Skye

I may be wrong here, but I think purple was going to be the colour when it was still gonna be called "crossrail"?

There is such a thing as "light rail" though. Lighter tracks, lighter trains, and cheaper construction.

Also if you want small trains, just look at the UK. Normal trains here are much narrower than normal US trains, they are about as wide as modern trams! And the London underground has trains that are tiny and shaped to make the most out of circular tunnels.

You don't need to rethink the entire system for the points you've raised there...

I have a few nitpicks...

Making train tunnels cheaper by making them smaller is not a new idea. it is a very old idea. Have a look at the deep level tube lines of the London underground. In some ways, we regret having trains that small since it reduces capacity and makes it nigh impossible to air condition.

It's possible to make normal trains go over existing roads, elevated rail is also a very old thing, a lot of it did get taken down though.

For some lines that go above ground (Northern, Jubilee, Central), the driver sometimes had to put it into manual mode to compensate for the worse breaking when it's raining outside.

Well in the UK the subjects you select is very closely tied to which University you can go to. Some universities require maths and will not accept people who haven't done it (sometimes even more advanced maths is required).

Some universities don't require maths and so will teach it to everyone who's applied. Some don't require it but force you to take a year of it if you haven't done it. and others require it and reject you if you haven't done it.

In my case, I have two card from one bank has sort code and account number. I also have one card from a different bank has none of that.

In the UK the details needed to transfer money into an account are on most bank cards (Account Number and Sort Code), so that's enough identifying info.

That would also mean someone can send you money if your card is blocked or cancelled. Account number and sort code don't change when you get a new card.

Also, "Faster Payments" is the name of the normal system to transfer money between accounts in the UK. It doesn't cost the sender anything other than the money they send. It's called "faster" because the old system was a lot slower (because it was based on paper I think?).

This font reminds me a lot of "Rail Alphabet" which is a font designed by British Rail in the 60s which was used to railway signs and also in hospitals. Newer fonts are starting to replace it, but there is still a lot of it around if you know where to look.

It seems to be a diesel locomotive pulling passenger carriages (almost certainly ones that were obsolete at the time).

It's still a pretty impressive way to show how strong they are...

This concept is not new at all, From what I understand the tunnel sizes proposed are barely bigger than the London Underground "tube" tunnels. (Glasgow's subway has even smaller tunnels too). Now, don't get me wrong, it worked quite well for London, but it's not exactly innovative.

On old British rail trains, commuter trains had many doors, I think on each side there was a door for each pair of row of seats?

There was also no door lock, so people could start leaving the train before it fully stopped.

The lack of a door lock is also why they're not used anymore.

In the UK, ballots are still done with pen and paper. You put a cross in one of the labelled squares and fold the paper, then drop it into the ballot box.

Also, while the guidelines say it has to be a cross, it could be any clear mark (though best not to risk it), as soneone drew a rude symbol in a square and it was counted as a vote! (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32693485)

The trains in the narrow tunnels push air around, so recent stuff like full height platform screen doors help improve conditions (allowing platforms to be air conditioned without having to air condition the tunnels)

IIRC the main heat source is the breaking of the trains combined with the high frequency of them. I suspect that using many cars will still release a lot of heat into the tunnels.

There are trains that run in narrow tunnels in London (12 feet wide I think?). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Why_London_Undergrou...

The uploader can't do anything short of paying money to keep the images up. They could move them, but that is still link rot.

I would help with archiving stuff, but I don't have the resources unfortunately. All I can do is not delete my downloads folder, so incase the a site goes down, I still have a copy of the stuff I downloaded earlier, which is better than nothing, I hope.

As I mentioned in another comment thread (is that the term used here?) about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18354066), I can understand why they want to limit the free service, the only thing that makes me a bit concerned is the fact that they want to delete images over the limit, rather than not allowing new uploads or freezing accounts for existing accounts which will go over the new limit. I just get worried when stuff on the public Internet is deleted in cases like these.

Well... It would have been nice if they warned people earlier because it is quite a big thing to happen.

A possible reason why someone running a website should care about keeping stuff up is to avoid link rot, to me it feels like part of bejng a good Internet citizen is to ensure that a change to your website doesn't break other websites or links where possible and reasonable. (if people want stuff removed, then that's fine though).

However, it might be that it's too expensive to even just keep stuff up, so fair enough, but if that is the case, I feel more warning would have helped a bit here.

Huh... Maybe I misread, either way, its a similar sort of concept, and still ends with deletion.

It says that they will be "actively deleted", which doesn't sound like they're going to be hidden.

EDIT: correction, it says they'll first be hidden for about a month, then they will be "actively deleted".

While I understand why they are adding a limit, the concept of just deleting the photos over the 1000 limit just unsettles me, and will almost certainly cause link rot, which is both sad and annoying when I encounter it.

I don't know what my dad will do, he's been using Flickr for quite a few years now, he used to pay for pro, but then stopped doing so after Yahoo bought Flickr and started breaking the UI. He has over 1000 photos, but I am not sure if the pro features are worth the price for him. Fortunately he has local backups of every photo, but it does feel like his photos have been held to ransom. He probably would be willing to pay some money (but less than the current pro) just for the extra storage (and none of the extra features), from what I understand.

