Of course, the old Orion design has been significantly surpassed by a number of newer designs. Medusa, for example, is much better than Orion - the bombs explode in front of the craft behind a gigantic "parachute", which captures far more of the energy and the long cords on the parachute allow for a much longer, smoother acceleration pulse. The bombs are also able to be detonated much further from the craft, and the craft may be made a lot smaller.

Nuclear thermal - the first version that was being developed called Nerva - allows for "clean" (to varying degrees) fission propulsion from the surface. Or if what you want is high ISP in space, then a fission fragment rocket goes much higher than an Orion or Medusa design (and scales down a lot better)

Even if you grant Snowden every consideration, how can he have any credibility as long as he's in Russia?

It was and it wasn't. One or two devices on a Mac SCSI bus was pretty PnP but beyond that, especially when adding non-disk devices like scanners, the Mac SCSI bus quickly could get into voodoo territory -- devices that disappeared from the chain, drives that wouldn't mount and general unreliability.

Usually over time you could get it stable, but that often meant "over time" -- re-ordering the chain physically, numerically and swapping expensive cables in and out to try to find a stable setup.

I often wonder if the 25 pin connector, which IIRC was non-standard, didn't contribute to the problem. SCSI seemed to work better on PCs which used the standard 50 pin connector.

I'm kind of curious what the space program would look like today if we hadn't sent people into space and had only used remote landers. About half the current Slashdot audience is critical of manned space exploration and prefers robotic exploration only. Would we be more or less down the road of space exploration if we hadn't done a manned moon mission?

It cost a lot of money to send people to the moon vs. just robotic stuff, but I wonder if there would be as much interest in it if we had never sent humans to the moon.

Decade or two to ramp up production for new vehicle sales. Plus a decade or so for consumer acceptance lag. Then two decades or more to phase out existing gas cars. We're talking half a century here.

Yes, at one point there were 5 cars per million people period. Around the year 1890. Today there's 0.15 cars per capita globally. It took over a century to scale up that much, so I don't think that's the sort of point you want to be making. Plus, not only do we have to scale up for existing car replacement, but also to handle the rapid growth of the third world, which will push that 0.15 cars per capita way up over the coming decades. It's simply something that will take decades to get the production capacity in place, and then decades at that level to phase out the existing vehicles on the road.

Biofuels are hardly a gap filler. Have you ever checked how much land they eat up even to meet today's tiny pathetic percentage of the market share? To meet the needs of the average American driver's 12k miles per year in an average 24mpg car (500 gallons) would require 3 million square miles of farmland dedicated to it, more than double the US total farmland for *all* crops - for human consumption, for animal feed, for clothing, for industry, everything combined. And that's just for passenger cars, let alone freight trucks, trains, airplanes, ships, etc.

It's not a gap filler. It's an environmental disaster on a greater scale than the oil it's trying to replace.

I heard it argued recently that capitalists aren't interested in increased economic activity, only in increasing their share of economic activity. Suppressing labor markets and high unemployment helps.

And for the literally 99.9995 percent of the world population who doesn't have a Tesla?

As much as I'm a fan of electric cars, it's simply an absurdity to pretend that everyone's going to have one any day now. The average car on the road in the US is 10 years old, implying an average US lifespan of 20 years - and many live on even longer, shipped to the third world. So even if every new car sold tomorrow was an EV, it'd still take decades to switch over. But of course, every new car sold tomorrow won't be an EV. Even if every consumer in the world was suddenly sold on the concept of EVs, it'd take a decade or two to be able to ramp up production that high. But of course every consumer in the world isn't sold on the concept of EVs, it'll take a decade or two of people getting to experience the technology and being satisfied with it for that to happen.

I wish this wasn't the case, but the majority of the cars in the world aren't going to be electric for many decades to come. So if your plan is to stop all oil production during that time... yeah, best of luck with the end of human civilization.

You think the boat is just going to sit in one place? They drag the sensors behind them while they travel across tens of millions of square kilometers. At the sort of pulse rate discussed and at typical ship rates of travel for a craft like this, the pulses would be about 100 meters apart, and the ship would be dozens of miles away an hour later.

