There were plans to extend the Heathrow Express, at least to Liverpool Street, and possibly to Kings Cross, but they seem to have been lost somewhere.
I'd never heard of that (too young), but I found an article from 1999 discussing an argument between London Underground and Railtrack.
Probably it was shelved in favour of Crossrail, which calls at Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Liverpool Street and others. Service starts in December 2018.
Have you tried the subway route from JFK? It's a (miserable) hour or more subway ride to Manhattan.
Building a better railway to JFK seems a good idea regardless of what happens to Newark.
My nearest airport is London Heathrow, which has the cheap option of an hour-long metro ride (using that word, since most of it is above ground), but there's also the "premium" Heathrow Express train, which takes about 15 minutes, a cheaper (and slightly slower) train, and the new Crossrail line will open from 2019 or something providing an excellent new route.
For completeness, London City is the closest to the centre of the city, and popular with business travellers. It has direct "light" rail to both financial centres, taking about 20 minutes and with an excellent view. The three other London airports (LGW, STN, LTN) are relatively far away from the centre, LGW has the best rail connections, STN is in between, and LTN is a little annoying (there's a 5 minute free shuttle bus from the airport to the near-ish station).
The hardware cost is irrelevant. It's the cost and time to thoroughly test / migrate / rewrite lots of bespoke software, made to the lowest quality by some company like Accenture on a contract, for which the source code probably wasn't supplied and all the original developers have left. And if the system fails the Daily Mail will write about it. And the tories slashed the budget, so all that's left can just about cover the new thing the new regulation requires.
Dental health is a service provided by people who spend money to outfit dental clinics. Same as medical professionals. As such, the market dictates the availability and costs.
Fire fighting service is [etc, etc].
It's amazing to me the number of people who think the government, who can't seem to run anything well,
That's a very American viewpoint. In other countries, government functions well. In others, it does well with some things, and badly at others.
Why should I have pay for someone to have a pretty smile??
Because they'll pay for you to have something you'd argue isn't essential, like fire protection, food safety, fertility treatments, counselling, etc.
Cataract surgery isn't covered until it affects ones ability to drive, not because someone just wants to see better.
My grandma is booked for cataract surgery in May. She's still OK to drive, the medical benefit is currently justified for her mental health (she's lost confidence with worsening sight). It's free on the NHS.
Brands available in Britain (see here etc) list "maltodextrin". That's a polymer of 3-20 glucoses, and I'd guess at the higher end since only some of the mass is included in the "of which sugars" on the nutrition information.
Is that really much different than starch?
(The purpose is simply to dilute the über-sweet Stevia powder so you can use reasonable amounts.)
330ml of Coca Cola contains: * Carbohydrate 35g, 13% RDA * of which sugars 35g, 39% RDA
Surprisingly, the can itself only shows the "sugars" value and RDA. (In Britain, the supermarkets are much better at promoting these values, since their store-branded products are usually better -- probably because they have more flexibility to change the recipe.)
Possibly because in the US there are so many more prisoners held on minor offences (drug possession, etc), who wouldn't even come close to considering suicide?
Per million population, the numbers become 1.43 in E&W and 1.63 in the US.
(NB, just England and Wales. Justice is controlled by the Scottish Parliament in Scotland, under a different legal system, so the figures are separate: 13 suicides (~0.16%!), 4.19 per M population. Small country bias, or is Scotland a particularly grim place to be imprisoned?
Northern Ireland: no suicides since 2010 [5 in the last decade], prison population 1465, country population 1.8M).
Last year 82 prisoners in UK prisons killed themselves, more than twice the 35 people who were executed in the US (with a vastly larger prison population).
Suicides: for England and Wales it's 82 (0.10%), for the USA it's 520, about 0.02%.
Bored railway tunnels are only single-track, usually with two parallel bores. Here are some good photos, I believe the "cathedral"-sized cavern was built by digging down from ground level. The finished tunnel diameter is 6.1m.
The London Post Office Railway has 2.7m tunnels, so is pretty much what you want. It was shut down after the introduction of the Congestion Charge, since that removed enough traffic that it was then cheaper to use surface vehicles.
If English had official "tones" like Mandarin, we could distinguish between meanings of "fuck" used as a verb in writing, to visually indicate things like sarcasm. Actually, in a way, English *does* have an informal "system" of indicating the equivalent of _tones_ -- quotation marks, underlines, italics, boldface, and wikitext markup.
