The Eurostar between London and Paris / Brussels does 300km/h (186 mph), and that is a normal scheduled service. It isn't even the fastest scheduled service in France.

The tax I was referring to is on the service fees. Sales tax on products purchased online is at the same rate as for products purchased offline. Of the sales tax, 0.33% goes to EU funds and the rest goes to the country's own general funds.

There is VAT (sales tax) on telecommunication services in every country in the EU, ranging from 15% in Luxembourg to 27% in Hungary. The average rate is around 20%.

Dasani is not available here because it doesn't comply with EU drinking water standards, so it would be Evian.

Students from Scotland get free tuition. Students from other EU countries get free tuition. Students from other parts of the UK and from outside the EU have to pay for tuition.

No, the distilled malt barley drink is called "whisky" if it is made in Scotland, or "whiskey" if it is made elsewhere in the world.

Machine based learning means following instructions about how to construct a database of past events, and then following instructions about how to process and use that data in future events.

I opened my apple account with an iTunes gift card. That way my maximum loss is limited to whatever is left of the £15 balance on the card. I have purchased a couple of apps with some of the credit.

Sinn Fein are a republican party, but very different to the US Republican Party. They are the second largest party in Northern Ireland, and want Northern Ireland to be part of the Republic of Ireland rather than the UK. They sit as part of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left in the EU Parliament, so very much to the left of the US Republicans.

The school kids on my bus in the morning used to spend their journeys using BBM on their blackberries. Now they have cheap Androids and converse on WhatsApp.

We are making the plastic anyway, so the only thing we need to consider the the energy cost of converting it back into oil once we have finished using it.

Legal tender means that it must be accepted as settlement of debt. The IRS will in practice accept checks and bank transfers as settlement of tax liabilities, but that does not make them legal tender.

When the Feds bust a normal street-corner drug dealer, they get "legal" property, such as cars, and illegal property such as their inventory of drugs. The illegal property is retained as evidence until the court case is concluded, then destroyed. The legal property gets sold off.

The Silk Road bust is subject to the same laws as any other drug-dealer bust, so by auctioning off the bitcoins, they are declaring that they are legal property.

There are lots of people with $600[1] in the bank who could bid for one bitcoin. There are not so many people with $1.8m in the bank who can bit for a block of 3000 bitcoins. Therefore they will probably sell for less than market value, and the winning bidders will likely make a profit from selling them off individually.

[1]$600 is based on the current prices quoted on Bitcoin Charts rounded to one significant figure.

I guess this would be like the red mini-buses in Hong Kong which supplement the green mini-buses and big buses that operate to a fixed route and timetable.