Ugh, terrible journalism, they've buried the lede. You have to read to the very last sentence to figure out that it's a heavy commuter rail corridor, not a subway, bus, or car tunnel. Maybe this is obvious to British readers, but I found it confusing as hell.
Do you mean the BBC article? The project has been going on for a long time with other work (excavating the big underground stations in central London) for ages now, so everyone in London is familiar with it. I think the article was only in the BBC's local news for London. The rest of the country ought to be aware of it -- it was a big expenditure that was definitely not going to be cancelled for any short-term savings, and rail spending has been in the news in other regions of the UK quite a lot recently.
Anyway, it's arguably heavy-rail infrastructure with metro-rail service: [At peak times] "Ten-car trains will run at frequencies of up to 24 trains per hour (tph) in each direction", so that's a train every 2.5 minutes in each direction. London Underground (metro/subway) lines run at between 20-30 tph at peak.
The machine was "parked" alongside the existing railway near my house, I could see it from the train. The size and engineering of it was very impressive.
Oh and as for earplugs? can't wear 'em, they throw the tone off so damned bad it makes me literally trip over my own fingers.
The yellow foam things are crap, but have you tried musicians' earplugs? I'm not a musician, but I have some £15 ones which I use at gigs, concerts and nightclubs. They don't seem to change the tone -- they just make everything quieter.
There are lots of map designs based on OSM -- take a look at http://tiles.mapbox.com/ for a few, and a tool which makes it (technically) very easy to make your own (e.g. for when you need a map, but don't want to ask Google for a license).
Different views are useful for different purposes, and Google doesn't yet provide anything like this. For example, I often use OpenCycleMap, since the irrelevant roads (motorways etc) are shown in pastel colours, but the useful routes (cyclepaths) are highlighted. On that map, click the layer switcher (top-right corner) and choose "public transport" to see bus, tram and train routes marked -- that's not a proper planner, but it's useful to show the existence of a route. (I don't know how complete the bus route data is, try somewhere like London if your city has no buses.)
I agree with the storing of time in UTC to eliminate confusion. The problem I see is not all OSes will translate that UTC time back the same way! Create a file at noon each day then after a daylight saving event go back and look at the files you created earlier. Does that older file still show a time of 12 noon or does it now show 11:00am or 1:00pm? Unix OS seems to translate the time based on DST rules in effect when the file was created/modified. Windows OS seem to translate the time based on DST rules in effect by the system's current time. It is matter of option which view is correct.
Certainly not! If I make a file at 2012-03-01 12:00 +0000 (my local time right now, in London), then make another on 2012-06-01 12:00 +0100 (during British Summer Time), the second file was actually made at 2012-06-01 11:00 +0000. The first file was made at 2012-03-01 11:00 +0100.
Note that GNU ls converts times into the local time for display, using whatever the date of the file is. GNU touch converts the input time in the same way. $ touch -t '201203011200' winter-midday $ touch -t '201206011200' summer-midday $ ls -l -rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-06-01 12:00 summer-midday -rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-03-01 12:00 winter-midday $ ls -l --full-time total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-06-01 12:00:00.000000000 +0100 summer-midday -rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-03-01 12:00:00.000000000 +0000 winter-midday $ TZ=0 ls -l --full-time -rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-06-01 11:00:00.000000000 +0000 summer-midday -rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-03-01 12:00:00.000000000 +0000 winter-midday
A UTC formatted time stamp always contains a time zone
No, it doesn't. It never contains one -- it always represents local solar time in Greenwich, London (without getting into detail only of interest to astronomers).
However, it's often stored with a timezone, or processed using one. For example, RFC 2822 date format, which is what you get with $ date -R Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:29:22 +0000 I happen to be in London, so my timezone is +0000 right now. $ TZ=:Asia/Tokyo date -R Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:31:12 +0900 $ TZ=:Europe/London date -R -d 'now + 80 days' Sun, 20 May 2012 11:32:35 +0100 (+0100, for British Summer Time)
In these cases, what's being used is UTC and a location. The location (mine is set to Europe/London) is used to find the timezone offset for any particular date and time. This even takes into account historic (or known-future) changes: $ date -R -d '1941/07/01 12:00 +0000' Tue, 01 Jul 1941 14:00:00 +0200 (Britain used "Double Summer Time" during World War 2) $ TZ=:Europe/Jersey date -R -d '1841/07/01 12:00' Thu, 01 Jul 1841 12:00:00 -0001 (The island of Jersey, between England and France, didn't start using GMT until 1898)
I just preordered, and saw the same options. I'm in the UK.
