Flags shall be flown from a balloon tethered to the top of the flagpole.

Normally I’d be against the waste of helium but I’m prepared to make an exception.

603 for maglevs, 574.8 for steel rail, set in France in 2007 by a hotted up, modified TGV.

China holds the record for a stock train at 487, set in 2010.

(all per Wikipedia)

It looks like the article might be implying that they will be the fastest trains operating in revenue service when they enter service, but that surely needs to be demonstrated with a production train in revenue service.

There’s still a lot of flights through Russian territory.

Korean 007 could have been intentional (I believe the pilot involved still claims it was a military plane) but Hanlon’s razor still applies here. They’re firing a lot of SAMs at many targets without good controls.

The US is barely better; they shot down one (nearly two) of their own fighters about a week ago and then there’s the Vincennes incident.

On underground lines, the PSDs are mostly for air-sealing. It allows you to air-condition the platforms without trying to cool the tunnels, and it helps the piston effect of moving trains pull air through the tunnels, rather than just swirl air around each platform.

Also probably helps for fire engineering.

The Elizabeth line is already built with platform screen doors, although I believe they’re only on underground sections. I don’t know enough about this station to say whether it had them; I expect not.

Platform screen doors tend to be used underground mainly for airflow management. They are not primarily for safety.

They work less well outside. No overhead structure to anchor to, weather has a larger impact (particularly snow/ice), and they can become something to climb rather than an obstacle.

Regular trains don’t run underground. Lots of opencast mines exist .

Basically all mines have an above ground terminal where whatever you mined is unloaded from your underground trains, lifts, haul trucks or whatever else onto storage piles, then loaded onto the actual long distance trains.

If the mine entry is up a mountain, then the trip down from that point will be a net energy producer regardless of anything else.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are electrified railway lines doing the same. Regenerate large amounts of energy into the grid while descending loaded; consume a relatively small amount of energy to haul the empty train back uphill.

If you’re thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it’s unfortunately a really bad idea.

Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.

To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.

I feel dumber having read that.

Banning a whole country because you disliked a company?

Dealing with stuff that’s ‘almost working’ is often harder than starting from scratch; ask any tradesperson.

They also apparently cannot get their heads around the fact that people might give you a discount if you advertise their brand. Ad-supported pricing has been around for a long time; it’s not some voodoo.

Until the day comes that I get a letter in the mail from the government saying, “Here’s how much you paid in taxes, if you’re cool with that then please disregard”, I will not be satisfied.

NZ does that. More accurately, they email you to tell you that there’s a letter available online - I don’t think they send physical mail by default.

Then they pay any refund straight into your nominated bank account.

The 737 factory is unionized, and it’s not having any fewer issues.

They’ve just acquired a terrible management culture. Even the military and space contracts have gone down the drain.

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.