Tesla says it will sell its 200,000th electric vehicle sometime this year. That means the US residents on the Model 3 waiting that stretches almost to a half-million have to wonder if they’ll get the full $7,500 tax credit, a partial credit, or none at all. Tesla could tinker with deliveries to make more buyers eligible for the credit. Buyers will be helped most if Tesla can crank up to its claimed production of 5,000 units per week.

What Tesla Said

Tesla, in a filing on Friday with the Federal Securities Exchange Commission, gave notice that it will sell it's 200,000th car this year.

Under current regulations, a $7,500 federal tax credit available in the U.S. for the purchase of qualified electric vehicles with at least 17 kWh of battery capacity, such as our vehicles, will begin to phase out over time with respect to any vehicles delivered in the second calendar quarter following the quarter in which we deliver our 200,000th qualifying vehicle in the U.S. We currently expect such 200,000th qualifying delivery to occur at some point during 2018. Here we are with 10 months left in 2018, and at “some point” during those 306 days, Tesla will have sold 200,000 Model S, Model X, Model 3, and earlier Roadsters. That begins the countdown toward the end of the available $7,500 tax credit. A credit is better than a tax deduction — about three times as good, if you pay a third of your income as federal taxes.

How the countdown works

This is how the federal tax credit works. It’s the same for every automaker. General Motors counts as one automaker, not as four (Chevy, Buick, Cadillac, GMC). Ditto Ford and FCA, as well as BMW-Mini-Rolls-Royce, etcetera.

• The automaker reaches 200,000 sales. Every car in that quarter sold and delivered is eligible to receive the full $7,500 tax credit. The full credit applies in the following quarter, too, no matter how many cars the automaker delivers. If Tesla hits 200,000 in the third quarter, July through September, every car delivered by Dec. 31 is eligible for the credit.
• For the next two quarters, buyers are eligible for a half credit, or $3,750. In this example, through June 30, 2019.
• For the next two quarters, buyers are eligible for a one-quarter credit, of $1,875.  That would be through Dec. 31, 2019.
• Then it’s gone.

To get the federal tax credit, you have to pay US taxes and you have to have paid as much in taxes as the credit is worth. In this example, you have to have paid $7,500 in taxes in 2018. You can’t take it the following year.

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Apple has tackled a bug that causes its devices to freeze if they encounter a specific character from the Telugu alphabet - a language native to India. Following the glitch's discovery, pranksters had used the symbol on social media, private messages and even Uber's app to cause problems. Apple has now issued a software update for its iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, smartwatches and TV set-top boxes. It is the latest in a series of "text bomb" flaws to affect Apple devices.

Earlier examples include:

• The Chaios bug, which caused the Messages app to freeze or restart if a special link was included in a text
• An exploit triggered by messages featuring a white flag symbol, a zero, a rainbow emoji and a hidden character
• Inclusion of a rubbish word in Arabic

The US firm's security update refers to the latest flaw as a "memory corruption issue" triggered by "processing a maliciously crafted string". The issue was first reported by the developers  of the Aloha mobile web browser on 12 February.. And as result, affected Apple's Messages app as well as third party services including Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Outlook and Gmail, but not Telegram or Skype, according to the Verge news site.


The Telugu letter involved is not very common in Telugu words, but because the sound it makes is unusual it cannot be easily substituted with another character when required.
Telugu itself is mostly spoken in south-eastern India, where it is the official language of the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Google has carried out a trial on a new technology that will help 911 operators figure out the location of cellphone callers more accurately.
The test included tens of thousands of 911 calls over the span of two months in several states in the US and had encouraging results, The Wall Street Journal reported late on Friday.
The 911 system, which turns 50 this month, has often struggled to locate cellphone callers.
Saving a minute in response times can save up to 10,000 lives a year, according to the federal regulators.
With the help of Google's new technology, about 80 per cent of the 911 calls could more accurately locate data within the first 30 seconds.
The tech giants' data also dramatically reduced the estimated radius of a call's location from 522 feet down to 121 feet and arrived faster than carrier data, the report said.
This improvement in tracing the location data can also help dispatchers in cases where the caller might not speak English, or in a state of panic, gives the wrong address.
The test, which included 50 call centres that cover around 2.4 million people in Texas, Tennessee and Florida, was done in conjunction with two companies that have connections into 911 centres, West Corp and RapidSOS.
For the test, Google sent location data from a random selection of 911 callers using Android phones straight to the people taking those calls.
Google's location technology is currently available in 14 countries, and the company has said it hopes to bring it to the US this year, the report said.