Are you in the Faroes? I stuck the order code 2081185 into the box on http://dk.farnell.com/ and it leads to a message "Bemærk: Farnell handler kun med virksomheder med et gyldigt CVR nummer, og alle indkøb betales via faktura." (companies with VAT number only?), which isn't the case on the UK site, which instead say to call for international orders. The UK web site only delivers to the UK, Guernsey and Jersey, but says you can email for international orders -- although the language implies large orders.
I don't think I've ever heard of a credit card charging its customers for transactions or general service - why would anyone use one if they did?
Many cards charge an additional fee for foreign transactions. This might not be a concern if you live and shop in the US, or indeed many large countries (UK, Germany etc). But if you live in a small country there might not be a local retailer for everything.
Paypal is free to use with a bank account. Credit cards can charge significant subscription fees. Combined with the universal acceptance of debit cards and you see relatively few credit cards in this country.
These guys have figured out how to get people to just GIFT them money to develop the product, which they can then sell at a huge profit, that they can keep for themselves.
At the end of every single tunnel, and at every access point to the railway, there are signs forbidding access (with the standard red-ring crossed-out-man sign).
As you can see from your map, it's actually not an abandoned station (there is a solid line, not a dotted line). It's maintained as a filming location -- hence why one of the pictures shows new, plastic station signs. The track is maintained, and the electricity supply works -- it could potentially be live. V for Vendetta uses Aldwych station, for example.
More importantly, they ran through tunnels to get to the station -- tunnels that probably wouldn't have had a train in them, but only because it was at night on a national holiday. There was certainly the possibility of engineering trains (the system is maintained overnight). There is generally hardly any (a few centimetres) clearance -- if a train had come while they were running along the line to the branch they'd have been seriously injured at best.
Last time I read it (and there's a new version since then) it claimed that the amount of tax on American fuel was just about sufficient for maintaining the national road network. Yes, it's on the map of America: "The fuel prices of the United States are average cost-covering retail prices incl. industry margin, VAT and incl. approx. US 10 cents for the 2 road funds (federal and state). This fuel price may be considered as the international minimum benchmark for a non-subsidised road transport policy."
I only know its a problem for Americans as I'd got partway through planning a trip to Cuba with a friend here from London. She realised her dual British/American nationality would cause a problem, and pulled out.
The British government has funded http://www.transportdirect.info/ , which should have everything. It's very rare that I need to plan journeys outside London or a couple of other cities, so I've only used it a couple of times. I don't know if it really is complete.
I've tried Google's public transport option a few times, but it's given bad plans. I don't know if they don't have good enough data, or if their algorithms aren't tuned to working in a city with so many frequent services as London, but the official route planner is much better -- and covers everything in London, which is enough for most people in London. Google's is very keen to switch from the Underground to buses -- it forgets that it takes much longer to get from the deep-underground platforms of the London Underground, crammed with people, out onto the street (which exit?), to the bus stop (which side of the road? which stop?) than to walk to a different platform for a different line. It's also optimistic with journey times during rush hour -- buses are often slowed by traffic/people, trains aren't much affected.
Also, when service frequency varies, it's most useful to know "take bus 23, buses are every 10 minutes" than "take bus 23 at 08:23". I've been approached by tourists concerned that there was no London Underground train at 20:42. Well, no, but there was one at 20:40, and another at 20:43.
Many European cities, and many elsewhere, have a single website with a routeplanner for that city. I expect many, many people still use these websites rather than Google.
