I just realized this is quarterly revenue. Still that values the company at $400 billion, still way short of a trillion.

Revenue was $33.7 billion, it's a mature company that does not expect crazy growth, so a conservative estimate would be $100 billion (3 times revenue). You can stretch that to maybe $200 billion. But who in their right mind would buy the shares at 1 trillion valuation? The times we live in.

So, you have defrauded you investors for billions of dollars and you defence is "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that meddling journalist". Surely your defence team can come up with something better, blame it on (flips excuse calendar) Immediate Encryption Underflow Signal.

First thing we've done after coming into a couple of startups was standardize the email addresses to stop this kind of thing. Everybody gets first.last name email (or something like that), no nicknames, no first names, no choice. Boring and formulaic, but efficient and eliminates confusion and status issues. The only exception is bofh@company.com, reserved for system ops.

Well, if you actually RTFA, you'll see that they just quote the statement by the editorial board of Machine Learning Journal which in 2001 quit to for free Journal of Machine Learning Research. Nature Machine Learning is supposed to launch in January 2019 and this is what this new petition is all about. So, no, slashdot is not 17 years too late.

So the Facebook report states that $100,000 worth of ads were bought over a 2 year period from accounts suspected to have been operated from Russia. Also these ads were:

- without specific geographic targeting (only 25% we so targeted)
- without targeting specific candidates
- vaguely meant to spread division in the society (what does that even mean?)

Somehow this got blown into "Russia was subverting democracy in the US". It's OK for Sheldon Adelson, Koch brothers and such to throw millions in on their PACs and hold auditions for GOP candidates, that's just free speech, no subversion of democracy there. But here we have the flimsiest of evidences that somebody (could have been from anywhere, even US) paid somebody from Russia $100,000 to do some vague anti-LGBT, racist, anti-immigration campaign not specifically targeted at any candidate or Americans, suddenly this requires a massive investigation. Has everybody lost their minds?

These analysts are typically guys who are not automotive analysts, but technology analysts. They have large misconceptions about the automotive industry and how quickly can the technology change. The transition from ICE to electric engines is a huge one with a number of technology and production issues to still be resolved. Reasonable analyses I've seen from automotive industry guys have hybrids jumping to 25-35% of vehicle sales by 2030, with full electrics staying below 5%. 50% by mid-2020's or even 2030's is a pipe dream.

To put it simply, Tesla's Gigafactory will take 5 years to build (2015 - 2020 for full capacity) at a cost of $5 billion and will supply batteries for 1.5 million cars. European vehicle sales (passenger cars and light commerial vehicles, which includes SUV's) are in the 10 - 15 million per year range, US are 15 - 20 million per year range. So to supply this volume of vehicles (50% of 25 - 35 million per year), you would need 10 Gigafactories, with building to start by early 2020's. I haven't seen any plans for this to happen, so the battery supply will not be there to build these vehicles. Infrastructure is the second issue. It takes time to build out the network of charging stations and there are no widespread plans to do this either.

So, all these plans and commitments are meaningless unless they are accompanied by major investments into battery and electric component production and infrastructure investment. When that happens, I'll believe that electric cars will have meaningful sales.

Amazon just bought Whole Foods, making it a direct competitor to Walmart. So, Walmart is being sensible. They are saying they don't want any of their data on a competitor's server. Using a car analogy, it's like Toyota saying to their suppliers they don't want their data stored in the GM Cloud Service. There are no guarantees that Amazon would not snoop on the data, no matter how walled off the service is from the rest of the company. This is quite common in the industry, the suppliers are still free to do whatever they want with their own data, but they must follow directions from the customer regarding customer data. So before crying monopoly, consider whether any company would freely hand over their data for storage to a competitor.

The "research" comes from the bank that would like you to be more "responsible" with your money, like giving it to them. This is a bank that has paid billions of dollars in fines over the last five years for money laundering and interest rate rigging. The key statement form the report: "Despite the apparent ‘reality gap’ in Millennials’ retirement expectations, most (68%) have started saving for retirement, at an average age of 26. Millennials are also more likely than other generations to take investment risks to boost their retirement saving..."

So it's not that the millennials are unrealistic, they are saving a plenty, it's that the Fed and other national banks are keeping the interest rates artificially low to boost asset prices and prop up failing mega-banks including HSBC. So please HSBC, tell me more about how I need to "save" more for the retirement so that the government can bail you and your ilk out again when you blow up the economy with asset bubbles.

There has been a number of ammunition depot explosions over the last 15 years in across Eastern Europe. 2 in Serbia, 6 in Bulgaria since 2000, Gerdec in Albania, Cobasna in Moldova, Ukraine itself in 2015. Cold War explosives are becoming unstable and they tend to explode on their own, especially when there is insufficient money to maintain proper storage.

Technically yes. In practice no. Passenger cars with Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) systems can apply for low temperature operation exemptions. Basically, the system losses efficiency at low temperatures, so the automakers are allowed to turn it off as not to waste the SCR fluid. Some of these exemptions are ridiculous, one Mercedes (if I remember correctly) vehicle is exempt from turning the SCR on at ambient temperatures below 15 C.

Most of the diesel passenger vehicles are exempt below 5 C, so especially in the winter there is almost no NOx emissions control on any of these vehicles. If you are a heavy duty vehicle, there is no exemption. You have to put an electric heater on your exhaust system to keep it at operating temperature. Also, as there are very few labs that can accommodate large truck testing the testing, the certification test for heavy duty trucks is on the road with a portable emissions measurement system.

The whole issue is that a bug truck hauling 70-80,000 pounds doesn't care if it needs a 100 pound heater or a 200 pound urea tank to bring emissions down. Space and weight are not an issue. Much more difficult to do on a 3,000 pound passenger car.

Apparently he wasn't tipped off by the start of the email

Comrade Podesta,

Filthy imperialist pigs have hacked into you email. To change your password please click http://www.ussrlives.com/mail/

It's more complicated than that. Patent was for a process, not any individual components. The component produced in the US (the enzyme) is not patent protected, it's a commonly used commodity. So the issue was, since the process is dependent on the commodity (it will not work without it), is this a substantive component of the device? Promega argued that any of the components is substantive, since it its absence invalidates the process. Courts view was that, since this component was a commodity that is not unique to this process, it is not a substantive component. The DVD analogy works pretty well, this particular enzyme is used for a bunch of things and it's not the "secret sauce" of this process.

This is a fairly common issue in biotech. US patent office tends to grant patents far too easily in biotech, resulting in a situation where a product is patent-protected in the US, but not abroad. The decision is absolutely right, Life Technologies licensed the product for the US market, but not the rest of the world, as there was no need for that. The patented parts of the product were not produced in the US, so there was no US-based transaction of the protected property. The analogous situation would be that Sony was suing a distributor for distributing a movie whose copyright is still in place in the US, but has expired abroad on the basis that the DVD's that the movie is distributed on were produced in the US.

Presumably PBS paid money for the rights to air the show, including streaming it online for a limited time. That revenue has to be offset against the reduced online sales revenues. With this methodology almost anything will reduce online sales revenue. Caveat: methodology assumed from the Torrentfreak summary not from the TFA which is paywalled.