AngusH

High speed 1 in the UK Section 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1

Section 2 finished in 2007 (just within your 20 year cutoff!) It links the channel tunnel with London St Pancras. Much of the London part is in tunnels and it is 100% grade separated.

The uk High Speed 2 route was also going to do this and build a new high speed rail line and station into London, but the exact issues you describe seem to mean that it will be halting at a point outside London instead possibly using existing tracks.

Overall though, High speed rail doesn't need new tracks into cities unless all the existing lines are full (or they are too slow)

It's much easier to build high speed line in the countryside and link it to the existing lines that run to existing stations in cities.

(Also the Elizabeth line in London, but's more like a metro really, even if it is 'heavy' rail)

Are you thinking of the Shanghai maglev?

It is pretty impressive and they're looking at building an extension. however oddly its operation speed has been significantly reduced from 268mph to 186mph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train

The basic problem is that Maglev is on average more expensive to build and operate and cannot (unlike ordinary high speed rail trains) ever operate on ordinary (non high speed) rail track.

It's also still pretty experimental, the Shanghai one is operational and high speed, all other operational systems are either low speed or experimental test beds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev

Regular high speed rail is a fairly routine thing and all the parts are well understood.

ArsTechnica has an article (from 2020) on the topic which seems somewhat balanced and seems to have interviewed some legal experts:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/publishers-sue-i...

A complete discussion by a lawyer directly writing might be better, but I haven't seen one that isn't working for, or aligned with, one side or the other.

Uranium is a mineral and can be purchased from many places and stored then used as needed.

15 countries mining it currently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...

There are also more countries with estimated reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

While an undersea cable requires continuous operation and the agreement from a single country where it starts. If they suddenly decide for whatever reason to turn it off (say they're short of electricity) then the supply is immediately stopped.

I think the closest US equivalent in this case is chapter 7 bankruptcy.

If I've got it right chapter 11 is more a reorganzation and restructuring, while chapter 7 is disposing of the assets to pay off the creditors.

This is the latter and UK administration process is usually a sell off of the assets, occasionally a company is sold as a going concern, but mostly it can't be and gets sold as parts.

Yes, I'm in the Uk and it sounds the same as you describe in the US. Inflation rates are very variable depending on the product.

From memory, in my local supermarket for example,

tea is still about 0.90/1.00 a box.

Freshly squeezed orange juice has gone from about 1.60 to 2.20

Butter has gone up a lot (don't have numbers)

chocolate biscuits not much increase (why not?)

milk prices are higher for organic, not so much increase on non-organic.

Fruit and vegetables a bit higher maybe, but not that noticeable as yet.

I can't think of much that's gone down, but it might have done.

edit: found and correct juice price 2.30->2.20

I think this is the current developer page:

https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant/over...

Now renamed to Google Play Instant, but still ok for apps (I think?)

Yes definitely agree.

Overall the UK grid is probably too dependent on wind energy, with all the variability that involves.

Right now gridwatch.org.uk is showing about 13.5GW from wind (40% of demand), but I've seen some days when there has been well under 1GW.

Unfortunately the government (of all stripes) tends to reject predictions it doesn't like:

try this one from 20 years ago:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3034088.stm

(it's on this topic of energy)

:-)

Very broad indeed, though I think it's just qualification for asking, not grounds for acceptance, (thankfully)

One thing I'm curious to know is what it's like on the distribution side though, getting these requests and then approving them (or not)

I wonder if they only get serious requests (say steel mills and hospitals) or if they also get requests from non-essential businesses who shouldn't be on the list?

Most data centers should have back up power, so the question of whether Facebook, Twitter and Amazon get cut off probably doesn't need to be asked.

This appears to be a contingency plan 'in the "unlikely" event supplies of gas fall short of demand.'

The report showed, under a base case scenario, that margins between peak demand and power supply were expected to be sufficient and similar to recent years thanks to secure North Sea gas supplies, imports via Norway and by ship.

Any operator that didn't have such contingency plans would be negligent.

Is it going to happen in reality: hopefully not

Edit: I have a feeling that the article may be referring to the 3 hour Loss of Load Expectation (LOLE) service level target for the year.

This isn't quite the same as a three hour blackout.

I'm not sure though because the sky article doesn't reference its sources.

