In most countries with 250km/h (155mph) plus high speed rail, it's taking back marketshare from the airlines --- because it tends to be quicker, by virtue of not having to arrive at an airport an hour before departure, not having the hassle of security, etc.

To use the typical North Eastern corridor example, it'd be far from impossible to build a line from New York to Washington DC, with one stop in Philadelphia, that would run in under two hours. This is half the time of driving between the two, and only half an hour slower than a plane (and quicker than that once you consider airport security, etc.).

A broad statement like cars and planes making trains irrelevant is untrue: certainly I wouldn't want to do a transcontinental journey by train, but there's no reason why trains can't better compete with air, instead of just competing (time-wise) with cars.

Uh, what? My father has never got anything beyond the first ADSL modem he got from BT almost a decade ago.

There's no concept of copyright registration in the UK.

The reality of any petition is that the W3C will likely do what its (paying) members want (as it is after all an industrial consortium), and hence it is unlikely to care what others think provided it doesn't hurt growing the membership.

Common law varies by region too. Scots common law and English common law are separate.

In reality, there is influence between the two, especially for civil offences, where the highest court for both is the Supreme Court (and before that, the House of Lords) which sits with the same (typically English) judges for both. In criminal cases this isn't so much the case, as the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over Scotland (where the Court of Criminal Appeal in the High Court of Justiciary is supreme).

On the other hand, some of us supported Python 2.5 pretty much as long as Debian Lenny was supported (until a year ago), and hence __future__ didn't contain the majority of what is needed. Quite a few major projects are only just now moving to requiring 2.6/2.7, and hence only just now making this plausible.

Can you not get windows that look identical to your current ones, but are triple-gazed? In the UK you're allowed to do that, even with listed properties.

In the UK there's only so much competition, as the vast majority of ISPs merely buy capacity off BT Wholesale. The only other major network is Virgin Media's cable network, but that covers a (geographically) tiny area (though does cover most cities), especially in comparison to BT's ADSL coverage.

They re-introduced native code in the WP8 SDK. I'm not sure whether you can allocate executable memory, though, which would make JITing JS compilers impossible.

The largest threat of terrorism to the UK does not come from Islamic extremism: the largest threat remains continuing branches of the IRA. Those damn radicalized Christians!

They haven't. There's just not the interest in browser vendors to go there.

The TGV have had a grand total of zero fatalities on high speed lines in France since they opened in 1981, as a point of comparison.

The TI-89 is 68k based to this day.

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