The Bakken formation is in northeastern Montana and northwestern North Dakota and extends up into Saskatchewan. If working there you might be housed in a place like Bainville. From there you would drive about 360 miles on I-90 and I-94 to Bozeman before getting off at Glendale. At 75MPH, that's 4 hours, 40 minutes. At 85MPH, that's 4 hours, 14 minutes. So the speed limit difference could cut 26 minutes off your drive. If you were counting the round-trip difference, it's about 52 minutes, so close to what he was saying. You might do that every week or two if you were working in the oil patch and "living" in Bozeman.

However, I don't think it's realistic to drive all that way at 85MPH. You'd have to slow down at times.

Driving a DeLorean is a trip back in time. No flux capacitor needed.

Marijuana slows reaction time and I think makes people less able to concentrate. So it definitely interferes with driving. Having a test to measure a person's level of intoxication is a good thing.

But we were talking about basic physics and what is or isn't possible. Take a starship to another star in a human lifetime? There is nothing we know or that is even seriously entertained by physicists that suggests this is possible.

'Few advancements? Dark mater/energy (assuming that it even exists) wasn't even theoretical 50 years ago, the presiding theories of the day said that the universe was slowing (current theories say it is accelerating), the Higgs Boson (still not proven) was just beginning to be theorized'

and neither of those resulted in any technology at all. And you're wrong about dark matter. It was hypothesized 80 years ago to explain orbital velocities of stars in the galaxy and confirmed by more recent and precise measurements.

'and I don't know if it qualifies as physics but it was assumed that the solar system was swept clean of asteroids millions of years ago, then Shoemaker-Levy Nine slammed into Jupiter, the resulting search eventually led to the discover of tens of thousands of asteroids and a number of "dwarf planet".'

I know, and it doesn't qualify as basic physics that would alter our understanding of what is and isn't possible, nor is it possible to base any technology on those facts.

Everything science has discovered over the last 80 years has led to the same conclusion: faster than light travel is almost certainly impossible in practical terms. The only thing that holds out any hope at all is the fact that superluminal expansion seems to have happened in the first 10^-32 sec of the universe's existence. As far as we can know, it hasn't happened since.

"I would imagine that the human understanding of physics 50 years ago would have forbid the creation of the kind of microelectronics/transmitters/battery technology that are commonplace in most of our pockets today."

There have been very few advancements in basic physics in the past 50 years that have made their way into products and most of the cutting edge stuff we have today was foreseen decades ago.

... but have huge amounts of evidence that indicae they're not THAT wrong.

I was discussing the way laws actually work. What are YOU talking about?

A quantum vacuum thruster has never been tested in a vacuum, or anywhere else it couldn't produce its micronewton thrust by plain old fashioned electromagnetism.

But it's not answering his question. He just spent five or six years getting an MS in a social science field. How can he use that? It won't help him program, but it could help him do a lot of other things.

Because credentials matter to people that will hire you:
http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
Computer Science (CS)Rank: 8; Starting salary: $59,800; Mid-career salary: $102,000

Median salary for a non-degreed programmer is lower and chances for promotion are poorer and chances of getting hired in the first place as a programmer are lower if you don't have some kind of degree. With no degree, you'd likely have to work your way into that from some lower-ranked position.

Also because a CS degree really does expose you to different things that just programming does. You wind up knowing things that you're unlikely to discover on your own in a programming job, or likely to take much longer to discover.

I agree a CS degree may not be the best course. Software engineers start higher and have a higher median salary so that's probably a better use of a college education if you're able to take that path.

An associate's degree may also be a good compromise because it's a lot cheaper, quicker and has lots of formal training focused on core skills rather than the sprawling educational experience that is any four year degree.

Also an advantage of the associate's degree is that you can apply that as credit toward a BS if you later decide that you want or need more credentials to get the job you want.

But the idea that you are going to learn enough to be usefully employable in a couple of months is not realistic. With a background in a social science field, he's got some understanding of basic math and probably a good grounding in statistics and how to do research and maybe formal logic if he's lucky. He won't be able to become a competent-enough-to-hire programmer without years more study, whether or not it's self-study. He should think about leveraging what he knows. A MS in any science field has studied and (if he was a good student) knows a lot of different things that he can apply to jobs in many fields. But unless he has done quite a bit of programming, that's not one of them.

Which means the optimum size for a bus is smaller than most current buses. In the automated future, buses will be smaller and more of them will run the same route. Possibly, during off-peak hours some of them will function as taxis.

If you think a bus disrupts traffic more or less than 40 cars do, you haven't thought it through.

It would be determined by price. The price of an automated bus ride (which would go along a common route) would be significantly less than the price of an automated car ride that goes wherever you want. Busses ain't going away. Neither are taxis. Paid-for-hire drivers however, will be gone soon. Then over probably another couple of decades, most people will stop driving cars themselves as the prices of auto-drive cars get nearly as low as human-drive cars and automated taxis become cheaper and more common.

Of course, this might be slowed in some places by regulations to protect taxi drivers, and that would be mostly a bad thing. Instead, automated taxi services will hopefully be forced to buy out human drivers.

Citizenship is irrelevant to the question of whether he broke US laws. Like every other country, US laws apply to actions and jurisdiction, not to citizenship. The important question is whether he acted in a way that broke US criminal copyright laws. The FBI has convinced the NZ government that they have a substantial case so they executed arrest and search warrants against him and he has strangely been able to drag out extradition procedures against him for more than two years.