Which may be this:

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/264521/download

or it might not?

edit2:

actually I think it's this:

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/268346/download

edit3:

Found it, its not the LOLE target, but the response to scenario 2 on page 10 of the second link:

scenario 1: "In this scenario we assume that we have no electricity interconnector imports from France, Belgium and the Netherlands (these are assumed to provide a de-rated capacity of 3.9GW in the Base Case). It is assumed that we import 1.2GW from Norway and export 0.4GW to Northern Ireland and Ireland."

scenario 2: "In this scenario we assume the same assumptions as Scenario 1, but with an additional 10GW CCGTs unavailable for a two-week period in January1. These assumptions have been chosen to illustrate the potential impact on the electricity system if there was insufficient gas supply in Great Britain."

"Should this scenario happen, it may be necessary to initiate the planned, controlled and temporary rota load shedding scheme under the Electricity Supply Emergency Code (ESEC). In the unlikely event we were in this situation, it would mean that some customers could be without power for pre-defined periods during a day – generally this is assumed to be for 3 hour blocks. This would be necessary to ensure the overall security and integrity of the electricity system across Great Britain. All possible mitigating strategies would be deployed to minimise the disruption."

Which I think would then follow this set of rules:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

final: I think my information here is mostly right. But you should not base your electricity operational decisions on it!

Do you mean that you had to buy the same book 3 times?

(or otherwise copy)

That's astonishingly bad.

I like it.

Personally I've always preferred HTML tags to markdown, primarily because I can usually understand simple HTML by looking at it, while the markdown needs a cheatsheet if I haven't been working on it recently.

I think this could probably be done as a web component if the browsers didn't implement it directly.

Plus most GUI tools produce HTML and that could probably be modified to output a more restricted format.

The whole package has now been deprecated by the maintainer:

'PyPI wants me to enable 2FA just because I maintain this package, and both that and the mess resulting from a stunt of mine, I thought it'd be a good time to deprecate this package. Python 3 has os.replace and os.rename which probably do well enough of a job for most usecases.'

https://github.com/untitaker/python-atomicwrites

Edit:

From the bug report

'I decided to deprecate this package. While I do regret to have deleted the package and did end up enabling 2FA, I think PyPI's sudden change in rules and bizarre behavior wrt package deletion doesn't make it worth my time to maintain Python software of this popularity for free. I'd rather just write code for fun and only worry about supply chain security when I'm actually paid to do so.'

I can see the maintainers point, even if it may be inconvenient.

So I've read through this, but the docs seem to assume you already know what it does. (Which I'm still not sure that I do)

It seems to be a way of generating a website from a shared google drive or MS sharepoint setup.

The google drive documents act as content which is mixed with templates to generate a website.

But it doesn't seem to be static site generator, more like wordpress with google drive (or sharepoint) as the content database?

But then it also talks about the helix team doing work for you? So it's maybe more of a service to create websites than a technology stack?

It seems like there are some interesting ideas, but it also feels like there should be more explanation.

Yes they would do that wouldn't they?

Difficult. hmmm.

I guess it would need to be a standard wording only. A specific sentence with 'fill in the blanks' only for the changed items.

"Now __ tablets instead of __"

If it was really transparent maybe...

I would think that means that if the number of washing tablets went from 12 to 9, then packaging would display in prominent letters "Same price, now 9 tablets instead of 12"

Similarly for unit weights:

Chocolate biscuits, "same 12 biscuits, now 20g instead of 25g. Pack size reduced from 300g to 240g"

That would be transparency from my perspective.

We could look at historical laws that did exactly this.

Set standard sizes and only allow sales in those size on penalty of prosecution.

For an example from the uk, until a few years ago bread could only be sold in 400g or multiples thereof.

You couldn't sell most kinds of bread except in standard sizes, so shrinkflation couldn't occur.

There were some exceptions obviously and you could have bigger multiples (like the mythical 1600g loaf)

https://www.fob.uk.com/about-the-bread-industry/how-bread-is...

The standard approaches on how do this date back centuries.

Milk gets sold in standard pints (err... 568ml), beer in pints, flour in 1kg bags, etc.

I actually think these restrictions are a good thing, with permitted exceptions possible for some specific things

Also size and population though?

Bath, being a major city, has far more residents and visitors than Maerdy, a small rural village.

My guess in Maerdy is that the residents probably drive somewhere (Aberdare?) with a supermarket. I'm not sure I'd live there without a car...

More likely covid was the issue (assuming you went in 2021?)

