Larry Ellison is the CEO of Oracle and one of the richest individuals in the world. He has a propensity for making extravagant purchases, such as 10 homes in Malibu’s Billionaire’s Beach, a 452-foot yacht, a tennis tournament, a Hawaiian island, and most recently, a small commercial airline.

Island Air is a Hawaiian airline with service between seven destinations. It offers 224 weekly flights between Oahu, the Big Island, Kauai, Molokai, and Lanai. Island Air has been going through a restructuring over the past year, and this deal will help secure its future and growth. The terms of the deal were undisclosed, but Island Air will continue its operations as usual, while developing plans for additional planes, routes, and services.

“We are excited Mr. Ellison has acquired Island Air,” said Island Air president Les Murashige in a statement. “He has the vision and resources to literally take Island Air to new heights.”

In reality, Ellison owns multiple private planes and probably won’t fly on Island Air. He purchased 98 percent of the 141-square-mile comma-shaped island of Lanai last June for between $500 and $600 million dollars. When you own your own island, I’d imagine the point is to avoid hopping between the others.

Judge Gary W.B. Chang ruled Friday that online travel companies owe the state of Hawaii approximately $110 million in unpaid taxes and $40 million of interest on sales of Hawaii hotel rooms.

Between 2000 and 2011, sites like Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Orbitz, Travelocity, and Priceline generated more than $2.7 billion in Hawaii hotel rooms. These companies collected enough money to cover the General Excise Tax (GET), but they never paid it to the state. Chang is now ordering that they fulfill their financial obligations, as well as seeking penalties for the companies’ failure to file tax returns and pay their due.

The ruling stated that the GET is a privilege tax imposed on businesses for the privilege of doing business in the State of Hawaii and should include the sale of hotel rooms. Governor Neil Abercrombie supports the ruling by the Tax Appeal Court, and he said in a statement that the asked the attorney general and the tax director to “aggressively and relentless go after these taxes that were due and owing.”

The additional revenue could amount to a further $20 million a year for Hawaii. This will have a significant, long-term economic impact on the state, which could use the money to bolster its budget in areas like infrastructure and schools.

However, the companies on the other end of this dispute will not accept this mandate lying down. In response to the judge’s decision, the Travel Technology Association, whose members include Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity issued the following statement:

“This ruling will significantly increase costs for all tour operators, travel agents, OTCs, and other travel intermediaries that facilitate travel to Hawaii.  Because demand for travel to Hawaii is acutely sensitive to price changes, this change in tax treatment will harm consumers and significantly reduce demand for Hawaii vacations.  Travel Tech members intend to challenge this ruling as well as work cooperatively with tourism leaders and lawmakers to minimize the ruling’s damage to the Hawaii tourism economy.”

The hearing is set for March 8, and a trial date set for April 15 to resolve any outstanding issues. Read the report from Hawaii’s attorney general. 

Before we start, there’s something I need to confess. When it comes to flight simulators, I’m a complete novice. Fear not though, because Microsoft Flight is intended to get everyone in the air, “whether you are a casual gamer who has always wanted to fly, or an experienced pilot who wants to test your skills.” The question is, can Microsoft’s free-to-play simulator really help rookies like myself get airborne, while maintaining enough depth to satisfy veteran pilots?

Microsoft Flight is a very new approach to packaging a flight simulator, from a company with a grand tradition in this area. The game is presented as a free download, giving access to the Big Island of Hawaii, along with two starter planes with which to explore the skies. No expensive flight stick is needed to play the game — although it is recommended for more advanced aerobatic manoeuvres — and I managed throughout with just a mouse and keyboard.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Flying around Hawaii

Setting Flight in Hawaii was a minor masterstroke by Microsoft, as the island offers a substantial variety of scenery and locations, while not being too large as to be daunting to newcomers. The main island offers a total of 13 airstrips, which range from small dirt runways, nestled in among the trees, to large commercial affairs. Alongside these, you are free to touch down anywhere that seems flat enough. You can even land in the sea, thanks to the amphibious capabilities of the slow but stable starter plane, the Icon A5 (pictured right).

Landing your plane successfully, on land or water, accounts for a large proportion of the initial challenges and missions in Flight. My first faltering approaches at fairly decent sized runways were pretty awful, and resulted in me overshooting, undershooting, and even forgetting to engage my undercarriage on one occasion. The game wouldn’t let me fail indefinitely though, and verbal prompts and visual cues helped me get back on track. Eventually I was touching down with what seemed to be a decent success ratio, even on the tiny dirt runways hidden away in the Hawaiian countryside.

The challenges

In addition to the numerous landing challenges on offer, Flight likes to gauge your ability at negotiating glowing rings and picking up virtual trinkets in the game world. My first attempt at a Challenge Course mission, which involves flying through a sequence of hoops in the correct order, resulted in a quite exhilarating descent through a tree-lined valley, towards the ocean. There are three such challenge courses in the free version of Flight, along with two Gold Rush challenges, which task you with collecting 25 rings from a given location within an allotted time.