Neptune certainly don’t have the mass of other planets such as jupiter but apparently has on decision among the planets in our solar system. It has the fastest ever measured winds, which could atttain supersonic speeds at sometimes. Neptune’s tumultuous atmosphere gives rise to vortices similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, but storms on Neptune usually just last a few years. For the first time  astronomers are watching one of them escape before their telescopic eyes We first learned of Neptune’s “anticyclones” when the NASA Voyager 2 probe passed by in 1989. They were not as large or as long-lived as Jupiter’s famous Red Spot, but they could still tell us a great deal about the planet. The probe sent back images of dark spirals on the surface, and a few years later astronomers started monitoring Neptune with the Hubble Space Telescope. While Hubble  is more than 25 years old now, its still kepping tabs on storm activity on the gas giant.

Due to the way the planet’s currents operates, thereby it makes storms dark in colour.There are three dominant wind jets on Neptune. One goes from east to west at the equator, and two others go west to east near the planet’s poles. The anticyclones form between these jets, pulling up darker material from below the top layer of clouds. From what we know of Neptune’s atmosphere, scientists have made some guesses about how a storm would behave when it dissipated. However, the reality is looking much different.

Previous simulations of vortex dissipation on Neptune predicted that the storm would drift toward the equator. As it neared the jet stream, the vortex would be torn apart and possibly produce an explosion of cloud activity. What’s actually happening is less visually impressive. The storm is drifting toward the south pole and slowly eroding as it gets closer.

This is one of the places were Neptune’s winds can reach supersonic speeds. The vortex was 3,100 miles (5,000 km) across when Hubble first spotted it in 2015, and now it’s down to 2,300 miles (3,700 km). The rate could also increase is the vortex gets closer to the southern polar jet.

Hubble will continue watching the storm as it edges closer to the jet stream. Astronomers suspect the cortex will quietly dissipate in the coming years, which could provide vital insights into the weather patterns on Neptune. Carefully observing the storm’s death via Hubble can help scientists understand surface weather patterns as well as what’s going on under the cloud tops.

Nest co-founder Matt Rogers  has announced that he is leaving the tech company,  a day after Google claimed that the US based manufacturer of home automation equipment has reunited with their hardware team. He said he decide to leave the company inorder to spend more time Incite.org, a Venture Capital(VC) company and product development lab where he is one of the co-founders too. Rogers tweeted from his twitter handle @nestmatt - ''After almost nine incredible, intense years working to build Nest, I've decided to begin my transition to dedicate more of my time to Incite.org, as well as to start thinking about the next adventure''. Nest was co-founded in 2011 by the Chief Product Officer Matt Rogers and former CEO.

Google had bought the US based start-up for home automation in 2014 for $3.2 billion. Since  Nest collaborated with Google in 2014, they've experienced increased momentum. The company doubled it's hardware portfolio last year by selling more of their products and device in the previous year than they did two years ago. Therefore, the departure of Matt Rogers, Nest last co-founder, marks the end  of a chapter for the company, according to CNET. Nest is a noted name in the world of smart home devices with its eponymous thermostat and smoke detector and "Nest Cam" smart security camera products.

Due to the sudden decrease in the value of cryptocurrency, online criminals has decided to use as an opportunity to mine more coins which come in the form of crypto mining plugins running on websites, but there’s a new form of Android malware spreading online that mines coins on your phone. The odds of picking up this particular virus are low, but it’s still a clever bit of coding.

The malware, identified ADB.Miner, was discovered by Chinese IT firm Qihoo 360 Netlab. The researchers report this is a “wormable” piece of malware, which means it’s capable of spreading to new devices over a Wi-Fi network. The “ADB” in the name comes from the method it uses to spread: the Android Debug Bridge. This is a developer tool built into Android that allows communication with a device via a command line interface. In this case, the malware authors turn it against the user. Every infection with ADB.Miner starts with a bad decision. Someone has to find the infected APK on a shady app store and manually install it. Qihoo 360 Netlab reports this malicious package is hiding in a number of apps that promise either porn or antivirus protection. Instead, you get ADB.Miner. It uses the processing power of your device to mine the Monero cryptocurrency and deposit it in the wallet belonging to the malware distributors. Of course, this causes lag and drains your battery.




