750 people can sit on the 387 metres of a London to Paris/Brussels train. They're particularly long, since they were built for a system with a serious limitation (a very-much-in-demand undersea tunnel) and the expectation of high demand.

French TGV trains carry 350-500 people. British national long distance express trains a bit more, up to 600.

There are 16 London-Paris trains per day (plus London-Brussels, and some others), from 05:40 to 20:31, slightly more than one per hour.

The Eurostar is one of the few services in Europe where there *is* a security check and a requirement to arrive 10-30 minutes beforehand (it's 10 with the expensive ticket, 30 otherwise, and they're actually very accommodating if you're late). California shouldn't need this, as there's no international / undersea borders.

For other trains, 2 minutes is a bit short. For a long-distance journey, I aim to be waiting at the correct platform 5 minutes before the scheduled departure time, or a bit more if it's an infrequent (>20m) service.

I'm not too bothered by the distance from LGW and STN -- the platforms are below the terminal buildings, so it's little more bother than in many European airports. Train ticket price is perhaps a shock for many visitors, especially as the cheaper non-express almost-as-fast trains aren't advertised very well. Gatwick has good connections with Thameslink. It's not reasonable to compare London to smaller cities, and the travel time is similar to other metropoli.

I agree the old LHR terminals are terrible, one of the worst airports I've used. T5 is great though, for an airport its size. I've never queued more than a couple of minutes when leaving, maybe 5 when arriving though UK Customs. (I use it every two-three months.) I haven't used T2 yet, work favours BA.

Connecting between terminals is probably confusing and awful.

I'd never heard of that (too young), but I found an article from 1999 discussing an argument between London Underground and Railtrack.

Probably it was shelved in favour of Crossrail, which calls at Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Liverpool Street and others. Service starts in December 2018.

I've never flown to New York, but...

Building a better railway to JFK seems a good idea regardless of what happens to Newark.

My nearest airport is London Heathrow, which has the cheap option of an hour-long metro ride (using that word, since most of it is above ground), but there's also the "premium" Heathrow Express train, which takes about 15 minutes, a cheaper (and slightly slower) train, and the new Crossrail line will open from 2019 or something providing an excellent new route.

For completeness, London City is the closest to the centre of the city, and popular with business travellers. It has direct "light" rail to both financial centres, taking about 20 minutes and with an excellent view. The three other London airports (LGW, STN, LTN) are relatively far away from the centre, LGW has the best rail connections, STN is in between, and LTN is a little annoying (there's a 5 minute free shuttle bus from the airport to the near-ish station).

The hardware cost is irrelevant. It's the cost and time to thoroughly test / migrate / rewrite lots of bespoke software, made to the lowest quality by some company like Accenture on a contract, for which the source code probably wasn't supplied and all the original developers have left. And if the system fails the Daily Mail will write about it. And the tories slashed the budget, so all that's left can just about cover the new thing the new regulation requires.

My point was to show there are many options between "everything" and "nothing" provided by the state. I don't really care to discuss it further.

(PS "counselling" is correct English.)

Fire fighting service is [etc, etc].

That's a very American viewpoint. In other countries, government functions well. In others, it does well with some things, and badly at others.

Because they'll pay for you to have something you'd argue isn't essential, like fire protection, food safety, fertility treatments, counselling, etc.

My grandma is booked for cataract surgery in May. She's still OK to drive, the medical benefit is currently justified for her mental health (she's lost confidence with worsening sight). It's free on the NHS.

Brands available in Britain (see here etc) list "maltodextrin". That's a polymer of 3-20 glucoses, and I'd guess at the higher end since only some of the mass is included in the "of which sugars" on the nutrition information.

Is that really much different than starch?

(The purpose is simply to dilute the über-sweet Stevia powder so you can use reasonable amounts.)

For comparison, Tesco give the RDA of carbohydrate and sugar: http://www.tesco.com/groceries...

330ml of Coca Cola contains:
* Carbohydrate 35g, 13% RDA
* of which sugars 35g, 39% RDA

Surprisingly, the can itself only shows the "sugars" value and RDA. (In Britain, the supermarkets are much better at promoting these values, since their store-branded products are usually better -- probably because they have more flexibility to change the recipe.)

Possibly because in the US there are so many more prisoners held on minor offences (drug possession, etc), who wouldn't even come close to considering suicide?

Per million population, the numbers become 1.43 in E&W and 1.63 in the US.

(NB, just England and Wales. Justice is controlled by the Scottish Parliament in Scotland, under a different legal system, so the figures are separate: 13 suicides (~0.16%!), 4.19 per M population. Small country bias, or is Scotland a particularly grim place to be imprisoned?

Northern Ireland: no suicides since 2010 [5 in the last decade], prison population 1465, country population 1.8M).

Suicides: for England and Wales it's 82 (0.10%), for the USA it's 520, about 0.02%.

and 0 vs 35 executions.

Bored railway tunnels are only single-track, usually with two parallel bores. Here are some good photos, I believe the "cathedral"-sized cavern was built by digging down from ground level. The finished tunnel diameter is 6.1m.

The London Post Office Railway has 2.7m tunnels, so is pretty much what you want. It was shut down after the introduction of the Congestion Charge, since that removed enough traffic that it was then cheaper to use surface vehicles.

This is not what tones are like in Mandarin. Different tones change the meaning of individual words completely.

ma1 (high, level tone): mother

ma2 (rising tone): hemp

ma3 (falling then rising tone): horse

ma4 (falling tone): to curse

ma5 (no tone): makes a sentence into a question, a bit like adding "right?" (rising tone?) to a sentence in English.

Sarcasm in English applies to the whole sentence, and the tone is applied to the whole sentence, not the individual words.

(Also, a homonym is a word like "minute" (time, small). It's Latin for same-word. You described a same-sound, a homophone. This would be easy if English derived technical terms from smaller English words.)

I was paid for my most recent open source contributions.

I submitted code to a moderate project earlier this year, after I suggested I did so to my employer -- an obscure part of the British civil service. It fits well with the government's IT strategy, but I wasn't expecting it to be as easy as it was.