This is not what tones are like in Mandarin. Different tones change the meaning of individual words completely.
ma1 (high, level tone): mother
ma2 (rising tone): hemp
ma3 (falling then rising tone): horse
ma4 (falling tone): to curse
ma5 (no tone): makes a sentence into a question, a bit like adding "right?" (rising tone?) to a sentence in English.
Sarcasm in English applies to the whole sentence, and the tone is applied to the whole sentence, not the individual words.
(Also, a homonym is a word like "minute" (time, small). It's Latin for same-word. You described a same-sound, a homophone. This would be easy if English derived technical terms from smaller English words.)
In England we call them, much more accurately, train drivers.
Interestingly, in France we call them chauffeurs, as in heaters. Because they used to have to shovel coal under the steam engine long before they could start them. And taxi and truck drivers are still called this way. Etymology...
That is interesting -- because chauffer in English means the person who drives your limousine.
The man responsible for the fire on a steam locomotive is called a fireman. (It's actually moderately skilled -- the fire is large, and needs to be balanced, and provide the right level of heat, and not waste coal. I had a go when I was about 13, unofficially on a tourist steam railway.)
I don't think you even need your eyes open. When I was at school I was given a tour of the local pharmacutical R&D company's facility. They had trouble with animal rights protesters, so the fence would alert security if it was knocked by a person and bring up the appropriate CCTV camera to that panel.
cops walking (note that walking and driving are NOT the same) a beat
I've heard the same thing. I wonder if it's because walking is slower than driving (stop beating the guy for a second as the car passes), or if it's because seeing 'people' has more of an effect.
Some of both, I think. Cars are very anonymous, and the driver will (hopefully) be concentrating on driving rather than observing.
A police officer on a bicycle can be a good halfway: they're still very much human (can speak and be heard, can stop immediately without blocking the road) but they can cover a wider area. Depending on local geography, they can get to some places faster than by car. About half the police I see around here (London, but not the centre) are on bicycles.
Probably, but probably not especially well. Spend a bit more for the Chinese watch that isn't trying to be Apple, where the effort has gone into features, not imitation.
My flatmate bought an "iPhone 6" in Albania for about £40. He was convinced it was real, to the point that he's contacted Apple UK support because it wouldn't charge properly.
I haven't handled an iPhone 6, but I thought the buttons seemed a bit wobbly, although the rest of the case was convincing. The graphics were spot on, and smooth enough that I wasn't certain it was fake (I thought it could be stolen). What gave it away was pressing "iTunes Apps" opened the Android "Manage Applications" screen. There were a few other apps, settings etc that opened Android things but had Apple labels.
It could have been OK, a cheap phone with an Apple-like interface. Except the touchscreen was so shoddy it was impossible to dial "#" (I wanted "#*#*INFO*#*#"), and it won't recognise the SIM.
... and blocked by Sky — but I shouldn't be surprised when I have internet supplied by an enourmous TV company. That's provided by the Luxembourg Pirate Party, but I guess the British police/courts have no issue interfering with e.g. the British Green Party's campaigns when it suits them.
I've done four road trips, about 8-10 weeks travel in total, stopping in at least 26 states. I've passed through or changed planes in a few more, but I don't count those. (In fairness, all except three of these states were when I was a child, and we only visited France and Ireland as a family.)
My US relatives (in their 40s) get two weeks leave a year, and tend to visit family.
The lack of Americans is most evident when backpacking. I was in Ecuador last year. You can divide the backpackers into students and non-students. There are some American students, but disproportionately few American non-students. (I'd expected to see more Americans on my first trip to South America, but it was little different to Asia.)
Americans don't travel as much, even in the US. They don't have much holiday time.
Many Europeans don't leave the EU, although I'd guess it's more common to visit the US than the other way round.
US culture between states is less diverse than Europe, but it does differ. Geography and climate differs more, although you need to remember some of northern Europe is arctic, which makes up for not having any desert. I think you'll find a bigger difference between Ireland, Austria, Estonia and France than any four US states you care to pick. If non-EU is allowed how about Belarus, Albania, Iceland and Georgia?
I've been to West Virginia, Texas, Ohio and Colorado. I've travelled through Alabama, by train (brief stop in Birmingham). I've been to/through Sioux City, so it seems I just missed Minnesota. I've not yet met an American who's been to more states than I have! But my parents' idea of a family holiday was a road trip.
