What can I say, I like toys.... Also I am a very high mobile usage person racking up a couple of hours of talk time every day. As a result I am on the top plan my network provides. The upside is I get to choose a new phone "for free" every year.

At the moment I am firmly on the LG band wagon so will be getting an Lg G4 as soon as my carrier has them, in 6 months or so....

There is a compensation system. The properties are bought from them at an agreed market price. In Australia there is a slight premium put on the figure in order to add to the compensation. But homes are often worth more to the owner than just a dollar amount.

For example I got married on our property. That emotional aspect won't be taken into consideration when doing a valuation.

That said I believe that resumption of properties for infrastructure is a necessity. It is one of those prices of living in a society, in that sometimes society has to come first. The real problems seem to kick in when person interests, either through money or popular protests, manage to shift the policies to far from the ideal.

Agreed. You want rail to go to your high density areas, have the smallest number of bends possible and keep your gradient as flat as possible. The problem with this is it tends to go straight over lots of expensive realestate.

People lobby the governments, government changes the design to a crappier option. Rinse and repeat, until the solution you have has so many design changes that it doesn't solve any problems.

If you have ever been to Moscow they have ring roads that are centred on the Kremlin. They manage to carry a huge amount of traffic and they are almost perfectly concentric. The only reason they exist is Stalin just bull dosed anything in the way. Great infrastructure now, terrible for anyone who lost their home of business at the time.

You have never lived in London I take it? Some super-privileged live in very exclusive post-codes in London. But a lot of the housing in London is fucking awful council estates that I would need to be paid to even consider walking through. Then if they are not council estates they are SW postcodes which for a long time were the expat Aussie, Kiwi and Saffer ghettos.

The truly super-privileged in the UK don't live in London they live on estates in places like the Cotswolds. Often they will maintain a flat for working in London as well though.

As for the security theatre I hope you are wrong. Hopefully they realise that the passengers on a fast train are the almost zero risk aspect of the operation. Unlike aircraft it is relatively easy to get at a train while it is moving. Just damage the tracks, drop a brick from a bridge etc. Getting someone onto a high speed train with a bomb is pointless when stealing a truck and crashing it onto the line inside the trains braking distance is likely to be more horrifying from a terrorist perspective.

Of course. You always need to model the outcomes and model what will get the best return on investment. The other is to model any other externalities as well.

For example bypasses will not impact traffic travelling into and out of a city where the point of origin or destination is that city. Where as people travelling by train will. The flip side is that the trainstations themselves will generate traffic wherever they are located so that needs to be planned for and handled as well.

Other considerations are pollution and noise. The HSR is likely to be noisier where it runs but for a relatively short period of time. Vehicles are individually quieter but in sum much louder, they are also more distributed. So you are trading a more general reduction in noise for greater noise levels at specific points for shorter durations.

As for pollution HSR will generate significantly less pollution per passenger mile but also move the pollution away from the population centre to the power generator.

Finally what is the long term maintenance costs? Road wears and wears fast as far as infrastructure goes. Rail on the other hand has a very long life cycle in comparison. Over what period of time would the capital and maintenance costs of bypasses exceed the capital and maintenance costs of the rail?

All of these things need to be taken into consideration when deciding if something is a viable plan. You can't just say - it cost $20 billion so it needs to be $100 per ticket to break even.

If that is what they build then you have a whole set of other problems.

Go and clone the Japanese Shinkansen though and none of what you say if true. FFS all the shinkansens I have been on in recent years even have standard powerpoints for you to plug your laptop / other charger in.

The reason that rail is subsidised is because the benefits of their operation, to the governments, are not restricted to their fare price. Every passenger is a passenger not taking an alternative mode of transport. Given the level of congestion on the highways this can be the difference between moving traffic and grid lock. If you can get 15% of the traffic on that corridor travelling by train you are potentially looking at saving vastly more money because you don't have to upgrade the highways. This is especially true where the highways are running through heavily developed areas.

If the backup generators hadn't worked then there would have been multiple days for a truck carrying a replacement generator to drive from anywhere in the country to plug it in.

People seem to forget the fucking massive wall of water that smashed its way across the Fukushima plant and everything around it. Wikipedia has a good article on the safety systems of a BWR reactor. I suggest you have a read.

I forgot to add the two iPhones that are in that collection.

On a more serious note there is no way that I would go to an iOS device. The lack of a dedicated back button is enough of a reason. The bloat ware that is iTune is another and the completely locked down environment is a third.

Lol. Probably. but my collection of random cables is way way worse

Well in my immediate vicinity.
Samdung Note 2 - old phone
HTC Desire - oldest phone
HTC Desire HD - wifes old phone
Lg G2 - current phone
Htc Flyer - really old tablet
Nexus 7 - Cracked screen
Nexus 9 - Current Tablet
Galaxy Tab 10.1 - Old tablet
3 x HTC Sensations - Old work phones they were going to bin.
Samsung S2 - someone bricked it and gave it to me - fixed

Then a little further away I have a gps tracker that I use when I'm using my SLR. My canon snappy has a gps in it too. I have 1 gps unit in each car. An old TomTom one that sits doing nothing.

In Aus Starbucks openned 85 stores. Lost $144 million dollars and then closed 60 of their stores....

Starbucks basically collapsed in Australia because it couldn't make a decent coffee to save itself (sorry).

I had a PCA hooked up after having my broken my collar bone and shattered my wrist re-assembled. The method for me to get a shot of morphine was to simply push a button. The system was set that I could only get a certain number of presses per hour.

That said I didn't use the button at all. They had given me oral painkillers and I was fine with those for the 8 hours I had to wait before they let me go home. For the most part I was just seriously bored. My entertainment was my laptop and watching tv shows on it. It would have been trivial for me to connect an Ethernet cable and mess away.

Yes and no. Yes if they make no changes to the iPlayer service. However what is much more likely to happen is that you will need to log in to iPlayer instead of just being able to access it with nothing but the geo-block.

You want access to the iPlayer server? Please type in the receipt code for your TV license please. If you do not have a UK Tv license but live in the EU and would like to access iPlayer please purchase a subscription over here.