Word grammar checking is better than what most people post, unedited, on the web. In fact, it's better than copy produced by major news organizations and that's (in theory if not in practice) reviewed by professional human editors. And it's way better than the shitty grammar checking you get with LibreOffice, for instance.

In this instance, they're looking at patterns of behavior. A man who has cheated on his wife is likely to do so again, and the government thinks that cheating on your wife is likely to indicate a propensity to cheat in other contexts and to have trouble resisting sexual temptation, which is one of the most common way that people are persuaded to give up secrets. Blackmail is another.

It would be nice if the government published studies of risk versus risk factor. How important is a felony conviction or an affair or having smoked pot as a predictor of security risk? I think companies would like to know, but who's got the stats to say what is or isn't a serious risk?

You mean Toy Story. "High pressure space wings."

The FAA's still not allowing commercial use of drones. So what's this about?

My guess is they're looking for evidence of corruption in the procurement contracts.

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.