Whoever the hell moded this tripe Insightful needs to have their head examined, along with the author.

You mean the discredited program that produced working engines and test-fired them on vacuum stands, proving they are practical and work? You might also note another program that was terminated in 1972: Apollo. Oh my, what an abominable failure that one was...

And how else would you propose to move in space? Mr Newton might have something to say here.

If you think the difficulty in achieving orbit is just lifting something sufficiently high up, you're more dense than I thought... Here's an idea, first learn about something, then start lecturing about it.

Please note that all of the above modes of transportation have one thing in common: they only work on the Earth. Or when was the last time you last saw a car drive through outer space?

P.S. just to set everything 100% accurately, I forgot about one detail. Fuel can result in more greenhouse gas emissions due to the binding of atmospheric oxygen, so I need to correct myself. However, the number for airplanes is still way off. For cars it might just about work out (930kg of CO2 contains about 250kg of carbon, which is in the ballpark), but for airplanes it's still way off (by about a factor of 4x).

Apparently not a very good one. Google maps says that the optimal driving distance from SF to BOS is about 3000 miles, which, on a 30mpg car, results in 100 gallons of fuel burn. Gasoline is typically around 0.75kg/L, so that comes to 284kg of fuel. Unless your vehicle manages to break the laws of physics somehow, you're never going to emit 930 kg of just greenhouse gases per vehicle. Now the same trip using a plane is about 2700 miles (from a real flight plan). A typical Airbus A320 or Boeing 737 comes to about 0.03L/km/seat, and given that Jet-A is typically around 0.82kg/L, this comes to ~100kg per seat.
So it really comes down to occupancy. A nearly fully-booked plane wins over a single-occupancy car hands down easily. The break even point is at about 2-3 passengers per car, so a car can be more efficient, assuming you car pool. One thing frequently forgotten in these comparisons, though, is the cost of time. The flight is 6 hours. The drive is 4 days of non-stop driving. In any case, just wanted to let your know that the source you cited is quite off.

That's what we have shielding for. All modern digital signaling cabling worth a damn is shielded end-to-end. Now not all on-board electronics in consumer products is shielded, true, but pretty much all of the electronics on board of an airplane is. The screens you see on flight decks are housed in separate grounded metal cases, and all cabling going to/from them is shielded as well. My guess is either your 1W UHF transmitter does a lot more than 1W output, or your electronics is so badly shielded, it's a wonder it's working at all. Another possibility would be interference through the power supply. Cell phones have 1-2W UHF transmitters and I just checked, yep, I can have a phone conversation while working at my computer desk.

Depends on which screen you're talking about. For the primary flight displays, they can just be LCD screens connected to an in-panel computer. The FMS and similar stand-alone things are self-contained computers connected to a data bus. However, all of these components are housed in separate grounded metal cases with shielded wiring going to them, so it shouldn't be a problem in the first place.

I've got 3 cell phones sitting 3 inches beneath my LCD screen all doing wifi & GSM and nothing has ever happened. I've had dozens of tablets sitting on a single desk, all going wifi at full blast downloading firmware updates and nothing happened to other screens around them. I've never ever seen wifi being a problem for the power and control electronics of an LCD screen. So I'm still utterly mystified - what the hell did they do? How could they have induced a radio signal so strong as to get the screens to blank out (presumably by frying the power electronics in them, can't imagine any other obvious way).

Might interest you: with speakers, it only interferes if you're inducing it into a pre-amplified line (where the signal levels of the wifi and the regular audio line are comparable and amplified together). Once past that, the audio signal is so strong that any induced wifi noise is essentially imperceptible. For example, a rather powerful antenna signal is about -40 dBmW, whereas audio amp output power level is approximately +40dBmW (for a ~10W speaker). That's a good 80 dB of delta, or about the difference between a whisper in a really, really quiet room at 6 feet (30 dB) and a jet at takeoff (110 dB).
ISS radiation is rather different - it's ionizing, i.e. the individual particles are powerful enough to knock electrons off of atoms. Radio signals aren't like that, they can only interact with materials by inducing minuscule electric currents by EM field interactions - you'd see that as line noise. While line noise is real enough, I can't imagine how it could be causing any trouble inside of a freakin' LCD screen and causing it to blank out. The only way I can imagine that to happen is if you literally fry the power electronics by excessive induced currents and the only way to do that is by a really, really powerful EM signal (in the kW range at really close proximity). Either that or Honeywell is making LCD screens with some really shitty electronics.

