Comment Re:Good use of the money (Score 1) 71
GCHQ and BT both wanted it turned into a housing estate, albeit for differing reasons.
GCHQ and BT both wanted it turned into a housing estate, albeit for differing reasons.
in 99% of its routes, the TGV doesn't even go that fast, because the french tracks are in such a crappy condition. 574km/h were only reached once on a test track.
Major fail in your comment.
It won't hit 357mph on any scheduled service (100% do not reach this speed), since that was a research experiment. The scheduled services run at 186mph (300Km/h) and 200mph (320km/h), depending on the line and train. It does this in an amazing level of silence and lack of vibration/sense of speed -- until you look out the window. When a TGV is moving quickly, rain doesn't stick to the windows. It's like being in a ground-level aeroplane.
No slower train is allowed on LGV lines, and most routes have at most one stop: they don't slow down much.
The record was done with a specially modified train (more power, less carriages), higher voltage(25Kv), higher-than normal tension in the overhead wires, bigger wheels and various other modifications. It was run on the new Le Mans line, before it was opened for regular service.
French TGV (LGV) tracks are some of the best in the world. They have minimum bend radii you measure in kilometers (6 on older ones, 10 on newer ones).
TGVs routinely hit 320Km/h (200mph) in service. They've not had a fatal crash ever.
Anyway - you said "french tracks are in crappy condition" - they absolutely aren't.
C
Most of CERN's data isn't on hard drives anyway - it's got the biggest tape system in Europe that I know of (I do high end storage for a living).
A photo, for funsies: http://www.flickr.com/photos/naezmi/3309812634/
C
A list of some of the things the UK apparently hasn't produced in years, which is relevant to both the OP and your post: http://www.giantbomb.com/united-kingdom/95-492/list-of-video-games-made-in-uk/35-9288/
Isn't the real question, "what does the US Military want to do with 5GW of power at Holloman afb?"
Conspiracy theories to the ready...
Just make it into a Fawlty Towers joke, ignore any comments and then have a cuppa: it's a more British than anything else I can imagine at the moment.
Most Germans I know these days have a good sense of humour. If Ein Britisher has a sense of humour failure, that's their problem.
Cheers
C
In many places in the UK It's possible to get a totally uncapped, unbandwidth-shaped broadband connection for under £15 which is actually usable (20Mbits down, 1.5 up).
As such, I don't agree that the bandwidth is necesarily an extra charge. The majority of homes in the UK already have bandwidth because they have broadband anyway - and the clever ones have Be* or o2 Broadband without caps. For those people, the voda femtocell may actually be pretty useful.
I've got friends who have great broadband but no mobile signal where they live: they are farmers. They spend a lot of time outdoors. This is *perfect* for them.
C
The point of that WSJ piece is that the Xbox360 CPU and the PS3 CPU are the same because they both come from IBM?
It's bull. The xbox360 CPU is a totally different architecture of PowerPC. I'm amazed you posted that.
C
Except that the data from this study (from the 1950s) is talking about extrapolations from data, without actual real testing including factors such as aerodynamics. In the 1950's this was restricted mostly to planes.
Modern road cars are not aerodynamically neutral devices - the vast majority of them generate lift at speed*. I suppose that if we drove everywhere faster, the load on the roads would lower somewhat because the effective "weight" (viewed as the force of the car on the road) would be reduced.
*I know of a few which generate "downforce" but in general these are pretty exotic (usually race cars, or certainly sporty anyway).
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