I can't think of any disadvantage to me gaining an additional European Union citizenship, with some exceptions (e.g. Estonia has military service).
Many millions of Europeans live in a different country to their citizenship. It's probably a lot more common than for US citizens, for all kinds of people (from the unemployed to millionaires), so the issues were solved long ago.
(I think there can be cases where if you don't live in a country "full time" you can lose the right to things like free healthcare, but that's separate.)
British paper money currently features (£5-10-20-50) Elizabeth Fry (prison reformer), Charles Darwin, Adam Smith (philosopher) and James Watt and Matthew Boulton (engineers), so there shouldn't be a problem from the queen. But I think people tend to have been dead for a while.
I'm surprised by how expensive they are ($1000). There was a push to get them in schools in Britain starting around 2002-3, and the three schools I've seen in the last couple of years have had them in every room.
They're accurate enough for my Chinese evening class. Share a screen with MS Paint, and get a decent conference microphone.
I want Gigabit symmetrical with 1 TB of transfer for $50/mo.. This is absolutely 100% possible with current technology.
Then why don't you start a company that offers that service?
Here's an example (British, and £50/month, but £1 = $1 is pretty normal for technology...)
They're only installing into apartment buildings at the moment, and I think they ask the building owner to subsidise the installation, but I don't doubt it increases the rental value.
Pay them to not fill your brand new machine with crap? Name another market where you do that...
Some people fly with Ryanair, who play advertisements several times in the flight. That annoyed me more than anything else last time I flew with Ryanair. They also have more up-sells on their website, which can be tricky for some people (e.g. old pensioners) to avoid, who end up buying insurance they don't need.
Paying for TV means paying for a load of advertisements.
Slashdot Mirror
There were plans to extend the Heathrow Express, at least to Liverpool Street, and possibly to Kings Cross, but they seem to have been lost somewhere.
I'd never heard of that (too young), but I found an article from 1999 discussing an argument between London Underground and Railtrack.
Probably it was shelved in favour of Crossrail, which calls at Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Liverpool Street and others. Service starts in December 2018.
I've never flown to New York, but...
Have you tried the subway route from JFK? It's a (miserable) hour or more subway ride to Manhattan.
Building a better railway to JFK seems a good idea regardless of what happens to Newark.
My nearest airport is London Heathrow, which has the cheap option of an hour-long metro ride (using that word, since most of it is above ground), but there's also the "premium" Heathrow Express train, which takes about 15 minutes, a cheaper (and slightly slower) train, and the new Crossrail line will open from 2019 or something providing an excellent new route.
For completeness, London City is the closest to the centre of the city, and popular with business travellers. It has direct "light" rail to both financial centres, taking about 20 minutes and with an excellent view. The three other London airports (LGW, STN, LTN) are relatively far away from the centre, LGW has the best rail connections, STN is in between, and LTN is a little annoying (there's a 5 minute free shuttle bus from the airport to the near-ish station).
The hardware cost is irrelevant. It's the cost and time to thoroughly test / migrate / rewrite lots of bespoke software, made to the lowest quality by some company like Accenture on a contract, for which the source code probably wasn't supplied and all the original developers have left. And if the system fails the Daily Mail will write about it. And the tories slashed the budget, so all that's left can just about cover the new thing the new regulation requires.
My point was to show there are many options between "everything" and "nothing" provided by the state. I don't really care to discuss it further.
(PS "counselling" is correct English.)
Dental health is a service provided by people who spend money to outfit dental clinics. Same as medical professionals. As such, the market dictates the availability and costs.
Fire fighting service is [etc, etc].
It's amazing to me the number of people who think the government, who can't seem to run anything well,
That's a very American viewpoint. In other countries, government functions well. In others, it does well with some things, and badly at others.
Why should I have pay for someone to have a pretty smile??
Because they'll pay for you to have something you'd argue isn't essential, like fire protection, food safety, fertility treatments, counselling, etc.
Cataract surgery isn't covered until it affects ones ability to drive, not because someone just wants to see better.
My grandma is booked for cataract surgery in May. She's still OK to drive, the medical benefit is currently justified for her mental health (she's lost confidence with worsening sight). It's free on the NHS.