I have never ever heard of wifi interfering with an LCD screen. What did they do to them to get them to blank out? Stick them 1 inch in front of a directional 1kW magnetron?

Of course it won't and I explicitly said to replace the entire second stage as well. I would have hoped it to be obvious that I was talking about reengineering large parts of the system.

Or to Mars for perhaps $500k, I agree. I was just thinking out loud about the possibilities here, just to show that Virgin Galactic's system is an overpriced toy that could be done much cheaper by the likes of SpaceX.

Well, the Vomit Comet is exactly the same as LEO zero-g, it's just much shorter. All the Virgin Galactic guys are doing is extending that time from 30s to 300s. And at tremendous cost, I might add.
As for 140 people for a suborbital flight on Falcon 9, that sounds about right, maybe even a bit pessimistic. By my reckoning, the second stage with propellant and max payload masses somewhere in the vicinity of 100 tons, more than the MTOW of a Boeing 737-800 and at that mass, the first stage is enough to give them around 2 km/s at burnout and an arc of well above 100km. And that includes the spare fuel to fly the spent booster back to the launch pad and land it, so no loss there either. So replace the entire second stage & payload with a hypersonic glider and you're done, basically. It might even be conceivably possible to use this to actually travel somewhere at hypersonic speeds without having to muck about with all that ramjet/scramjet business, though I'm not sure it'd be worth it.
Assuming capital costs per flight of $1M (20% of which is fuel, the rest being O&M, equipment amortization and profit), one such ticket could cost as little as ~$5k. Not chump change by any means, but still 20x lower than what Virgin Galactic are charging. It's about 1st class-type money on some long-haul flights.

It's still an interesting article. It seems they've found a way of cheaply producing ammonia from hydrogen. Not sure they meant ammonia exactly, but they mention "liquid-based inorganic fuel" and later talk about how ammonia is important for fertilizer, so I'm kinda guessing that's what they're making. Ammonia can then be used to either make fertilizer, liquid fuel substitutes and a bunch of other interesting processes.

In that respect, that is correct, the increase might indeed be just noise.

This data is pretty hard to come by, I agree, so I had to make some assumptions (elaborated below). Can you cite your sources?

While it is true that some efficiency offsets might be made, your numbers simply do not add up to the graph Dunkelfalke linked. It lists lignite at 3201 TJ in 1990 and 1645 TJ in 2012. That is not "[usage] of brown coal is still nearly 20% below the 1990 level (in primary energy)", that is a 50% reduction in primary energy. All of that also happened before the year 2000 - since then, pretty much no reduction in lignite use has occurred. If powerplant efficiency were indeed rising while electrical generation remained mostly flat during the 2000-2011 period, that would imply that a rising proportion of that input lignite energy (which flatlined during that time period too) is being used for heating and other uses. However that doesn't appear to be the case either (coal use outside of electricity is falling rapidly) - this leads me to believe that there hasn't been such a dramatic increase in efficiency as to be able to confidently say that the recent increase in generation is due to an increase in powerplant efficiency. Also, how can you claim use in electrical generation is 10% below 1990, when even you said yourself just a few moments before that "no one can deduce how much more brown coal was used for that". I'd really appreciate if you could cite your sources, that would allow us to clear up the situation. If you have access to figures on lignite consumption by coal fired power plants, that would be great. Otherwise, the only reliable thing we can say is that electrical generation from lignite is at an all time high since 1990.

Maybe you should start with your own advice. The poster was referring to electrical generation here, not overall energy use. Your graph is for overall energy use (and I'm not sure about the proportions there either, they seem a bit off). You might have been clued into that by the units being petajoules (customarily used for overall energy production) not watthours (customarily used for electrical generation). Another thing that might have ticked you off is that mineral oil is a good 1/3 the energy share there. And natural gas about 1/4. In actual fact, when you look at the right graphs, in electrical generation, oil accounts for a meager 1% and gas about 11%. In relative proportions lignite has remained mostly stable since 1990, however in absolutes, 2013 (161 TWh) was indeed a record year since 1990 (171 TWh). Hard coal has also picked up in the last 5 years.

I think you misunderstood my reply. I was replying to the poster talking about iSCSI having to be implemented in ZFS. That's what I was addressing.
You talk about a different thing altogether - ZFS backing. The zvol-on-another-zpool solution should work, although performance will suck. The zvol-on-the-same-zpool solution can and will hang for obvious reasons.