"Although the government of Cuba permits U.S. citizens to visit, the U.S. itself restricts its citizens from travelling there, except with a license issued by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control [1]. The specific restriction is against spending money in Cuba. However, U.S. authorities consider any visit of more than one day to be prima facie proof that one has spent money there. Furthermore, OFAC also holds that U.S. citizens also may not receive goods or services for free from any Cuban national, eliminating any attempts to circumvent the regulation based on that premise."
Am I missing some major potential social or environmental benefit to doing this?
It proves that it's possible to grow plants from long-frozen seeds, so shows its worth preserving (freezing) seeds just in case something really bad happens to the living plants. (This has already happened, where species have been wiped out in the wild by mining and forestry, then reintroduced once the companies have left.)
The techniques might be useful for other, more recently extincted (?) species.
And it's challenging and interesting, that is reason enough.
I guess that the predictability of the transport route would matter in this case.
Mmmm... but the article has a map showing which interstate highways are used. As the article suggests, the greatest danger is the weather and bad driving (and I would add other vehicles as a high risk). Those risks are much, much lower with trains.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, terrible journalism, they've buried the lede. You have to read to the very last sentence to figure out that it's a heavy commuter rail corridor, not a subway, bus, or car tunnel. Maybe this is obvious to British readers, but I found it confusing as hell.
Do you mean the BBC article? The project has been going on for a long time with other work (excavating the big underground stations in central London) for ages now, so everyone in London is familiar with it. I think the article was only in the BBC's local news for London. The rest of the country ought to be aware of it -- it was a big expenditure that was definitely not going to be cancelled for any short-term savings, and rail spending has been in the news in other regions of the UK quite a lot recently.
Anyway, it's arguably heavy-rail infrastructure with metro-rail service: [At peak times] "Ten-car trains will run at frequencies of up to 24 trains per hour (tph) in each direction", so that's a train every 2.5 minutes in each direction. London Underground (metro/subway) lines run at between 20-30 tph at peak.
The machine was "parked" alongside the existing railway near my house, I could see it from the train. The size and engineering of it was very impressive.
Hearing recovers just fine, given time.
It does?
Then how come, 8 years later, I still have occasional tinnitus after staying way too close to the speakers at a metal concert?
Oh and as for earplugs? can't wear 'em, they throw the tone off so damned bad it makes me literally trip over my own fingers.
The yellow foam things are crap, but have you tried musicians' earplugs? I'm not a musician, but I have some £15 ones which I use at gigs, concerts and nightclubs. They don't seem to change the tone -- they just make everything quieter.
Musicians I know have ones costing £50, £100 +.
In the UK we have Prospect, "the trade union for professionals". A good number of the scientists where I work are members.
There's also the Hospital Consultants & Specialists Association, the FDA http://www.fda.org.uk/ "The Union of Choice for Senior Managers and Professionals in Public Service", and others. Pick from the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_affiliates_of_the_Trades_Union_Congress
These articles make me glad I have a 37.5hr week :)
A MIME-formatted mailing list digest would be a file encapsulating many emails, in whatever format those emails were sent in.
Think of "saving" many emails from your email program, then attaching them to a new message, and sending that to someone.
Something like this: http://pastebin.com/uJ6K6ias (KMail shows it correctly, GMail doesn't, I don't know what the problem is)
There are lots of map designs based on OSM -- take a look at http://tiles.mapbox.com/ for a few, and a tool which makes it (technically) very easy to make your own (e.g. for when you need a map, but don't want to ask Google for a license).
Or zoom into http://maps.cloudmade.com/# and click "Change Style".
Different views are useful for different purposes, and Google doesn't yet provide anything like this. For example, I often use OpenCycleMap, since the irrelevant roads (motorways etc) are shown in pastel colours, but the useful routes (cyclepaths) are highlighted. On that map, click the layer switcher (top-right corner) and choose "public transport" to see bus, tram and train routes marked -- that's not a proper planner, but it's useful to show the existence of a route. (I don't know how complete the bus route data is, try somewhere like London if your city has no buses.)
I agree with the storing of time in UTC to eliminate confusion. The problem I see is not all OSes will translate that UTC time back the same way! Create a file at noon each day then after a daylight saving event go back and look at the files you created earlier. Does that older file still show a time of 12 noon or does it now show 11:00am or 1:00pm? Unix OS seems to translate the time based on DST rules in effect when the file was created/modified. Windows OS seem to translate the time based on DST rules in effect by the system's current time. It is matter of option which view is correct.
