Information is Wealth.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, a contingent of US Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bombers landed at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. They're there to support Operation Inherent Resolve, the push to eliminate the Islamic State throughout Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. The B-52s will drop GPS- guided smart-bombs and conventional 500-pound bombs on targets, and play other types of communication and monitoring roles. The 160-foot-long bombers—built by Boeing and nicknamed BUFFs, for "Big Ugly Fat Fuckers"—have storied histories,including setting an around-the-world nonstop flight record, patrolling the Soviet Union's border with nuclear warheads 24-hours-a-day for eight years straight, and making a memorable appearance in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. For 60 years, the bomber's been a constant presence in America's arsenal, seeing action in Vietnam, the Serbian conflict, the Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 744 B-52s Boeing built between 1952 and 1962, 7...

WINDSHIELDS ARE RARELY gush- worthy, but the one on Tesla's Model X truly is: It swoops up and over your head,offering an unfettered panoramic view of the road. But that windshield is also causing trouble. As Jalopnik recently highlighted, some drivers have complained the glass causes double vision at night. What's happening? In one word, physics. And pretty simple physics. I promise. You don't even need any math to understand. Imagine looking through a vertical pane of glass, like a window. Whenever light passes through two different materials—like going from air to glass or glass to air —some light passes through the second material and some reflects off. When light hits a window straight on, most of it goes right through the glass and very little reflects. But if it hits at an angle—like on a sloped windshield—some the light will reflect off the glass-air boundary, which goes back and hits the air-glass boundary, and so on. "Those multiple reflections keep rattling ...

Simultaneously pull the two wheel- mounted paddles in the Volvo XC90 to turn on self-driving mode. Volvo's going to put customers in Sweden and China into its autonomous cars starting next year. VOLVO NO ONE'S QUITE sure on just when people will be able to summon a self-driving car and go wherever they need to go. Too many variables—how the technology advances, how regulations are developed, what consumer acceptance looks like—remain for anyone to say, but that's not keeping Volvo from offering a date: 2020. The Swedes synonymous with safety want to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious injuries in their cars by the end of the decade. Because airbags, automatic braking and other active tech can only do so much, Volvo plans to use automated driving to do it. Next year, it plans to see how that tech works in the real world when it puts 100 customers in robocars for an extended beta test in Gothenburg, Sweden. Today, the company announced it will do the same thing in China....

Don't look for a sharp recovery in the crude oil price any time soon, it's likely to oscillate between $35 to $55 per barrel for the remainder of the decade. That's that the view of Vivek Dhar, mining and energy commodities analyst at the CBA, who suggests that unless OPEC cuts supply in order to rebalance the market, the price is likely to be capped in the mid-$50 region due to the likelihood of marginal US shale restarting production. "Oil prices should lift on average in 2Q16 and 3Q16 as US oil supply continues to track lower and demand picks up, but high OECD inventories,increasing Iranian crude oil output and a potential restart of US oil shale output at around US$55/bbl should lead oil lower again in 4Q16 and 1Q17," says Dhar. "OPEC crude oil output should lift by around 1 million barrels per day (mb/d) over the next year as Iran boosts output and as other OPEC members maintain current production rates." Beyond 2017, Dhar anticipates that "cru...

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda ruled out the use of "helicopter drops" of money. "Helicopter money" is a broadly- defined term that includes anything from governments potentially depositing money into consumers' bank accounts to the central bank printing money with the sole aim of the government using it to complete projects. Either way, this experiment isn't coming to Japan. Here's the WSJ: While Mr. Kuroda has emphasized his willingness to take whatever steps are necessary to lift inflation to 2%, there is one bridge he says he won't cross: "helicopter money." This refers to the central bank printing money (for example, by buying government bonds) to explicitly finance expanded government spending or tax cuts. "We have no intention to employ helicopter money,anything like that," Mr. Kuroda said, because it would blur the division of responsibilities between parliament, which ...

GOOGLE CALLED IT Borg, and for many years, it was among the company's best-kept secrets. Borg ran just about everything within the company, including Google Search, Gmail,Google Maps, Google Docs, and any other Google service you can think of—not to mention the private services you and I never see. Basically, it provided a way of parceling tasks across dozens, hundreds, even thousands of machines with extreme efficiency. A few years ago,uber Google engineer John Wilkes told me Borg was so efficient—so adept at finding a use for available processing power on each and every machine—that it had probably saved Google the cost of building another data center. And those things are expensive. Even then, Borg remained veiled in secrecy. Wilkes wouldn't even refer to it by name. But inside another big-name company, Twitter, Ben Hindman was recreating this sweeping software tool alongside several former Google engineers. They called it Mesos. Hindman started the project as a grad student...

There is only one country which would like to see Donald Trump enter the White House - and it's not the US. According to a new survey from YouGov for the Handelsblatt Global Edition, Russia is the only major economy in the world that prefers the Republican, yellow-haired candidate over Hillary Clinton. The survey polled more than 20,000 adults in every G20 country. The results show that Mr Trump leads by 21 points in Russia, while Ms Clinton claims more than 21 points over her rival in 15 other countries. The same survey shows that 79 per cent of Russians are dissatisfied with their economic situation - only second to South Korea - yet 74 per cent of Russians vote for their president Vladimir Putin as the most trusted leader. Mexico gives Ms Clinton the widest berth from Mr Trump at an incredible 54 points. Mr Trump has continually targeted Mexican immigrants, saying he will build a wall to keep out illegal immigrants and has implied they are responsible for murderin...