Sounds straight forward but any time there's mention of an obelisk you should always check for an asterisk (in case there are special conditions that apply) :-)

I've been publishing my daily blog for almost 30 years on my own website -- hand-coded HTML (with all the associated errors).

It still has its own small community of followers and allows me to say what I want, how I want to, when I want to. I don't have to worry about upsetting some mega-corp that is engaged in full-on virtue-signalling and therefore shadow-bans my content or even cancels me completely. The freedom is fantastic -- even though most of my commentary is related to matters of technology and science.

There is still a place for individual websites in this world of X/Meta/YouTube/Tiktok/whatever.

Don't blame YouTube... blame creators who use mid-roll ads in their monetized videos.

None of my videos have mid-roll ads so you can watch 20-30 minutes of content with only 2 pre-roll ads and, if you hang around, 2 post-roll ads.

I believe in a fair "value exchange" between myself and those who watch my videos and that means I can't justify including mid-rolls.

For the time being, the choice of whether to litter a video with mid-roll ads remains with the creator if their channel is monetized -- so don't go blaming YouTube when it's greed on the part of the creator -- YouTube is simply providing the opportunity for that greed.

Partly because I don't force viewers to sit through endless midrolls, I have a combined total of nearly half a million subscribers across 2 channels and over 130 million views. I guess I must have got the value-exchange just about right then.

I agree... Philips/Pozidrive screw heads would not have been my first choice for such a task. Even hex-driver or torx would have been superior I would have thought.

Many a time I ended up having to drill out the Philips-head screws on my old motocross bike engines when they wouldn't yield, even to the most concerted attempts to unscrew them with an impact driver. I ended up replacing them with hex-head screws and never had that problem again.

I believe that torx screws have an even better ability to deliver torque with a much lower risk of stripping or the tool riding up and out of the hole.

One can only wonder what the fasteners were made of too. If they used stainless steel then there would always be the risk of cold-welding where the screw sticks firmly to the parts and can even gall with the amount of load involved, if some kind of anti-seize treatment isn't involved. Odds are they were titanium though (for weight/strength) but even that can gall under high pressure.

Google claims to have made over 100,000 drone deliveries in Australia -- and hasn't earned a single cent of revenue, let alone profit.

Google is not a charity. It is not a philanthropic organization and all the "free" services it offers actually have an angle where YOU become the product.

Now consider what Google has to gain by giving away "free" drone delivery...

Will it be using its overflying drones to gather intelligence for marketers? "I see that number 25 willow street has a new swimming pool... let's target them with ads for pool chlorine and accessories" perhaps?

The even more likely situation is that Google (which is primarily an online serivce company) is gearing up to launch a UTM (unmanned traffic management system) that is an air-traffic control system for drones. The FAA has already indicated that this is how they see the future -- a UTM that controls and authorizes all drone traffic in the skies over our heads. Google look to be creating a perceived need for such a system and will likely come in as "the most experienced in drone traffic management" with their pitch to be the company that then controls the keys to the sky for all drones.

The provision of that service could be a *real* money-maker for Google (or Amazon, which is in the same position).

Don't be fooled into thinking that Google or Amazon want to be in the drone delivery business, they don't. They realize that just like back in the gold-rush days, the *real* money isn't in prospecting, it's in providing the critical infrastructure those prospectors need (ie: shovels, pans, food, etc). He who holds the keys to the skies holds the keys to the industry's wallets.

And I recall writing a complete accounting system in Pascal MT+ (the Digital Research compiler) for CP/M machines.

Happy days -- dealing with the limitations of 8-bit processors that forced you to use dozens of overlays (dynamically loaded code) and hand-optimize certain routines to save a byte or two here and there.

Kids today don't know how good they've got it! :-)

So true... I'm pretty sure (at 71 years of age) my eyes are barely HD let alone UHD. In fact, sometimes I think SD looks "good enough".

Age is a bitch... except that sometimes it allows you to use cheaper/older gear without noticing the difference :-)

Haha!

Sony, reap what you sow with your evil DRM.

Yes, there are *many* challenges... not the least of which is that of reliably sustaining the detonation. Think of it as trying to keep a candle lit in a hurricane.

It took a long time for researchers to produce an RDE that would run for more than a few short seconds without stopping, due to the precarious nature of the rotating shock wave and its sensitivity to pressure/density, temperature and other factors.

Going from "we got it working" to "we have a commercially viable product in production" is a huge step.

Yes, RDEs *are* extremely noisy -- they have a very distinctive screech... somewhat like afterburner screech.

Any kind of aircraft using them for commercial service would almost certainly have to be a hybrid of some kind, using a far quieter engine to get them to altitude before engaging the RDE so that the noise was less of a factor. Of course all high-speed flight needs to be done at high altitude anyway because the air is simply too dense at lower altitudes.

The hybrid configuration would add weight and complexity so I don't see RDEs being used for passenger jets any time soon.

That $1,500 per Kg is for low-earth orbits which are unsuitable for beaming power back to earth because they can't focus their energy on a single location on the planet's surface.

The price I saw quoted for boosting payloads into geostationary orbits (which is a lot further out and requires a lot more energy) was $11,300 per Kg (cite) which is a *lot* more expensive.

Actually hydrogen has an amazingly wide stoichiometric range (anywhere between 30:1 to 200:1) so it's very easy to get a mix with air that becomes highly explosive (unlike most other gasses).

And let's not forget that you've not only got to use energy to split the water -- but then you'll have to use even more energy to compress the collected H2 into the cylinders you'll be using on your forklifts. Compressors to that level (200 bar or so) will use a *lot* of energy that is *never* recovered.

Yeah, I can't help but get the feeling that this is simply an exercise in virtue-signalling rather than any serious attempt to reduce carbon emissions.

In fact, given the inefficiencies, it would be *much* more effective to simply buy electric forklifts and charge them from the power grid. At least you'd get about 90 percent of the energy going into doing the work you want. Once you figure electrolysis losses into the equation, the proposed "solution" is just a waste of time and money.

I save a bunch of cash by buying non-smart TVs and using something like the Google Chromecast and my Raspberry Pi running Kodi. The TV is simply an HDMI monitor with no camera, smart apps or anything that gets in the way of *me* having control.

Most of my large collection of DVDs and Bluray disks have been ripped to disk and are available in a coiuple of clicks via Kodi. If the internet goes down. When the credit card I used to subscribe to Netflix and Prime Video expired I didn't even bother renewing those services. Now I just use YouTube (lots of full movies now available for free there) and my own library. With DVD rental stores shutting down I was able to pick up a *lot* of disks for about a buck each and no greedy corporate will be able to steal them from me (are you listening Sony?).

Anyone who buys a smart TV can expect to be at the mercy of the manufacturer and advertisers for the forseeable future.