Establishing a permanent lunar base is the logical first step towards a Mars trip.

Establishing a permanent lunar base is the logical first step towards going anywhere in the solar system; Mars, Venus, the asteroids, Earth-Moon Lagrange points, etc,

Elon's got you covered.

The Boring Company

Once they have a solid business, we'll see if they too sit on their laurels like ULA, or if that the cash still goes into R&D.

Musk's not going to "sit on [his] laurels" at least until he steps onto the surface of Mars.

So we've got a ways to go.

To make the US internet good.

SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed

> The problem remains with the "tubes" which have to be a very good vacuum over a long distance.

That and the thermal expansion and contraction of the metal tubes extending over kilometers which must remain vacuum tight and well aligned.

Good luck with that.

Bought a car stereo a little over 2 years ago, the stereo system could either connect to bluetooth, or use a USB device. Connected my phone to bluetooth, it didn't sound right. Couldn't put my finger on it, but it sounded thin. Put the same music on a USB device, it sounds just fine.

I've read, but cannot confirm, that the problem is that compressed music on your cell phone is decompressed and then recompressed and decompressed again over Bluetooth.

The problem is that the compression algorithms are designed to emphasize and de-emphasize different music characteristics. So it's kind-of like squeezing your music through two incompatible audio filters, it just squeezes all the goodness from your music.

In fact, I don't know but I'm willing to bet the Bluetooth compression is optimized for speech, which would be crap for music.

An ESP8266 module with an LCD or LED display.

You would need an ESP module like the ESP-07 or ESP-12 with multiple I/O pins or a NodeMCU board to drive the display, but you can program it to sync with a time server every day or so over your wireless network.

You can add a DS3231 precision real time clock chip (cheap breakout boards are available on eBay) for better accuracy.

No one for a thousand years to come will ever seriously think about trying to smush two protons together hard enough for them to fuse without a sun-sized gravity well to assist with it.

Actually you can do it relatively easily with a Farnsworth fusor.

It's not practical for power generation, but it easily smushes protons together.

Yes, I know TFS says, "the three best-selling vehicles in the U.S. in both 2014 and 2015 were all pickup trucks."

But I would think a luxury SUV would be a more likely step.

Musk has made great improvements to battery capacity and life for his automobiles, but I suspect trucks require more power and range than is practical with current battery technology.

Farnsworth fusors work just fine at room temperature.

In the default configuration the phrase "Powered by Zencart" appears at the bottom of each page.

Also, the default Zencart themes and icons are unmistakable if you know what they look like.

OOP:

In an OOP world every sock would have an attached washing machine.

Unless the washing machine was defined as static.

Then there would be one washing machine for every sock in the world.

Stereo lithography has (had?) been used for decades to prototype various 3D parts for fit and interference, though it could not make structural parts, certainly not for high temperature applications.

SpaceX's SuperDraco engine is completely 3D printed, although I'm not sure of the exact technology.

So when do they release these 322 pages of new rules? With all this transparency, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?! /s

From TechDirt:

"First, it's important to note that despite a 3-2 vote approving the Title II-based rules, we won't get to see the actual rules today. Despite claims by neutrality opponents that this is some secret cabal specific to net neutrality, the agency historically has never released rules it votes on (pdf) until well after the actual vote. It's a dumb restriction that's absolutely deadly to open discourse, but it's not unique to one party or to this specific issue."

There's only one place in the article that specifically mentions mobile broadband. The rest talks about the internet and broadband in general.

Although it's not completely clear, I'm assuming Title II will apply to both mobile and non-mobile broadband, but he's calling out mobile broadband because the most ignominious examples of abuse (data caps, throttling, prioritization, etc) have been by mobile operators.