Tesla Motors, the automaker which is Silicon Valley's best hope to build an electric-car industry, will run out of cash in three months if it does not raise new financing. CEO Elon Musk has confirmed Valleywag's report that it has spent most of its customers' deposits and is running low on cash. In an interview with Reuters, CEO Elon Musk conceded that the company only has $9 million in the bank, as a concerned Tesla employee told us yesterday. Tesla's contract with customers specifies that deposits can be used for "working capital" — but last I checked, "working capital" means liquidity available to a company. It does not mean "money that has gone out the door." So Tesla may arguably be in breach of contract with the 1,200 customers who have put between $5,000 and $60,000 down for its Tesla Roadster. Tesla has only delivered 50 cars.

Musk has previously said that Tesla will be able to turn cash-flow positive in nine months, if it receives new investment. He now says he's seeking an additional $20 million from Tesla's current investors, and expects to get it next week.

Do the math: If Tesla has $9 million in the bank, and requires another $20 million to get to positive cash flow over the next nine months, then it is burning at least $3 million a month. And that's after it laid off 24 percent of its workforce and announced plans to shutter its Detroit office.

A Cow writes "The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova. The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work, without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gas got down to $2.79 a gallon in CEO Jeremy White's hometown of Minneapolis, and true to his promise, White's making all Codeweaver apps free to download.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

If you're American, it's nearly time to do your civic duty and pick the lesser of two evils for the greater good... and then to wonder if that vote actually got counted. With Diebold admitting its own machines are utterly insecure, competitor Sequoia is now under the microscope and, after a little quality time with the company's machines, Princeton researchers have filed a 158 page report on the ease of replacing their ROMs and winning yourself an election. Okay, we know what you're thinking: "Hacking hardware isn't exactly easy when the computer is in a locked box." Amazingly, it is. A researcher was able to bypass the physical security mechanisms in 13 seconds, despite never having picked a lock before. Now you're thinking: "But you'd need to do that on hundreds of them!" Not so; once infected that malicious code can spread itself to others, and, with no paper trail and an easily bypassed internal audit system, you're well on your way to whatever dark corner of Washington, D.C. you care to occupy!

[Via Ars Technica]

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Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking

– Steve Jobs

Frase del giorno:

Italia, la mia patria. Terra dove tutti sono commissari tecnici, piloti, politici, editori di siti web e system admin

Mai frase migliore per un giorno come oggi, ringrazio Paolo Corsini di Hwupgrade.it per averla usata come firma nel forum

Non sono poche le funzioni che mancano all’iPhone, almeno secono me, e credo che più o meno ogni utente del dispositivo abbia una propria wishlist contenente quelle cose che vorrebbe che alla prossima versione del Firmware venissero sistemate o aggiunte.

Con lo scopo di raccogliere tutti questi desideri e scoprire quali sono quelli più diffusi fra gli utenti è nato il sito Please Fix The iPhone, tramite il quale è possibile venire a conoscenza di quale sia la funzione più richiesta, ovvero il copia e incolla, o della seconda più agognata, ovvero la visione dei contenuti flash da Safari.

Fossi in Apple visiterei il sito, una volta ogni tanto, e lo terrei sotto controllo per scoprire quello che i consumatori veramente vorrebbero poter fare con il loro cellulare della mela. Anche se, comunque, credo che gran parte delle richieste elencate siano già risapute, visto che se ne è discusso più e più volte a proposito della loro mancanza.

With fuel prices rising and supplies dwindling, more and more inventors are turning their creativity towards cars that work without the need for barrels of gasoline. True, there have been a number of vehicles released that run on electricity but now designers are turning to another precious resource – air.

Al Franken can draw an almost perfect map of the United States freehand from memory while answering questions about health care and cracking jokes about the Red States. How impressive is that?