Brands available in Britain (see here etc) list "maltodextrin". That's a polymer of 3-20 glucoses, and I'd guess at the higher end since only some of the mass is included in the "of which sugars" on the nutrition information.
Is that really much different than starch?
(The purpose is simply to dilute the über-sweet Stevia powder so you can use reasonable amounts.)
For comparison, Tesco give the RDA of carbohydrate and sugar: http://www.tesco.com/groceries...
330ml of Coca Cola contains:
* Carbohydrate 35g, 13% RDA
* of which sugars 35g, 39% RDA
Surprisingly, the can itself only shows the "sugars" value and RDA. (In Britain, the supermarkets are much better at promoting these values, since their store-branded products are usually better -- probably because they have more flexibility to change the recipe.)
Possibly because in the US there are so many more prisoners held on minor offences (drug possession, etc), who wouldn't even come close to considering suicide?
Per million population, the numbers become 1.43 in E&W and 1.63 in the US.
(NB, just England and Wales. Justice is controlled by the Scottish Parliament in Scotland, under a different legal system, so the figures are separate: 13 suicides (~0.16%!), 4.19 per M population. Small country bias, or is Scotland a particularly grim place to be imprisoned?
Northern Ireland: no suicides since 2010 [5 in the last decade], prison population 1465, country population 1.8M).
Last year 82 prisoners in UK prisons killed themselves, more than twice the 35 people who were executed in the US (with a vastly larger prison population).
Suicides: for England and Wales it's 82 (0.10%), for the USA it's 520, about 0.02%.
and 0 vs 35 executions.
Bored railway tunnels are only single-track, usually with two parallel bores. Here are some good photos, I believe the "cathedral"-sized cavern was built by digging down from ground level. The finished tunnel diameter is 6.1m.
The London Post Office Railway has 2.7m tunnels, so is pretty much what you want. It was shut down after the introduction of the Congestion Charge, since that removed enough traffic that it was then cheaper to use surface vehicles.
If English had official "tones" like Mandarin, we could distinguish between meanings of "fuck" used as a verb in writing, to visually indicate things like sarcasm. Actually, in a way, English *does* have an informal "system" of indicating the equivalent of _tones_ -- quotation marks, underlines, italics, boldface, and wikitext markup.
This is not what tones are like in Mandarin. Different tones change the meaning of individual words completely.
ma1 (high, level tone): mother
ma2 (rising tone): hemp
ma3 (falling then rising tone): horse
ma4 (falling tone): to curse
ma5 (no tone): makes a sentence into a question, a bit like adding "right?" (rising tone?) to a sentence in English.
Sarcasm in English applies to the whole sentence, and the tone is applied to the whole sentence, not the individual words.
(Also, a homonym is a word like "minute" (time, small). It's Latin for same-word. You described a same-sound, a homophone. This would be easy if English derived technical terms from smaller English words.)
I wonder about uber driverless. Without a person, what prevents people from trashing the car?
The same thing that prevents people trashing buses, or train carriages. Most people simply don't.
More than the train/bus, there's probably a record of exactly who hired the car, and before/during/after CCTV pictures can be recorded.
In England we call them, much more accurately, train drivers.
Interestingly, in France we call them chauffeurs, as in heaters. Because they used to have to shovel coal under the steam engine long before they could start them. And taxi and truck drivers are still called this way. Etymology...
That is interesting -- because chauffer in English means the person who drives your limousine.
The man responsible for the fire on a steam locomotive is called a fireman. (It's actually moderately skilled -- the fire is large, and needs to be balanced, and provide the right level of heat, and not waste coal. I had a go when I was about 13, unofficially on a tourist steam railway.)
I don't think you even need your eyes open. When I was at school I was given a tour of the local pharmacutical R&D company's facility. They had trouble with animal rights protesters, so the fence would alert security if it was knocked by a person and bring up the appropriate CCTV camera to that panel.
cops walking (note that walking and driving are NOT the same) a beat
I've heard the same thing. I wonder if it's because walking is slower than driving (stop beating the guy for a second as the car passes), or if it's because seeing 'people' has more of an effect.
Some of both, I think. Cars are very anonymous, and the driver will (hopefully) be concentrating on driving rather than observing.
A police officer on a bicycle can be a good halfway: they're still very much human (can speak and be heard, can stop immediately without blocking the road) but they can cover a wider area. Depending on local geography, they can get to some places faster than by car. About half the police I see around here (London, but not the centre) are on bicycles.