The next phase is where things get interesting. ADB.Miner uses code from the Mirai IoT malware that hit last year. The malware scans any Wi-Fi network it isn’t connected to in search of vulnerable devices to infect over ADB. However, ADB is disabled by default on all Android devices, and it’s a multi-step process to enable it. The devices also need to have ADB over port 5555 turned on, which requires a separate setup process after enabling ADB. Basically, we’re talking about active developer devices. Still, that’s probably some phones and tablets. By infecting the right target, the malware creators can build a stable of devices churning away to produce cryptocurrency. Qihoo 360 Netlab reports that the number of infected devices is in the thousands, most of which are in China and South Korea. You’re not likely to run into this malware, but it’s a good idea to avoid installing sketchy APKs anyway. You won’t find this malware floating around on the Google Play Store, so stick to that if at all possible.

Take-Two, the publisher of GTA V announced that the game has sold 90 over million units worldwide with it's multiplayer component, GTA online, being the largest driver of consumer in expenditure in the last quarter. GTA Online will see more content updates in the months to come. This means that GTA V sold 15 million units in 2017 alone. Not too shabby for a game that originally released in 2013. To put it into perspective, Star Wars Battlefront 2 sold seven million units and that was below publisher EA's expectations. "Looking at the numbers, and accounting for the PS3, 360 and PC versions, we can roughly say that more than one in three PS4 and XB1 [Xbox One] owners have a copy of Grand Theft Auto 5. The game is a must buy with a current gen console purchase," tweeted industry analyst Daniel Ahmad. "We are expecting another record year for Grand Theft Auto Online," Take-Two Chief Executive Strauss Zelnick said on an earnings call. "Everything is going better than expected and we do have pretty high expectations." The company reported net income of $25.1 million (around Rs. 160 crore), or 21 cents per share, in third quarter ended Dec. 31, compared with a loss of $29.8 million (roughly Rs. 190 crore), or 33 cents per share, a year earlier. Take-Two said it had a net benefit of $11.9 million (approximately Rs. 77 crore) in the latest quarter from the overhaul of the US tax code. With Red Dead Redemption 2 due later in the year, things seem to be looking up for Take-Two. More so considering that it will ship with an online component that appears to be as robust as what we've seen with GTA Online.

     Being a video game fan, you can check out Transition - the gaming podcast of Gadgets 360 or listen to it via Apple Podcast and Feedburner

NASA has made a report concerning it-s satellite that disappeared in 2005, that it has not only rediscovered  long-thought dead IMAGE spacecraft, but that its satellite is "fully charged" and overall "in good shape. NASA has been investigating the situation and has issued several updates since our coverage last week. Two things have occurred worthy of note. First, on Feb. 2, NASA determined it was communicating with the “A” side of the Image satellite. Because it’s so expensive to build and launch spacecraft, satellites and exploration vehicles like Curiosity are frequently designed with redundant electronics and backup systems. In this case, the Image satellite had a duplicate set of electronics, one on each side of the spacecraft. In 2004, the Image satellite underwent what NASA characterizes as an “unexpected power distribution reboot.” When the satellite re-established communication, NASA discovered that only the “B” side electronics were functional. (NASA’s description implies that these different sets of electronics may have literally been on different sides of the satellite, though this is unclear.)

The rest of the mission operated using just the B side electronics until that system failed unexpectedly in 2005. But today, it’s the A side that’s once again active. The organization’s write-up suggests that power should’ve been provided to both sides of the spacecraft by default. But there’s no explanation as yet for why power would’ve switched over to B, only to reboot at some point after 2007 and turn the A side on again. New information this week suggests that the spacecraft is in surprisingly good shape for spending an unknown number of years powered down. The batteries are fully charged and nothing in NASA’s guidance suggest any issues at this point. That said, there are still significant questions the space agency hopes to answer, including why the vehicle has rebooted itself several times, why the A and B sides of the spacecraft have behaved erratically, and why it rebooted in the first place.

 NASA has begun the process of attempting to recreate a small control center that could communicate with Image’s scientific payloads and begin checking the scientific instruments to see what kind of work they might still be capable of doing. The organization, however, is playing things safe and proceeding slowly. On the one hand, NASA doesn’t have a lot of spare cashflow, satellites take years to build, and launches are expensive and always run the risk of something going wrong. It makes sense, therefore, to seize every opportunity to squeeze useful work out of any piece of hardware, so long as its economically feasible to do so. But on the other, something clearly went wrong with the Image satellite. The fact that it’s now online again with the same set of electronics that failed 13 years ago might be due to software glitches — or it could point to short circuits or other problems with the satellite that can’t be fixed without access to its internals. NASA undoubtedly wants to understand what caused the problem before it sinks a lot of time or effort into an ongoing scientific mission.

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NASA