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.

Surely it's an act of fraud to sell someone something that you do not own or to sell rights (ie: in perpetuity) for something you only hold transiently?

Sounds liike class-action lawsuit time to me.

And this is why I still buy my music and my favourite movies on physical media. It's another reason that piracy will never die until the day that we can gain a transferrable (cross-platform) life-time license to watch/listen to media that is streamed.

It was bad enough that I had to buy my favourite music on vinyl, then buy it again on tape, then buy it a third time on CD. Just what *are* you buying?

If it's a license to use/liste/watch then damaged media should be replaced for the cost of that media.

If it's just the media you're buying then what's wrong with ripping and burning?

Yeah, because I mean we don't see any EVs catching fire do we? And EVs are *far* less demanding of their batteries than a craft that flies.

I mean... an EV runs for about three hours on a charge, a flying craft runs less than 1 hour so puts three times the load on the battery. An EV is usually slow-charged but to be even remotely economically viable a flying craft will have to be fast-charged *every* time.

Nah... Lithium Ion batteries treated in this way will *never* catch fire -- don't believe all that deepfake stuff showing Teslas and other cars burning like road-flares.

These things *do* fly but they are a very, very, very long way from being economically viable.

In essence we have something that serves the same role as a helicopter but:

a) has a much shorter range/endurance
b) requires much longer to refuel
c) can not autorotate in the event of power failure
d) is unlikely to be able to land fast enough in the event of battery fire
e) uses batteries that, in this application, have a life measured in just a few hundred cycles

The bottom line is that there's no way to make money from this until we have a new generation of safer, more energy-dense, longer-lived battery technology and despite all the claims of "breakthrough" developments, lithium-ion batteries remain the most viable batteries we have. I watch the tech wires and every few weeks there's another of these "breakthroughs" but we just don't see them coming to fruition as a commercialy viable product for any number of reasons.

In the meantime, little display flights like this prove nothing -- if there is a demand (and that's largely unproven) then helicopters will provide the solution for quite some time to come.

A lot of people are going to lose their shirts by investing in this stuff. Trailblazers can often be found lying lifeless alongside the trail as those who come later step over their corpses on the way to success.

I'm 70 years old and the Beatles were a big part of my youth. Their music was so varied and powerful.

Sadly, this latest track is nothing but a cynical attempt to squeeze more blood out of a stone.

It lacks so much of the *real* Beatle's music and I find nothing of merit in it.

Back to my original vinyls and the trove of MP3s I've ripped from them I guess.

Fixed that for you :-)

But you're right... When I first started in the YPP I was earning such good money that I decided to go full-time. I was making about $4K per month with only about 80K subs and half a million or so views a month. This was, of course, when membership of the YPP was by "invitation only".

Since then I've seen my income continuously eroded by YouTube's own lust for revenues and things such as a couple of adpocalypses etc.

Now I earn under $1K per month, despite having more subs, more views and more videos.

If it wasn't for my support over on Patreon I'd be back to flipping burgers.

Also, when I started YT *valued* all of its creators. They listened, they fixed problems and they were there to help if things went wrong. Today, they're only interested in helping those who have at least 10 million subscrbers or are tied to the MSM.

Just look at the situation Louis Rossmann finds himself in right now. A creator with 2 million subscribers got two community strikes because his company made an app that allows people to follow people on multiple social media platforms without having to subscribe directly. Louis is also the guy behind the "Right to Repair" movement and he is a very ethical, honest and worthy individual. However, YT doesn't like people that don't sing only from their corporate hymn book and so he's been whacked hard.

Then there's that 3D printer channel that YT demonetized for allegedly including videos on how to 3D print firearms (which they didn't by the way). When the owner of the channel announced that he'd found sponsorship to make up the lost YT earnings, they simply deleted his entire channel. He was innocent of the allegations they made against him.

Meanwhile, a very large creator called sssniperwolf was able to get away with doxing someone and posting videos of minors in sexually compromising circumstances -- they got nothing more than a "temporary" demonetization. Even that was only for one of their channels until the public outrage forced YT's hand to demontize all her channels -- but likely only for a couple of weeks.

Money talks in the halls of YouTube and it is about time they changed the name to CorpTube because there's no longer much room for "you" in it.

Now that small to medium-sized creators have built the platform into a virtual monopoly, YT is happy to kick them to the curb and focus only on the big earners.