But the important question - Do they work?
Probably, but probably not especially well. Spend a bit more for the Chinese watch that isn't trying to be Apple, where the effort has gone into features, not imitation.
My flatmate bought an "iPhone 6" in Albania for about £40. He was convinced it was real, to the point that he's contacted Apple UK support because it wouldn't charge properly.
I haven't handled an iPhone 6, but I thought the buttons seemed a bit wobbly, although the rest of the case was convincing. The graphics were spot on, and smooth enough that I wasn't certain it was fake (I thought it could be stolen). What gave it away was pressing "iTunes Apps" opened the Android "Manage Applications" screen. There were a few other apps, settings etc that opened Android things but had Apple labels.
It could have been OK, a cheap phone with an Apple-like interface. Except the touchscreen was so shoddy it was impossible to dial "#" (I wanted "#*#*INFO*#*#"), and it won't recognise the SIM.
Sky do at least link to this page: http://help.sky.com/articles/w... showing who has demanded the blocks.
tpb.piraten.lu LU up Very Fast
... and blocked by Sky — but I shouldn't be surprised when I have internet supplied by an enourmous TV company. That's provided by the Luxembourg Pirate Party, but I guess the British police/courts have no issue interfering with e.g. the British Green Party's campaigns when it suits them.
(Others on that list aren't blocked.)
I've done four road trips, about 8-10 weeks travel in total, stopping in at least 26 states. I've passed through or changed planes in a few more, but I don't count those. (In fairness, all except three of these states were when I was a child, and we only visited France and Ireland as a family.)
My US relatives (in their 40s) get two weeks leave a year, and tend to visit family.
The lack of Americans is most evident when backpacking. I was in Ecuador last year. You can divide the backpackers into students and non-students. There are some American students, but disproportionately few American non-students. (I'd expected to see more Americans on my first trip to South America, but it was little different to Asia.)
Americans don't travel as much, even in the US. They don't have much holiday time.
Many Europeans don't leave the EU, although I'd guess it's more common to visit the US than the other way round.
US culture between states is less diverse than Europe, but it does differ. Geography and climate differs more, although you need to remember some of northern Europe is arctic, which makes up for not having any desert. I think you'll find a bigger difference between Ireland, Austria, Estonia and France than any four US states you care to pick. If non-EU is allowed how about Belarus, Albania, Iceland and Georgia?
I've been to West Virginia, Texas, Ohio and Colorado. I've travelled through Alabama, by train (brief stop in Birmingham). I've been to/through Sioux City, so it seems I just missed Minnesota. I've not yet met an American who's been to more states than I have! But my parents' idea of a family holiday was a road trip.
I can't think of any disadvantage to me gaining an additional European Union citizenship, with some exceptions (e.g. Estonia has military service).
Many millions of Europeans live in a different country to their citizenship. It's probably a lot more common than for US citizens, for all kinds of people (from the unemployed to millionaires), so the issues were solved long ago.
(I think there can be cases where if you don't live in a country "full time" you can lose the right to things like free healthcare, but that's separate.)
British paper money currently features (£5-10-20-50) Elizabeth Fry (prison reformer), Charles Darwin, Adam Smith (philosopher) and James Watt and Matthew Boulton (engineers), so there shouldn't be a problem from the queen. But I think people tend to have been dead for a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
I'm surprised by how expensive they are ($1000). There was a push to get them in schools in Britain starting around 2002-3, and the three schools I've seen in the last couple of years have had them in every room.
They're accurate enough for my Chinese evening class. Share a screen with MS Paint, and get a decent conference microphone.
Then why don't you start a company that offers that service?
Here's an example (British, and £50/month, but £1 = $1 is pretty normal for technology...)
They're only installing into apartment buildings at the moment, and I think they ask the building owner to subsidise the installation, but I don't doubt it increases the rental value.
Pay them to not fill your brand new machine with crap? Name another market where you do that...
Some people fly with Ryanair, who play advertisements several times in the flight. That annoyed me more than anything else last time I flew with Ryanair. They also have more up-sells on their website, which can be tricky for some people (e.g. old pensioners) to avoid, who end up buying insurance they don't need.
Paying for TV means paying for a load of advertisements.
Same with magazines and newspapers.