To conclude this wall of text, I understand why they're doing it, and hopefully it will make Flickr sustainable, but I feel the way it was done will cause problems when it happens (if it only stopped an account from uploading if it had too many photos, that would help a lot to avoid link rot), and might also cause problems in the future (while morbid to think about, if a pro user dies, they won't be able to pay and a bunch of their images will just get deleted, which could be bad for their families)...

EDIT: fix a few spelling errors and tyops

UPDATE: my dad's response to this is that he will pay for pro to keep his images online. In general, he doesn't feel like Pro is intended for him because it has features he doesn't really care about, he only cares about the storage and community stuff, not the statistics and software stuff.

From what I understand, it's not exactly easy for an indivual to "fix". From my limited knowledge about the US economy, it's not easy to get a well paying job quickly, the examples there showed that they tried to get jobs, but the jobs they could get were worse than leaving the US.

Maybe they made a bad decision in the first place, but do they really deserve a lifetime of debt because they did what they were told they needed to do (go to university) but weren't aware about the pitfalls of certain paths? While they weren't directly forced to take get a degree, isn't it kind of expected by schools and parents nowadays? So there's still pressure to to it...

(also, not everyone is suited or has the prerequisites for the big and well paying jobs, so it's kind of unfair to expect people who are smart but not in the way that certain jobs require to struggle through stuff not suited for them, which might also cause problems, etc...)

Ah, then in that case, it's not against the GDPR, but if it was accessible from the EU, then it would be. In a way, this is the sort of thing the GDPR is designed to prevent.

I am not fully sure about this, but it might be against the GDPR? From what I understand you aren't allowed to block someone if they opt out of non-essential stuff. However the GDPR hasn't been tried on anything like this yet, so it'll be interesting to watch in the future, but I am not expecting anything soon.

https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/cctv/ at least in the UK, you can request people who have CCTV footage of you, and also note that people have to delete CCTV when they no longer need it (how long that should be is arguable), so people have to delete CCTV without being prompted to. and this is not new with the GDPR, it's from the old law, from 1998, I think.

...and how is wanting to know what a company has about you a bad thing? I'd be worried if a company cannot answer this, because that means they haven't got a handle on what data they store, which means that when they get hacked, they wouldn't know what got taken!

EDIT: grammar (got -> get)

Sounds like the "Sam Vimes 'Boots' theory of economic injustice", from the Discworld novels.

https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...

I don't knnow how accurate it is, but it does make sense for some things, such as shoes, and thinking about it, train tickets (season tickets are better value for money but very expensive), and essentially anything where bulk/long term is better value, but only being affordable to some people, and I think the space to store things comes into play as well...

It seemed that way, then I got a train driving simulator. Buy a train simulator (Train Sim 2018 is what I have) and try to drive a train to the timetable. Then play with the conditions (raining, autumn, midnight). Then realise that you need to do this without the map at the bottom of the screen. Then try to understand all the rules and regulations that a train driving simulator doesn't simulate, like how to walk down the track safely (old training videos are on YouTube are very interesting).

Also, in real life, train drivers are responsible for the safety of the passengers on the train, and also have to deal with the aftermath if anyone ends up being in front of the train.

If I was a train driver, I would like to be paid enough to cover all of that!

Well... The Victoria Line was a form of automatic since it was made, so it seems to be more practical to have a new system created as an automatic one rather than upgrade an old system. Even with the new systems on the Underground, the driver still needs to know how to drive the train, for when things go wrong, and unlike a car, other trains can't move around a stuck train.

I guess one of the big problem with automating trains is that while it's easier to automate the normal operation of a train, there is less tolerance for any issues (a train stopping blocks all other trains on the line, there are also a LOT of people on a train at a time, stopping distance is huge, etc...).

Here are some ideas from the top of my head:

* Many trains are old (at least in the UK), and tend to be very slowly upgraded, so the trains on the network were built before it was considered practical to automate them.

* Signalling systems are old, UK example: the warning system (AWS) is built on electromagnets, clever and cheap, but not enough for automation.

* While it's possible to design a system that works well for a normal journey if nothing goes wrong, when things do go wrong you'd need a person (for example, I once was on a train and a door was stuck, the driver got out and fixed it so we could get off), also what about level crossings?

* Once you're paying someone as a failsafe, then they already know how to drive the train, then the extra automation is just extra cost, except when the railway is busy (so London Underground has partial automation, as cost of driver + automation is worth it to run all the extra trains).

* Places with automated systems tend to be isolated (see the DLR, it's isolated from mainline trains, and also has no level crossings).

* Maybe a way to keep people to blame if things go wrong, if an automated train goes wrong, who is to blame?

* Who in their right mind would want to lose their job? From what I understand people enjoy it, and it pays well, and it's not exactly a skill that can be transferred (while in an ideal world someone could get another decent job, the fact is we're not in an ideal world, so if someone loses their job they're going to have a hard time and not have a way to magically get something new, unless they're lucky).