These challenges are a clear attempt by Microsoft to engage an audience that would not traditionally be found playing flight simulation games. While many veteran pilots may object to their inclusion in Flight, I found them engaging, challenging, and perfect for a ten minute blast on the game. Buzzing past rooftops in an open cockpit plane is always fun, and having glowing collectibles as justification for doing is a welcome move.

The freedom of Free Flight

Despite the short blasts of fun that the challenges offer, the feeling of discovery and exploration in Flight is better represented by the Free Flight mode, which has been augmented here by the addition of ‘aerocaches’. These are small, glowing objects placed in different parts of the island, and their discovery and collection can either be by happy accident, or the end result of a planned excursion. Swooping under a bridge to collect an aerocache was hugely satisfying, as was climbing over 14,000 ft to the highest point on the island, and this guided exploration, more than anything, represents what Flight does best.

Free Flight mode is available from any of the thirteen airstrips, and the weather conditions, seasons and time of day can all be quickly altered, to give a diverse range of flying experiences. Taking off in a thunderstorm with a strong prevailing wind proved impossible in the Icon A5, and resulted in some hilarious false starts. The Boeing PT-17 Stearman, on the other hand, coped admirably with bad weather, and taking to the skies at dusk with rain lashing down and a red glow dimly visible on the horizon, was a surprisingly beautiful experience.

In addition to user defined flying conditions, there are a number of flight control assistance options in Flight, which can be switched on and off, to help newcomers or enhance the experience of veteran pilots. These options are automatically turned on at launch, but even as a relative rookie to the genre, I found myself switching some of them off after a few hours, which actually gave the game a more satisfying feel.

Forgiving hardware requirements

My somewhat aging PC coped well with Flight on low and medium graphics settings, but the frame rate dropped significantly with everything set to high. However dense or detailed the scenery becomes on the ground though, the sky always remains the star of the show, with the variety of weather conditions and times of day available offering players some gorgeous vistas, even on low settings. In this respect Microsoft has done an admirable job of balancing graphical performance with accessibility for a wider audience.

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The initiative is called the Hawaii Hydrogen Initiative, and it aims to make hydrogen available for all one million residents on the island of Oahu by 2015 through a total of 20 to 25 hydrogen stations installed around the island. It mirrors some of the infrastructure being built nationwide, like the efforts in Norway previously reported on by VentureBeat. The initiative is led by Hawaiian utility The Gas Company and includes a total of ten companies collaborating on the project.

It looks like GM is banking on Hawaii being a good market for its Chevrolet Equinox Fuel Cell car, if and when the vehicle becomes commercially available. Hawaii has been the state of choice for many electric vehicle and clean energy projects. Hawaii is one of the more progressive clean energy states, banning coal plants and instituting a plan to reach 70 percent of energy use derived from renewables by 2030. That has made it an attractive market to clean energy companies like electric car startup Coda, solar financing company SunRun and electric vehicle infrastructure startup Better Place.

It’s also an interesting move for GM (albeit not a huge one) as it looks to go greener. It’s bringing out the range extender Chevrolet Volt (a partially electric car), has pledged to invest $40 million in green energy projects and, now, is investing in a small hydrogen infrastructure project. Lately, the major automakers making news for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are folks like Honda and Mercedes-Benz. Both of those companies will begin leasing hydrogen cars in California next year. Hawaii is also big on electric cars and infrastructure and will be among the first states to get the limited-release electric cars coming to market, like the Nissan Leaf and Coda sedan.

It’s also an example of how companies are building the infrastructure for a technology before it’s actually created or released — like the build-out of electric car chargers nationwide — in some cases by utilities themselves – or Google’s investment the Atlantic Wind Connection, an ambitious transmission backbone for offshore wind farms that have yet to be built (but would need transmission lines in order to become fully operational). Indeed, the supply of hydrogen outstrips the supply of cars in Hawaii at the moment. The Gas Company says it currently makes enough hydrogen to power 10,000 hydrogen cars.

In May, Nissan singled out Hawaii as a target market –- the state will be among the first to get the Leaf next year. The Coda is set to hit the U.S. market at the end of this year, the same time the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf will arrive.

“They have a great opportunity in front of them. At least for the next 18 months to 24 months there’s going to be a very limited supply of both the Volts and Leafs, so I think there will be customers hungry for those vehicles … and would strongly consider Coda,” said John Gartner, analyst for Pike Research.

Hawaii is a prime market for electric vehicles, thanks to short driving distances and a strong commitment to renewable energy. Their current governor launched the Clean Energy Initiative, which aims towards 70 percent clean energy usage by 2030.

Hawaii is also one of the first states to partner with Better Place, a company that has brought electric vehicle infrastructure, charging stations and in some cases electric cars themselves to countries like Israel, Denmark and Australia.

The state’s deal with Better Place should yield stations where EV drivers can exchange their depleted car battery for a charged one. And with islands that are short in circumference, “range anxiety” is less of an issue.

The Coda sedan itself seats five, and the company says its lithium-ion battery system has 40 percent more usable energy than any other EV in its class, with a range of 120 miles.