Tech Today w/ Ken May

Tesla Motors announced today it has completely repaid the $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy the company received in 2010. The funds were generated by Tesla through a recent sale of their stock, worth close to a billion dollars. The stock price had risen sharply after the company reported its first profitable quarter (and the stock still sits roughly 50% higher than before their earnings release). Today’s payment of $451.8 million finished off both the loan’s principal and its interest, nine years before the final payment was due. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, ‘I would like to thank the Department of Energy and the members of Congress and their staffs that worked hard to create the ATVM program, and particularly the American taxpayer from whom these funds originate. I hope we did you proud.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The answer may be surprising to some, but according to leading security firm NSS Labs, there’s a new champ in town. NSS Labs tested the top 5 browsers on the market today; Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer 10, Mozilla Firefox 19 and Opera 12 to see how they would respond to “live” testing. Each browser was pointed to series 900+ URL’s that had known infections embeded in thier sites. At the end of testing, guess what? IE 10 FTW! Yeah, you read that right. IE 10 crushed everyone. IE 10 blocked a whopping 99.96% of the infested sites followed by Chrome at 83.16% (respectable), Safari at 10.15%, Firefox at 9.92% and Opera pulling up the rear at a measly 1.87% effective rate.

Kim Jong-un is wishing that he was still running Windows 95 like he was last year when they were able to successfully run launch tests. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) stated that a launch test had to be put on hold due to “problems with Windows 8.” KCNA goes on to say that they are “working with Windows 8 support to resolve the issue.” There is no word what the exact nature of the problems Jong-un was experiencing, but perhaps ctrl/alt/delete might work. So what do you think was on that support ticket? I would love to know who the support staffer was so we could get a copy, but I am guessing that in the ‘description of issue’ section it went something like: “Failure to launch”