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Making a profit and going bankrupt are two different things that can coexist when you realize the decline in value of assets. That's what the tarp legislation was about, if it didn't happen, they would be bankrupt and fail- remember?.

Exxon's rate of 44% includes taxes (mostly) paid to foreign governments. They don't pay that in the US. Foreign governments hit them hard and they can't dodge it because of the physical need to drill.

Your partially correct, at least if I reading what your saying right. You are right in that the 44% includes foreign taxes but that is not "mostly"paid to foreign governments because the tax rates were so much higher. It was because foreign income was just much higher. If we look at their 2009 10-k filing for the 2007 income (44% numbers). we will see that pre-tax US income was 13.700 billion dollars where foreign income was 56.744 billion dollars. We also see that income taxes for the US (which does include taxes foreign profits and state taxes), as 5.120 billion dollars. Now if we subtract 263 million from that which is the US tax on foreign profits we get 4.850 billion. That comes out to a 35% tax rate. But wait, they are listing other US taxes too, an extra 2.048 billion. That brings us up to 6.898 billion which comes out to 50% effective tax without the US tax paid on foreign income. This is significant because when you start messing around with foreign taxes which include the same things, you drop that effective rates to 44% or 6% of profits lower.

You do realize that their profit isn't all from gas and Diesel fuels right? They have wells that produce oil sold on the open market, they own stations or station lands and building and lease them out to private operators, produce and sell natural gas and home heating oil plus a number of chemicals.

In fact, Fivecentnickel did a break down of were the money goes in a gallon of gas. As it turns out, refining and profit is of gas is only about 10% of the price per gallon. This isn't off from other estimates either. And it isn't excessive compared to other industries. Microsoft kept 27.3 cents of every $1 in revenue in its most recent quarter; General Electric, 11.4 cents and McDonald's, 12.3 cents. In fact, Exxon is below the 11-cent average of Standard & Poor's 500 companies, says analyst Howard Silverblatt.

So lets look at this, 10% per gallon. That is 40 cents on $4.00 gas. But wait, 40 percent or more of that goes to income taxes. So in reality, of the 40 cents, they keep around 23 ti 24 cents per gallon. Of course federal highway and state taxes average around 13% depending on the price and location but lets not focus on that. So If Exxon (the countries largest oil company) decided to cut their profits in half to save the consumer, that would only effect gas prices by 5% or 20 cents on a $4.00 per gallon gasoline. Does $3.80 compared to $4.00 a gallon seem like gouging?

The problem is that we only have about 5 major oil companies operating in the US with only 4 of them operating in any given state at a time. This problem is compounded by not being able to develop oil fields in the US because of environmental concerns and not being able to open refineries because of the same problems. This means that with all of the smaller oil companies, the major ones just do enormous volume in sales which is why they make so much. In 2007, the US consumed 142 billion gallons of gas (about 390 million gallons per day).

So if we look at this 142 billion gallon figure, we can do a number of things. Lets multiply it by $4.00 per gallon of gas, thats $568,000,000,000 or 568 billion dollars in sales. Now of the 10% holds true, that is 56.8 billion in profit across the US. Lets divide that into quarters to compare it against profits for Exxon. It comes to around 14.2 billion dollar profit per quarter in the US gas market alone. Now assuming that usage hasn't went down in the US in more then a negligible amount, with Exxon's $11.7 billion profit posted this quarter and forgetting that it makes money in places other then Gasoline sales (about 65 billion gallons of diesel and heating oil in 2007 nation wide )plus natural gas supplies and all, 11.7 billion profit in a quarter at $4.00 a gallon is only about 79% of the market.

Now we know that Exxon doesn't control 79% of the US market. So were did all the extra come from? Well, it isn't a calculation error (even though I rounded some numbers) and it isn't a number error, the 8k sec filing shows us that the US market is a very small portion of Exxon's sales compared to world wide participation. It refined 2,584,000 barrels of liquid product (or 2,584 kbd in case I got my abbreviations wrong) in the second quart in the US where it refined 4,191,000 barrels elsewhere in the world for a total of 6,775,000 (6,775 kbd). And forgetting about all the other areas for profit, Roughly 38% of their profit would be derived from within the US. So if we take 38% of the 11.

When you're a public company, and you release an annual report, you are required to list just about every possible risk to your company that you can think of. That way, potential shareholders who read the report and buy stock based on your good news are also exposed to the bad news at the same time.

If your CEO is brilliant, you have to point out that he could die. If you have a gigantic data center, you have to point out that it could get hit by a missile. If you have obvious competitors, you have to point out that they could stomp you. If you don't, you have to point out that new ones could form at any moment. You have to put these in the strongest possible terms; it's the "don't say we didn't warn you" principle.

So, yes: to the extent that McAfee relies on license terms that have not yet been tested in court, they are at risk. Not necessarily a big risk, not even a worrisome risk, but a risk.

To the extent that they use proprietary software, they are ALSO at risk - of undiscovered bugs and reverse engineering. I imagine that's in there somewhere too.

In fact, here is the annual report in question.

The Risk Factors section is about 24 pages long, and includes things like "Failure of our products to work properly or misuse of our products could impact sales, increase costs, and create risks of potential negative publicity and legal liability."

