Facebook stock trades at 94x earnings. HP trades at 14x. Facebook stock is quite a bit more risky than HP stock because it has so much forward growth built into it already. Zuckerman treats Facebook stock like Monopoly money because it pretty much is.

I heard rumors from people working at Autonomy that they were shady long before the acquisition started. I kept hearing things like "If this were a US company the top management would be in jail" This kind of thing, where they were cooking the revenue numbers, involved a lot of people.

Yes, right on the money. This was Apotheker's deal to save the company and transform HP into a software company. He was doing everything he could to ramrod it through, I'm sure.

Interesting - apparently they were suing Deloitte and KPMG but have now dropped them from the lawsuit. It seems odd that they'd let the auditors off the hook.

HP is a multi-billion dollar corporation. In other words, they get to wear the big boy pants. Due diligence is part of the acquisition process and it's a breach of the HP board's fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to have gotten rooked so badly. I know people who worked at Autonomy prior to the acquisition and there were plenty of rumors going around about Autonomy's accounting shenanigans.

Lynch and Hussain may very well have committed fraud on HP. However, getting taken for $8B brings to mind the old saying about a fool and his money.

Yes - I still don't know what the point behind info is other than to be different than man.

I don't see a lack of documentation anywhere in the FOSS world, it's actually a lot better than most closed source software. I don't know whether you're complaining about your lack of Google-fu or the fact that software is reliant on other things. Off course, very obscure things are not well documented but that is regardless of software you use, that's when you experiment and find out what you need, write a blog post or improve the documentation yourself. But for a regular user and regular sysadmin and developer tasks, there is plenty of help available.

The CO2 needs to be sequestered or you're just delaying the problem. So carbonating beverages and growing tomatoes with it is right out. Anything that doesn't put it back into long-term storage is not helping.

I wonder what standard of safety these carbon storage proposals are being held to? We've gone absolutely nuts on radioactive material storage but the reality is, even if the stuff gets out in 10,000 years it's going to create a fairly localized problem. Whereas if your CO2 storage springs a leak and dumps a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere that could have planet-wide repercussions.

Feel free to move to Mars, I doubt they would know or care much about your hijinks. The world has become a small town due to the Internet. Small towns have their advantages but also their disadvantages.

There is technology out there that could detect humans/animals even in the darkest portions (in tunnels etc) well in advance, outside human drivers' visual range. However whether or not that would make a difference is a big question, you can't stop a chunk of steel weighing in at 10T in a matter of seconds - well, you could (rocket boosters and whatnot) but then the meat bags inside the train would be omelets.

Speech recognition has been in computers since OS/2 Warp and MacOS9. It's a 'solved' problem. However we speak much slower than we either think or type/move mouses so it's a bit of a solution looking for a problem (and with mobile there are some practical uses eg. driving a car but it's still weird to talk to a device in public as if it were your butler; heck it's weird to talk to a human butler). What isn't solved very well is understanding natural language and having a 'conversation' with a computer.

If I don't know any further details, I'll take it as if it were the best case scenario and someone found some irregularities and is fixing it. Irregularities doesn't mean something illegal happened, there are plenty of ways to siphon money out of a fund that don't break the law, that's what accountants are supposed to know and fix.

If something is blatantly illegal, follow the corporate policy and report as necessary to superiors and if that fails or is not feasible, authorities. Remain as anonymous as possible, do an anonymous report to HR or at least ask them to keep your identity concealed etc etc. And trust me, authorities don't give a shit about what is and isn't legal within a corporation, you file a report and nothing ever happens unless millions of dollars are going in the wrong (read: not in their) pockets. Even the corporation won't care if an accountant syphoned 100k to their personal bank account; they'll fire the dude/dudette and carry on because the bad press will hurt their stock/client base more than the 100k. For the 'regular' guy, $100k or even $1M is a LOT of money, within the billion dollar corporation this is chump change and well within their calculated losses.

Architecture is an important art with plenty of math worked into it, the human body in art is also a great case for both biology and math; art is important and should be a core academic subject supporting the rest however it should not be "arts and crafts" which is not art but a way of keeping kids busy.

It should be the reasons behind art, what makes a thing aesthetically pleasing, what harmonics are and how colors and light mix but how do you convince a populace that doesn't even understand half of the words in this sentence that that is what art is and why it's important?

Math has been in the boring rote memorization exercise for decades in schools. The reason is that most people simply do not grasp the 'mechanics' behind mathematics and teachers have neither the will nor the skill to teach a subject like math. I didn't like math in school simply because they went so slow and required rote memorization of multiplication tables, axioms and rules. I even remember doing tests that were simply asking to write down axioms in text form.

Some people do grasp math and those will be the nerds that eventually become STEM students. However 75% of the population will never enter this field because they're simply not wired to understand it.

That is basically breaking even especially given the backers and what they're investing in. I'm surprised the losses weren't larger.