A lot of unavoidable staff sickness has caused major troubles in manufacturing and delivery of goods.

Plus some real stupidity relating to tax and licensing of lorry drivers. :-(

Yes, brexit has had an effect, but I think covid is more significant.

I once wrote a software release checklist system with custom values in php which worked quite well, if you have a server to run it on.

But I'm not sure thats the best bet for new work today.

It might be worth looking at interactive fiction tools like https://twinery.org or https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

They sort of do everything you need already including variable ui+storage, javascript processing, html output and save/reload.

Twine also supports complete backtracking if you use the sugarcube dialect.

I'd say the UK situation has some good, some bad.

A lot of the rail replacement currently is due to staff sickness ... Covid has hit a lot of things very badly.

Positively, the government has heavily supported rail through the pandemic. (estimated 22 billion pounds in 2020-21, up from 11 billion in 2019-20) (1)

Mostly to make up for loss of passenger ticket income.

Investment in High Speed 2 is also continuing despite the current situation, which I'm relatively hopeful about.

On the other hand the government has demanded cutbacks on operations to possibly 80% or less of pre-covid, and there seems to be a lot of overcrowding in some areas where the demand has rebounded faster. There is also a fairly widespread withdrawal of much of the onboard catering :-(

(1) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

I can't help thinking the usage model you want is more like a router or network appliance than a normal web server.

Have you considered running your software on a synology box or similar high end NAS?

Not sure it would work well if exposed to the internet, but if it's a small group and limited network access it could be quite a simple solution.

Although it looks like Dyson was not actually paid anything and covered the £20m development cost themselves:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52409359

I'm not sure it can be properly judged as a success or failure until the situation returns to normal. (Covid19, etc)

This is only dates to May 2021 after all.

I don't think I would move countries right now unless absolutely necessary.

Especially since most of the qualifying people will presumably already have acceptable jobs, so moving is merely for advantage over their existing situation, rather than a matter of survival.

The Wikipedia page has detail on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmoor_line

Essentially the line went through the closure procedure and was completely closed to passengers back in the 1970s, however it remained open for stone trains from a quarry on the line.

The quarry bought the line and ran their own trains.

They occasionally allowed occasional passenger services.

Various groups tried to run the route as a heritage railway between 1997 and 2019.

The local county council subsidised a few experimental timetabled services on Sundays to see if there was a demand.

This is very expensive for the council and they probably couldn't afford a 5 or 7 day a week service. Plus Sundays are a less busy timetable in general so some spare trains may be available that is not available the rest of the week. (Saving the need to obtain additional trains for the extra work)

Also I seem to recall, but can't source the statement, that the quarry owners may have set a limit on when and how many passenger trains could run over their line. Ie possibly Sundays ok, Weekdays not.

It probably made them next to nothing, while incurring extra expense because passenger lines have higher requirements than freight lines. The more that run the higher the cost.

Finally a government programme to reopen railways supported the full reopening that happened a few days ago. This involved buying the line and repairing the track.

For those, such as myself, who were not previously familiar with it:

"MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms. Code can be developed on a normal OS such as Linux or MacOS X, and then compiled into a fully-standalone, specialised unikernel that runs under a Xen or KVM hypervisor."

https://mirage.io

It seems an interesting idea.

I'd probably want it grouped by category with a drill down interface for the specifics.

Probably arranged so you can type in a figure at the bottom for monthly expenditure and it would balance out the requirements based on typical use cases.

So enter $50 in the monthly cap figure and it allocates, say, $20 to compute, $20 to transfer operations and API calls, $10 to storage

which you could then fiddle with of course.

I can't offer much on the second point other than to say that unexpected bills annoy me much more than services that stop working.

I've also never worked anywhere with unlimited budgets. (alas)

I can see that there are probably cases where uptime is more important so they would be more annoyed the other way around.

You need separate costed quotas for each type of activity with a combined total at the bottom.

You could also have a setting in the admin panel as to what the system should do:

[ ] I want to keep going beyond my quotas (but email me)

[ ] Please shutdown my site

If the amount of storage that you can use is limited by quota (say 50GB) the problem becomes relatively easier.

You set a quota for 50GB of storage and no more. The server then restricts you by disk quota to that amount of storage.

The cost is then calculated as 1.15USD per month.

So you don't pay more than 1.15 per month.

Compute and transfer (and other things) could be covered by separate similar quotas with a single maximum spend figure at the bottom of the table.