Apparently. Sometimes I come to /. to find out how incomplete my knowledge is.

I am not an aerospace engineer or astrophysicist, but I have to ask how "capable" SpaceX is of this mission you propose. SpaceX won the X Prize by getting to 112 km twice. The shuttle orbited at 304 km and the ISS at 370km. The marginal cost of taking each additional kg to space is significant. To get any amount of any moderate mass more than twice as high above the Earth has got to have a massive energy budget. I realize SpaceX gets to the edge of space, but Shuttle type altitudes are higher above where SpaceX got than SpaceX itself was above the Earth.

Since I have small children that don't all understand that repeatedly entering a bad pin will erase my phone, I back up my iPhone & iPad to iTunes every night (and do not use iCloud.) All I have to do is plug it in and do a complete restore. If people don't back up their phones, whatever happens to them is their own fault. If someone wants to remote erase my device, I say "Bring it on."

P.S. I know degree != education, nor does lack of a degree = uneducated. The post to which I replied posed a specific situation wherein a person claims to have a particular education by showing a transcript of classes in lieu of a conferred degree.

If you don't have a degree, you don't "have the education." As an employer, I would take a dim view of a person who wants to use a college transcript, without a conferred degree, as evidence of having an education. If a person is trying to cut corners for personal gain, what is that person going to do as my employee?

The easy solution to this is a prorated "tax" on earnings. One year of attendance = 0.75% tax on earnings. Since you are paying the tax, you have a very strong incentive to finish. Taken further, a person could be dissuaded from stretching it out by having a penalty. A person taking 150 hours to get a 120 hour degree will pay 3.75% on future earnings with an absolute cap to make them leave and get a job at some point.

You can have our textbooks when you pry them from our cold, dead fingers...

I'm starting to think the most important thing to learn in this particular set of comments is that many people have problems posting special characters and notations to /.

Then you can build a bridge out of it.

I think suckage is a matter of perspective. The larger a company is, and the farther one is from the top, the more specific and limited any given worker's job duties are. In the five person software company I worked for, the owner washed the dishes in the break room. In the Fortune 1000 company I worked for, we had one employee who just sorted printouts coming from a bank of printers. Some personality types like having a very defined role and set of responsibilities and want their job to be set hours, responsibilities and compensation. I suspect that the set of people who want that has very little overlap with the average /. user.

IIRC, the force of gravitational attraction is proportional to the product of the masses. Given the magnitude of the masses of the Earth and the Moon, moving mass from one to the other in the amounts of which we are capable will result in a delta of the before and after products barely indistinguishable from zero.

There is no physics based reason for a car to weigh as much as it does. Take off the body and replace with folding chairs and a flat board and the vehicle will weigh substantially less and mpg will probably quadruple. Of course, when that car moving 40+ mph hits another car, or an inanimate object like a tree, the occupants will all be killed or seriously injured, but that is okay, because we've improved fuel efficiency.</sarcasm>

In all seriousness, if the NHTSA is going to mandate minimum standards for collisions then the car has to be heavy. You can have lightweight, or safe in a high speed collision, but not both.

Bitcoin has a legitimate purpose; a truly portable store of value not needing physical storage that is also not under the control of any government entity has a fundamental value. The true mark of the legitimacy of any currency is the existence of as-of-yet unknown 3rd parties willing to accept said currency. Shells, salt & grain have all been used in the past because a person accepting said currency trusted that somebody else would take that same currency in return for goods or services at some future date. Bitcoin is going to swing between overvalued and undervalued for a while, but eventually a critical mass of parties willing to trade in Bitcoin alone will exist. Someday a farmer will accept Bitcoin for his wheat, and then use those Bitcoins to pay for his diesel and tractors and not once will any party have to convert Bitcoins to <insert fiat currency here.>

It make take a while, but so long as Bitcoin remains uncorrupted by counterfeiting it will stabilize because it will remain out of the sphere of government influence.

I don't know where everyone else lives, but I have yet to find a free wireless or wired streaming video capable Internet connection anywhere in the place I live. I use Netflix and Hulu but I still pay a communication utility for Internet access, so while I am not paying that same provider for cable content, it still is not free. All I have done is separate the data access utility from the content provider. Cord cutting is really a misnomer, few (if any) are truly cutting the cord, they just choose to consume content as Internet data rather than TV signal.

Satellite radios already know if they are allowed to decode the signal for a listener and EZ-Pass RFID works for toll roads. I am pretty sure the "is this car allowed to charge here" problems has already been solved.

Given that an "efficient" diesel internal combustion engine is only about 40% efficient, if electricity can be generated by non-fossil fuel sources like wind or solar it doesn't have to be efficient, especially since most driving takes place in daylight hours when potential wind and solar energy are at their peaks. All we have to do is get the Green supporters to kick some NIMBY butts and this has promise.