There's no point to sitting in one area and pulsing the same place over and over.

Yeah, but how many people were editing 4k video in 2007? I'm sure the 3 people at the time weren't worrying about scheduling their Fusion ioDrives across workloads, either, just pounding them into submission. Wider adoption usually means mixed workloads where scheduling scarce resources matters more and is more complicated.

FWIW I don't know if I agree with the article premise -- it seems like most of these resource scheduling decisions/monitoring/adjustments are being made in hypervisors now (think VMware DRS, as only one example). And a lot of storage resource allocation isn't even done at the hypervisor level, it's done in the SAN which simply allocates maximum storage bandwidth to to the host and figures out on its own which storage to use.

France also has a much milder climate and 3.5 times the population density. They're also heavily dominated by nuclear power, which some people like but others truly hate, and which tends to be one of the more expensive generation sources per kilowatt hour and with a very long turnaround time from conception to commencement of generation.

And once again, we're talking about oil here, oil and electricity are not interchangeable. You need to be comparing oil consumption per capita. France's is a bit over half the US's, but with a population density 3.5 times higher, that's kind of to be expected.

Let me know how you managed to fit the sun or a fusion reactor into your gas tank.

Are we really going to keep pretending that oil and electricity are the same thing?

For the third time I have to point it out in this thread, underwater explosions are measured differently on the decibel scale than above water explosions, you need to subtract 61.5 from the decibel figures before comparing them with above-ground noise figures. That's over 6 orders of magnitude difference.

Also, when people talk about how the ships keep making pulses every ten seconds, they act like it's in the same spot. Which would be idiotic. "Okay, now that we know what's down here, what should we explore next? I know, let's keep exploring the exact same place!" The ships pulse every 10 seconds while moving across the vast survey area.

Lastly, see my comparison with lightning above, which strikes more frequently in the survey area, louder, and often hits the same area for hours on end.

Once again, people here at Slashdot seem completely unaware that underwater sounds are measured by a scale that's 61.5 db louder than sound in the air.

Nitrogen-based fertilizers generally come from natural gas, not oil, FYI. Of the three main sources of fossil energy (coal, oil, natural gas), oil is generally by far the most expensive per joule.

Also, I don't think your comparison is that simple that if yields decline, people die. If there was a global food shortage due to reduced yields per acre, the price spike would hit meat the hardest, practically driving grainfed meat off the market. A calorie of grainfed beef takes over 12 calories of grain to produce; all of that vast acreage dedicated to growing field corn for livestock feed would switch to the suddenly more valuable crops for human consumption. Meat from animals grazing on marginal lands wouldn't be more expensive to produce, although their profit margin would shoot up. The world's diet, although especially the poorer nations', would increasingly look more like it did in the past - calories primarily from plant sources with only the occasional meat supplementing it.

Also there's the fact that if price on food products skyrockets, all sorts of land that was previously considered marginal and uneconomical to produce on suddenly becomes economical.

Common screwup. Those are all atmosphere-rated decibel figures. Underwater decibel figures are listed at 61.5 dB louder than their atmospheric equivalents. 250 dB underwater is 188.5 atmospheric.

Adjusting your above examples to be underwater figures, we get:

271.5 dB 2.0 earthquake
296.5 dB 5.0 earthquake
309.5 dB atom bomb
371.5 dB loudest volcano

I'd think it obvious that an air cannon isn't going to produce sound levels equivalent to an atomic bomb. And actually one would expect an underwater atomic bomb to be much louder than a surface one, far more of the energy is going to go into creating a gigantic oscillating bubble. And lastly, your cited atomic bomb figure is only for the 16 and 21 kiloton bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Modern thermonuclear weapons are generally three orders of magnitude higher yield than that. A large thermonuclear weapon in deep water will create a bubble on the order of magnitude of a kilometer in size, which will then oscillate in a series of collapses and reexplosions. The oscillating bubbles created by air cannons are practically microscopic by comparison.