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.

NZ law just says it has to be adequate for the intended purpose: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0035/latest/whole.html#DLM154837

(1) Subject to subsection (2), a legal requirement for a signature other than a witness’ signature is met by means of an electronic signature if the electronic signature—

(a) adequately identifies the signatory and adequately indicates the signatory’s approval of the information to which the signature relates; and

(b) is as reliable as is appropriate given the purpose for which, and the circumstances in which, the signature is required.

(2) A legal requirement for a signature that relates to information legally required to be given to a person is met by means of an electronic signature only if that person consents to receiving the electronic signature.

98% of it seems to be 4.

If it has navigation lights and is on approach to a runway, it’s probably an airliner, even if you can’t see everything because it’s dark.

Perhaps, but Russia also has satellites for that.

If Russia was doing spy drones, they would not be fitted with navigation lights flying on normal flight paths.

There is basically nothing that you’ll learn from flying a drone over New Jersey that you can’t learn from Google Earth.

Some plastics have reasonable recyclability.

A major part of the issue is contaminants: most consumer goods are very thin with lots of surface area, from dirty uses like food/drink handling. Lots of surface area for stuff to stick to, very little plastic recovered at the end of it.

Anal on the other hand…

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.

Two religions is not more statistically significant than one.

Referring to yourself in the third person and acting like this comes off as extremely condescending.

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.

Oh, I mixed up your post. Sorry.

If you’re considering the US federal government (excluding the newly elected carrot…) ‘tyrannical’, what civilisations are you considering not tyrannical? The list has to be very, very small.

None of the definitions of tyranny I see have a restriction on scale. You can be a tyrant ruling a hundred people or a billion. It’s technology (transport, food storage, writing/communication) and geography that limit the size of a tyranny. I’d argue lots of small tribal societies wander into tyranny; it’s just hard to rule over multiple islands when you don’t have writing or metals.

There’s religions in Asia other than Buddhism.

There was rampant cannibalism in Polynesia along with all kinds of infighting. Maori gods have plenty of murder and war in the mythology.

War in Asia goes far wider than just one empire. Imperial Japan were thoroughly tyrannical during WW2, as well as many other conflicts.

Any civilisation that could spare, mobilise, and feed enough people to form an army basically did so, sooner or later. It’s a supply lines and population problem. Small populations can’t raise large armies and send them long distances.

The NASA Vehicle Assembly Building is also a contender.

I’m not sure how many dividing walls there are inside Everett, but the VAB is basically one massive empty skyscraper.

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.

It’s also torches and everything after the regulator, which run at much lower pressure. At least in NZ

I think it might be because they’re connected and disconnected regularly so misconnection is a common problem, even with colour coding. Gas work on houses involves actually putting the fittings on pipe and is done by people who should be concentrating more on that rather than on what they’re about to weld/cut.

I’ve heard flammable gas uses reverse (left hand) thread to prevent cross connection. At least for welding gases in NZ; not sure about natural gas.

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.