There's an assumption here that the Solar Panels / Collectors need to be placed on the aircraft itself. That would appear to be impractical. How about putting the solar array in _orbit_, and beaming down the power via Microwave power transmission or some such technology? This would solve the issue of night flight, as an orbital power grid could move energy to areas not shadowed by the earth. Clouds shouldn't a problem either.

Perhaps we should allow trades only by hand-written, wax sealed forms submitted by hand every Tuesday at 10am on the floor of the New York stock exchange. This could well reduce volatility - but would it really make for a fairer market? HFT isn't a bad thing. If anything, it benefits the market by increasing liquidity - more shares are changing hands, so it's easier for long term investors to buy and sell them.

Strewth! This new cable sounds Bonza! Betcha it'll get that financial data across the drink faster than you can say "A dingo ate my baby"!

The only "payment" Virgin received was in the form of rights to access tube stations and install their equipment inside.

Although the service will initially be free of charge, it'll no doubt carry some form of advertising on the login screen. Virgin have stated that it will eventually be charged for like typical WiFi services. Also, it'll be free to existing Virgin Media users, thus making Virgin services more attractive to users and benefitting their business.

New Zealand already got rid of its 5c coin a few years back, making 10c the smallest coin. That doesn't mean *everything* is priced in 10c increments, however. You'll sometimes see prices written as "$1.3" or "$5.5" in things like restaurant menus, but not at things like supermarkets. Price increments less than 10c still exist, and are still used for card transactions - it's just that the final total is rounded if you're paying with cash.

No, this is not really true either. While European railways as a whole often receive some form of subsidy, High-Speed passenger services between major cities in Europe are usually very profitable. It is the less-busy regional and commuter type services that tend to receive subsidies, because it is believed that there are economic and environmental benefits in doing so.

It is true that taking the train is sometimes more expensive than flying, but this is simply because rail can command higher fares because it is more convenient. If you can save a couple of hours (and, lets face it, a lot of hassle these days with security checks and such), by taking the train then most people will.

• Booming passenger numbers drive record revenues at Virgin Trains http://mediaroom.virgintrains.co.uk/2011/08/booming-passenger-numbers-drive-record.html
• SNCF: Net profit of €588 million http://www.sncf.com/Finance/pdf/en/CP_et_Presentations/SNCF_group_HY2011_Results.pdf
• Deutsche Bahn Revenue, Profit Surged in 2010 http://www.joc.com/logistics-economy/deutsche-bahn-revenue-profit-surged-2010

This is nonsense. The 3GS runs just fine on iOS 5. Significantly faster, in fact, in some areas than iOS 4 - such as web browsing (particularly a HUGE improvement on Javascript scores thanks to the Nitro javascript engine), and loading time for the camera app.

You can see the iOS 5 on 3GS benchmarks for yourself at: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4956/apple-ios-5-review/15

Secondly, the only iPhone which ever had serious performance problems with an upgrade was the 3G running on iOS 4. 1st gen and 3G iPhones all run just fine with iOS 3.x. The issue (which is admittedly very bad and a huge fuck up by Apple) with the 3G on iOS 4 is mostly due to a serious bug in Location Services which causes memory consumption to increase (and thus, performance decrease) over time. So a fresh iOS 4 install on a 3G starts out pretty decent but after a few weeks it gets slower and slower until, eventually, it becomes unusable.

Sure - there'll always be a mix of small and large cells. But most of London is "high density areas". And it can be very difficult/expensive to find good sites to put full sized cell towers. If you can put many smaller cells inside buildings etc, just like WiFi stations, then it'll probably save the carriers a lot of money.

AT&T is a bit like the liquid metal terminator from Terminator 2. You can break it into little pieces, but somehow, eventually, it'll find a way to reassemble itself and become a monopoly again.

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Verizon likes this!

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Facebook likes this!

Incorrect. GCC does not use Boehm GC. The boehm-gc you see in the GCC source tree is used by libjava, which is a java runtime library and unrelated to the compiler itself.

There's approximately 20,500 bus stops in Greater London - I have a database (NaPTAN) of them. I'd estimate there's as least 50 lamp posts for every bus stop. So, thats over 1,000,000 WiFI access points to be rolled out by 2012! Wow!

France's LGV Est (this is the line that the 574km/h world speed record was set) has a standard operating speed of 320 km/h. There is no line in Germany capable of speeds over 300km/h (but German ICE trains do operate on LGV Est at 320km/h).

Also, Bombardier isn't the name of a train network in the sense of ICE, TGV, or Shinkansen. Bombardier is a train manufacturing company like Alstom, Siemens, or Hitachi. Canada's passenger rail network is known as VIA and for the most part it isn't regarded as high-speed, though they do use tilting train technology on the densely populated "corridor" between Windsor, ON and Quebec City, QC. This corridor line does boast higher average speeds than on any current passenger rail line in the US.