Certainly not! If I make a file at 2012-03-01 12:00 +0000 (my local time right now, in London), then make another on 2012-06-01 12:00 +0100 (during British Summer Time), the second file was actually made at 2012-06-01 11:00 +0000. The first file was made at 2012-03-01 11:00 +0100.
Note that GNU ls converts times into the local time for display, using whatever the date of the file is. GNU touch converts the input time in the same way.
$ touch -t '201203011200' winter-midday
$ touch -t '201206011200' summer-midday
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-06-01 12:00 summer-midday
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-03-01 12:00 winter-midday
$ ls -l --full-time
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-06-01 12:00:00.000000000 +0100 summer-midday
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-03-01 12:00:00.000000000 +0000 winter-midday
$ TZ=0 ls -l --full-time
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-06-01 11:00:00.000000000 +0000 summer-midday
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 2012-03-01 12:00:00.000000000 +0000 winter-midday
You mean universal? That just means a standard.
A UTC formatted time stamp always contains a time zone
No, it doesn't. It never contains one -- it always represents local solar time in Greenwich, London (without getting into detail only of interest to astronomers).
However, it's often stored with a timezone, or processed using one. For example, RFC 2822 date format, which is what you get with
$ date -R
Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:29:22 +0000
I happen to be in London, so my timezone is +0000 right now.
$ TZ=:Asia/Tokyo date -R
Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:31:12 +0900
$ TZ=:Europe/London date -R -d 'now + 80 days'
Sun, 20 May 2012 11:32:35 +0100 (+0100, for British Summer Time)
In these cases, what's being used is UTC and a location. The location (mine is set to Europe/London) is used to find the timezone offset for any particular date and time. This even takes into account historic (or known-future) changes:
$ date -R -d '1941/07/01 12:00 +0000'
Tue, 01 Jul 1941 14:00:00 +0200 (Britain used "Double Summer Time" during World War 2)
$ TZ=:Europe/Jersey date -R -d '1841/07/01 12:00'
Thu, 01 Jul 1841 12:00:00 -0001 (The island of Jersey, between England and France, didn't start using GMT until 1898)
I just preordered, and saw the same options. I'm in the UK.
Are you in the Faroes? I stuck the order code 2081185 into the box on http://dk.farnell.com/ and it leads to a message "Bemærk: Farnell handler kun med virksomheder med et gyldigt CVR nummer, og alle indkøb betales via faktura." (companies with VAT number only?), which isn't the case on the UK site, which instead say to call for international orders. The UK web site only delivers to the UK, Guernsey and Jersey, but says you can email for international orders -- although the language implies large orders.
Maybe try phoning.
I don't think I've ever heard of a credit card charging its customers for transactions or general service - why would anyone use one if they did?
Many cards charge an additional fee for foreign transactions. This might not be a concern if you live and shop in the US, or indeed many large countries (UK, Germany etc). But if you live in a small country there might not be a local retailer for everything.
Paypal is free to use with a bank account. Credit cards can charge significant subscription fees. Combined with the universal acceptance of debit cards and you see relatively few credit cards in this country.
So pay with a debit card.
These guys have figured out how to get people to just GIFT them money to develop the product, which they can then sell at a huge profit, that they can keep for themselves.
They are a charity registered as such in England.
You can see their accounts (presented to the British Government) here: http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/CharityWithoutPartB.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=1129409&SubsidiaryNumber=0 (but it seems, as they have had a turnover of less than £10000 so far, they don't need to file detailed accounts).
At the end of every single tunnel, and at every access point to the railway, there are signs forbidding access (with the standard red-ring crossed-out-man sign).
Here's an example.
"Trespass on the Railway" is a specific, criminal offence.
Also, they can't have accessed it by an open tunnel. The station in question is in the very centre of London, miles from any end of the tunnel.
As you can see from your map, it's actually not an abandoned station (there is a solid line, not a dotted line). It's maintained as a filming location -- hence why one of the pictures shows new, plastic station signs. The track is maintained, and the electricity supply works -- it could potentially be live. V for Vendetta uses Aldwych station, for example.
