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Oracle is very proud of its cloud sales. But not everyone is very happy about how it got them. (credit: Håkan Dahlström)

On June 16, Oracle Corporation released financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016, and corporate executives trumpeted the company's cloud services success. According to the latest report, Oracle's cloud infrastructure, platform, and software services collectively brought in $859 million for the quarter ending May 31, compared to $576 million for the same period in 2015. Oracle brought in $2.853 billion in revenues for cloud and had an $8.9 billion (£6.07 billion) profit for the year.

But those numbers don't tell the whole story. Oracle's overall revenue was down, largely because of its shrinking "on premises" software sales, which fell by $224 million versus 4Q FY2015 and by $1.245 billion (£0.85 billion) for the year as a whole. Software license and software maintenance sales still account for 73 percent of Oracle's revenue, while cloud accounts for only 5 percent. Oracle's hardware revenues, which still account for 14 percent of its overall income, fell by 9 percent during the quarter and 10 percent for the full year.

There's some controversy over Oracle's reported cloud sales numbers, however. On June 1, former Oracle senior finance manager Svetlana Blackburn filed suit against Oracle for wrongful termination in October of 2015, claiming that she was fired after she "resisted, refused to engage in, and threatened to blow the whistle on accounting practices she reasonably believed to be unlawful" surrounding how Oracle counted cloud revenues. In a statement to the press, an Oracle spokesperson denied that there was any wrongdoing.

Vladimir Putin, center, and Dmitry Rogozin, far right, tour Russia's new Vostochny Cosmodrome in October, 2015. (credit: Kremlin)

Back in 2014, as tensions between the United States and Russia rose to a crescendo, that country's chief space minister mocked NASA and the US government for its reliance on Russia to get US astronauts to the International Space Station. If the US didn't like Russia's policies and was going to persist in economic sanctions, deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted, perhaps they would like to use a trampoline to get to space?

Publicly, neither NASA nor the US government responded. They continued working with Russia which, despite some of the more heated rhetoric, has remained a steady partner with the International Space Station. In response, NASA and Congress also stepped up funding for commercial crew efforts in the United States, which should allow Boeing and SpaceX to begin carrying astronauts into space from US soil by late 2017 or 2018.

But beyond astronaut transport, the US government is reliant upon Russia in another way in space—until last year the primary means by which national security payloads were launched into space was via the Atlas V rocket. This reliable launch vehicle is powered by RD-180 engines that United Launch Alliance purchases from Russia, and after that country's actions in Ukraine, Congress called upon the American company to end its reliance upon the Russian engine by 2022. This charge has been led by US Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

(credit: Paul Archuleta/Getty Images)

Anton Yelchin, the Russian-American actor most famous for his portrayal of Pavel Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek movies, has been killed in an accident with his own car.

According to reports, the 27-year-old was found dead on Sunday morning, seemingly crushed between his Jeep Cherokee and a security fence at the bottom of his Los Angeles home's steep driveway.

Yelchin was born in St Petersburg to professional figure-skaters who moved to the US soon after his birth. He played Chekov in 2009's Star Trek and 2013's Star Trek: Return to Darkness, and is due to appear in the third, Star Trek Beyond, next month.

Elon Musk has confirmed that the Tesla Model S floats well enough to turn into a boat "for short periods of time," with "thrust via wheel rotation."

Musk's comments were in reaction to a video shared over the weekend (embedded above), which appears to show a man driving a Tesla Model S through a flooded tunnel in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The Model S seems to be unfazed by the metre-deep water: it simply starts floating, then powers past some flooded internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, the water gracefully lapping against the car's bonnet.

While it might seem a little incongruous for an electric car become a boat, it makes some sense if you think about it. Most conventional ICE cars have an exhaust pipe that's low to the ground and quickly becomes flooded if you drive through deep water. Battery-powered vehicles, on the other hand, don't have an exhaust pipe. (I wonder if fuel-cell vehicles, which do have an exhaust, can be used as a boat.)

Ars Technica's six best games of E3 2016. (video link)

Another E3 is in the books, and it's nearly impossible to distill the dozens and dozens of games on display into a few titles to keep an eye out for—but that won't stop us from trying. These 10 games in particular stood out from the crowded E3 show floor, and each has us excited to try out the full versions after a short taste this past week.

Abzu

Developer: Giant Squid
Publisher: 505 Games
Platforms: PS4, Windows
Expected Release Date: August 4, 2016