Re: "seven times the speed of sound"
You should have pulled out the Register standard unit converter!
Kilofurlongs per fortnight will do!
Posts by Steve K
1562 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2008
SpaceX rocket set for unintentional Moon landing – well, a piece of it anyway
ICANN opens applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012
The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping
Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date
Next.js developer Vercel warns of customer credential compromise
Shoe company says it's getting into AI infrastructure and yes this is the top
Headless 360: Salesforce's latest pitch to let AI do the dev work
Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference
AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming
Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states
Wednesday 11th March 2026 13:03 GMT
Re: Maybe
You wouldn't hae the inertia in EVTOL blades to help either.
A Robinson R22 (very light) helicopter has conventional blades (but with low inertia), but even with that if your engine fails and you don't dump the collective pitch to keep rotor speed up within a second then your rotor speed is irrecoverable and you will plummet.
Tuesday 10th March 2026 22:01 GMT
Re: Maybe
“ Craft with powered lift don't get much option different from a ballistic trajectory”
Not true with helicopters, which can autorotate as long as they keep sufficient inertia in the rotor system to flare on approaching the ground.
A blade delamination/loss will of course lead to a ballistic trajectory in a variable number of parts.
This is not quite true of most E-VTol Designs, which will generally tolerate a loss of more than one rotor as long it’s not on the same corner. However a loss of power in most E-VTOL designs will not permit autorotation due to rotor size, and a ballistic recovery system (deployed at the right height) may save the day.
That said, it is still going to be the preserve of the well-off due to the necessary certification and regulation. There is also likely to be a “last mile” issue, since they can’t just land (and recharge) where they want.
Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download
Fast Pair, loose security: Bluetooth accessories open to silent hijack
Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check
Claude is his copilot: Rust veteran designs new Rue programming language with help from AI bot
The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere
Nvidia DMs TSMC: Please sir can I have some more? The Chinese are starved for H200s
AI faces closing time at the cash buffet
SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year
Oracle's new AI-enhanced support portal leaves users fuming
The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked
British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted
And the winner of the Microsoft Christmas sweater is...
Xero to start charging developers API usage fees, replacing revenue share deals
BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money
Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’
From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world
You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training
Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone
Monday 27th October 2025 12:54 GMT
Re: Genius-Level Procurement In Whitehall SW1......
"half a billion a pop"
I don't think that's the cost of the aircraft on its own - that's the lifetime cost of maintenance/spares etc. along with the airframe/engine (£80-£100 million, I think).
If you drop one in the sea then you don't have to pay the remaining maintenance any more (not that it's a good use of funds to do so...), or you get extra spares for the remaining fleet.
Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators
Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet
Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it
Monday 6th October 2025 07:42 GMT
Disk Insertion?
I wonder whether it was triggered by the floppy (oo-er missus, fnar,fnar) disk insertion event?
I recall back in the very early 1990s as a trainee Accountant I was assigned to a piece of work in a department using Macs, which had that particular event set up with a similar sound file triggered.
One of the other things I learned about Macs that day was where the volume control was.....
Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told
UK splurges £4.4M on drones, e-planes, and other flights of fancy
Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says
Saturday 27th September 2025 07:53 GMT
Re: Is anybody surprised?
It’s what Douglas Adams envisioned as the “Reason” program back in 1987.
Give the program the outcome you want and it will come up with a justification for it, which sounds plausible but you don’t know why.
In the novel, the bank manager approved a loan for a sports car (promptly crashed by the character…) following a request generated by Reason, but wasn’t quite sure why…..
Trump admin says tech companies are abusing H-1B visas, slaps $100k a year to allow entry
Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel
Atlassian acquisition drives dream of AI-powered ChromeOS challenger
In Otter news, transcription app accused of illegally recording users’ voices
Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need
Sunday 17th August 2025 04:43 GMT
Comments
The new Word comment system is dreadful, but at least you can (for now) revert back to Classic comments as long as you haven’t got any new-style comments in the document.
The new comments feature spans the hell out of collaborators on the document, and you can only change the focus of the comment you are editing by hitting Ctrl-Enter or the “Send” button. Who looked at that comment system and said “Yep, that is superior let’s ship it and make it the default”