More importantly, they ran through tunnels to get to the station -- tunnels that probably wouldn't have had a train in them, but only because it was at night on a national holiday. There was certainly the possibility of engineering trains (the system is maintained overnight). There is generally hardly any (a few centimetres) clearance -- if a train had come while they were running along the line to the branch they'd have been seriously injured at best.
http://www.google.ca/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html
It's not too bad, if you're happy with essentially the same information being passed as for a Google search for every page you visit.
Actually, Chromium [Browser] is Chrome [Browser] without Google's "spyware" (loaded term, but you get the idea).
This page is quite interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_and_diesel_usage_and_pricing but see the German report: http://www.gtz.de/en/themen/29957.htm
Last time I read it (and there's a new version since then) it claimed that the amount of tax on American fuel was just about sufficient for maintaining the national road network. Yes, it's on the map of America: "The fuel prices of the United States are average cost-covering retail prices incl. industry margin, VAT and incl. approx. US 10 cents for the 2 road funds (federal and state). This fuel price may be considered as the international minimum benchmark for a non-subsidised road transport policy."
I have no idea, I'm British.
I only know its a problem for Americans as I'd got partway through planning a trip to Cuba with a friend here from London. She realised her dual British/American nationality would cause a problem, and pulled out.
The British government has funded http://www.transportdirect.info/ , which should have everything. It's very rare that I need to plan journeys outside London or a couple of other cities, so I've only used it a couple of times. I don't know if it really is complete.
(Also, I find http://traintimes.org.uk/ much nicer than the real National Rail site. URLs like http://traintimes.org.uk/WAT/Putney work (with the code or the full name), and you can add times, dates, etc.)
I've tried Google's public transport option a few times, but it's given bad plans. I don't know if they don't have good enough data, or if their algorithms aren't tuned to working in a city with so many frequent services as London, but the official route planner is much better -- and covers everything in London, which is enough for most people in London. Google's is very keen to switch from the Underground to buses -- it forgets that it takes much longer to get from the deep-underground platforms of the London Underground, crammed with people, out onto the street (which exit?), to the bus stop (which side of the road? which stop?) than to walk to a different platform for a different line. It's also optimistic with journey times during rush hour -- buses are often slowed by traffic/people, trains aren't much affected.
Also, when service frequency varies, it's most useful to know "take bus 23, buses are every 10 minutes" than "take bus 23 at 08:23". I've been approached by tourists concerned that there was no London Underground train at 20:42. Well, no, but there was one at 20:40, and another at 20:43.
Many European cities, and many elsewhere, have a single website with a routeplanner for that city. I expect many, many people still use these websites rather than Google.
"Although the government of Cuba permits U.S. citizens to visit, the U.S. itself restricts its citizens from travelling there, except with a license issued by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control [1]. The specific restriction is against spending money in Cuba. However, U.S. authorities consider any visit of more than one day to be prima facie proof that one has spent money there. Furthermore, OFAC also holds that U.S. citizens also may not receive goods or services for free from any Cuban national, eliminating any attempts to circumvent the regulation based on that premise."
From http://wikitravel.org/en/Americans_in_Cuba , although the citation is broken.
Given that the article says it crashed onto the highway, and helicopters aren't known for gliding, I'd say they were on top of the highway.
Am I missing some major potential social or environmental benefit to doing this?
It proves that it's possible to grow plants from long-frozen seeds, so shows its worth preserving (freezing) seeds just in case something really bad happens to the living plants. (This has already happened, where species have been wiped out in the wild by mining and forestry, then reintroduced once the companies have left.)
The techniques might be useful for other, more recently extincted (?) species.
And it's challenging and interesting, that is reason enough.
I guess that the predictability of the transport route would matter in this case.
Mmmm... but the article has a map showing which interstate highways are used. As the article suggests, the greatest danger is the weather and bad driving (and I would add other vehicles as a high risk). Those risks are much, much lower with trains.
Why not use trains, at least for most of the journey? The chance of an accident is much smaller.