I'm not sure why you'd think this is the case in the UK - perhaps you've only tried driving around central London. A few factors affect the relatively low rate of road fatalities in the UK:

The first is the relative difficulty of getting a driving license. You must pass a theory test, which is multiple choice. It's not that difficult, but you can't pass it without having at least read the highway code, even if you can't remember quite all of it. Then you must pass a hazard awareness test, which shows you videos recorded from cars and checks that you are aware of things that may potentially be dangerous and so need your attention. Finally, you need to pass a practical test, which takes 30-60 minutes and involves driving on various kinds of road, where one major fault will result in failure. It's not unusual for people to require 2-3 attempts to pass, with lessons in between

Perhaps more important, however, is that safety statistics are the primary input into the road signal design system. Speed limits are set and traffic lights are installed in response to accident statistics, not (usually) to raise revenue. Police speed traps are also placed according to these rules. The USA has no equivalent system.

You haven't actually read anything I've read in this entire thread, have you?

I'm not on LinkedIn, and my spam filter has now learned that everything from them is spam. Looking though my spam folder, I seem to get 2-3 invitations from people whose names I don't even recognise (and some sent to aliases, for example the FreeBSD Core Team, rather than to me personally). I can't imagine anyone getting sensible results from any exploration of the LinkedIn graph.

Is everything in your world a false dichotomy? Yes, you stop the owners from harming the slaves. You also deprive the owners of their property. We, as a society, have decided that the harm of slave owning is so great that it warrants restrictions on property rights. We unfortunately reached that conclusion more for economic than moral reasons a couple of hundred years ago but now, thankfully, the moral argument is more widely accepted.

Property is an abstract notion determined by society. I believe, as a moral judgement, that allowing humans to be property is an abhorrent notion. This does not alter the fact that many societies across history (and some today) do allow it. When you free the slaves, you harm their owners. This is a form of harm that I am totally fine with, and indeed would encourage. But saying that your moral judgements are absolute statements of fact is not only wrong, it is insulting to the people who struggled and, in many cases, died to make the societies that we live in today accept those beliefs as self-evident.

When was the Bitcoin protocol changed so that the difficulty was not a function that monotonically increased in difficulty?

No, he's stating a fact, which is independent of moral interpretation. This is why people who are not libertarians realise that it's a question of balance. Most people today would realise that the harm of being a slave is greater than the harm of depriving a slave owner of his or her property.

To put that in perspective, the InterCity 125 was a rail service introduced in 1976 in the UK with a top speed of 125mph. Sadly, we've neglected our rail infrastructure as a result of one of the stupidest privatisation plans in the history of the world and so they rarely hit over 100mph now. Meanwhile, the French TGV has, on some lines, an average speed of 173.6 mph, with top speeds of over 200mph. It recently lost the record for the fastest journey speed for a scheduled train to the Chinese.

Doing that journey in 3 hours wouldn't even be stretching modern technology. You do, however, hit diminishing returns quite quickly. At 125mph, it's about 3 hours. To get to 2 hours, you need to go up to 191mph. To get down to 1 hour, you're up at 382mph and the Hyperloop speed makes it just over half an hour. While there's an obvious advantage to half an hour over 3 hours, there's not much difference in convenience between a 2-hour and a 3-hour journey. Even getting a 3-hour trip down to 1.5 hours isn't something that many people would be willing to pay a significant premium for, especially when you have half an hour of much slower travelling to get you to the station at each end.

If California wants to spend a lot of money on their train system, they should consider improvements to the Caltrain. It's under 80 miles of track, but getting between San Jose to San Francisco on a Sunday is painful. Upgrading 80 miles of track to support even 150mph trains and replacing the archaic rolling stock would mean that most of the valley on the Caltrain would take less time than one side of San Francisco to the other on the BART (which could also benefit from some modernisation). And if you've ever driven from one side of SF to the other, then you'll see the attraction of public transport...

Has the speed of rail journeys increased at the same rate? And how much does the EuroStar contribute to that? Most of the time, I'd rather spend two hours travelling in comfort than one hour in cramped conditions - there are a few times when I'd really appreciate more speed, but most of the time I'd like to be on a mode of transport where I'm comfortable enough to work or relax. When I started here, I took a few first-class train trips back on the London to Swansea route, at off-peak times, so I got a 4-seat table to myself and could spread a laptop and some papers out and found it very productive time (no distractions). A half-hour train instead of the three-hour train just wouldn't be much more of an incentive.

Yup, I agree. I started writing a blog post about the DevMeeting, but didn't get around to posting it - I should soon. For reference, Ohloh has some pretty activity graphs.

Yes, we had a DevMeeting in Cambridge last month. Lots of progress on LanguageKit, CoreObject and EtoileUI, not much progress on a web site that doesn't suck...

GNUstep started to implement the OpenStep specification, which was a public spec for portable application development and was implemented by NeXT and Sun (hence the NS prefix on all of the class names). The most popular implementation of OpenStep is called Cocoa, and includes a lot of extensions to the base spec. We try to implement these extensions as well.

That makes no sense at all. GNUstep is an open source implementation of the Cocoa framework.

WindowMaker doesn't use GNUstep and is not a GNUstep project. GNUstep has supported full transparency in applications for a few years.

GNUstep aims to implement the APIs that Cocoa uses. This has a natural use as a porting tool, but the main reason we're implementing the APIs is that we want to use them (which has the unfortunate side effect that ones we don't like tend not to be implemented quickly, even if lots of OS X code uses them). Over in Étoilé (which, no doubt, Slashdot's early-'90s character encoding support will mangle: Etoile with accents on both 'e's) we're building frameworks for building better environments, some of which also work on OS X and some of which don't.