

All right. Happy Pi Day! Celebrate in the best way most of us know how: spending most of the day forgetting that it's even Pi Day at all.