I know the parent didn't make reference to this, but a lot of people think it, so:

In August 1997, Microsoft purchased $150 million in non-voting Apple stock.

As of the prior quarter, Apple had $1.2 billion in cash on hand .

The money didn't "bail Apple out", as some people think. It was a symbolic gesture. The symbolism of the "badly needed" "investment" (which really wasn't needed from a financial standpoint) renewed peoples' faith in Apple, renewed the faith that Microsoft and Office would still be on the Mac platform, etc.

So while you could argue that the gesture was needed (and I'd tend to agree), the money itself wasn't.

And Microsoft made out like bandits on that investment.

If I'm reading this correctly, their latest Q10 filing says the Warner Music Group is worth about $5 billion.

Apple has what, $8 billion in cash? Steve Jobs has said "It's all about the music". Mr. Bronfman apparently can't tell the different between the iTunes Music Store and the iPod. Who would you rather control your music?

Apple should make an example out of them and just take over the company. :) Apple has shown themselves to be very good at vertical integration. They keep what, 5 cents a song, with the record company taking like 80 cents? Why not keep that 80 cents too. Maybe they can LOWER prices. :) I can't always justify 99 cents per song when I'm looking to buy. Drop some tunes down to 49 cents and I'd spend way more. ;)

I hate the patent crazyness as much as anyone. But why so many stories about Amazon's patents in particular? Amazon is a relative lightweight in the patent scene. IBM walks to the patent office with a stack of patents every single week. I'm sure you can find plenty to pick on in their applications.

Not to mention that Amazon is often on the receiving end of patent aggression. If you look at Amazon's most recent 10Q, you'll see that Amazon is currently the defendent in five patent infringement lawsuits.

Pinpoint, inc. is suing Amazon for patent infringement related to site personalization.

Soverain Software is suing Amazon for patent infringement of four of their patents, including a "Digital Sales System" and "Digital Active Advertising."

IPXL holdings is suing Amazon for infringement of a patent titled "Electronic Fund Transfer or Transaction System."

BTG International is suing Amazon for infringement of a patent titled "Attaching Navigational History Information to Universal Resource Locator Links on a World Wide Web Page."

Cendant Publishing is suing Amazon for infringement of a patent related to recommendations.

If you despise patent aggression, Amazon is not your poster child for patent abuse. Not even close. Amazon is taking a lot more than it's dishing out.

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but of course do not speak for them.

First "Altair Nanotechnologies" basically makes specialty powders for surface chemistry applications. Calling this "nanotechnology" is a stretch. What they actually do, as a business, is make titanium dioxide powder, the pigment used in white paint. Read their 10-K filing, which is more honest than the press releases they put out.

Altair claims to be working with the "Energy Storage Research Group" at Rutgers University. That did exist, and, sadly, it's one of the leftover bits of what was once Bell Labs. But what's left of it, at Rutgers, doesn't seem to be doing anything in this area. They're concentrating on capacitors and on hydrogen storage. The Rutgers articles on battery technology seem to stop around 2003.

If you look really hard, you can finally find the technical paper on this. It's from mPhase. They're actually trying to make the battery. But what they say they're doing is building a battery with a very long shelf life for use as a backup power source in telecom gear. That's useful, especiallly since mPhase makes DSL gear for telecom carriers. There's gear out on poles that needs some backup power capability, and most existing batteries don't last long enough to be useful in that environment.

But this is a long way from Electric Cars Real Soon Now.

The Blockbuster I worked in didn't function that way... Of course, this was 8 years ago

Ok, so I don't know exactly when it happened... but to quote from Blockbuster's 2000 10-K filing:

Since the late 1980s, revenue-sharing agreements have been available to home video chains and independent video dealers through deals brokered by distributors such as Rentrak Corporation and SuperComm, Inc.

So, 8 years ago would be 1997. My reading of BB's 2000 10-K is that revenue-sharing agreements were fairly new to BB then. Further down they indicate that a restructuring of their business model occured in 1998 and that they entered into revenue-sharing arrangements with six major studios. Anyway, you can always read it youself.

Anyway, it's shocking how much companies are forced to reveal in their SEC filings. But your 8-year-old data is, unsurprisingly, pretty much out of date.

In fact this was part of an out-of-court settlement between Apple and MS about patent and copyright issues.

"Preferred Stock - In August 1997, the Company and Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) entered into a patent cross license and technology agreements. In addition, Microsoft purchased 150,000 shares of Apple Series A nonvoting convertible preferred stock ("preferred stock") for $150 million. These shares were convertible by Microsoft after August 5, 2000, into shares of the Company's common stock at a conversion price of $8.25 per share. During 2000, 74,250 shares of preferred stock were converted to 9 million shares of the Company's common stock. During 2001, the remaining 75,750 preferred shares were converted into 9.2 million shares of the Company's common stock." source (PDF-File - 10-K/Part II/Item 8 - page 75)

Even then this wasn't a "large chunk"

It would mean MS has 18 million shares in Apple, of what? 400 million shares? How many shares of AAPL are on the market?

MS sold the shares, and for a decent profit.

If you have a source that Microsoft ever sold those shares please provide a link to it.