Reorte

The Bradford Exchange - the company that keeps selling the sort of tat mentioned in this thread, rather than Bradford the place. edit: Well, I say selling. Advertising anyway. Although presumably someone must be buying it if they keep on going. Heaven knows who.

No sign of that happening anywhere I can see. Hydrogen might be applicable in some situations but in general it's hard to not see it as simply adding an extra layer of inefficiency. I'd actually expect hydrogen trains rather than cars, since at least that would save the expense of the installation and maintenance of OHLE, whereas it's hard to see where the saving is for road vehicles.

More like "If I am completely satisfied I have been had"!

I should probably apologise for being in a particularly grumpy mood today.

That one had passed me by. Another reason to be extremely depressed about the suspicious, untrusting, disrespectful, intrusive excuse of a world we now live in. God I hate it, it's all so dehumanising. No doubt the usual suspects will turn up shortly to berate me for not finding everything we do being monitored a wonderful prospect. Hoping that in a few years conversions of ordinary, bog-standard current or slightly older cars (let's say 15-20 years old) to electric will be practical and affordable. Without the past rust problems that should give a platform that should last indefinitely, without all the modern "features" I'd much rather do without.

Depends on the foot crossing I suspect. A fairly low speed line, maybe three or four trains per hour, I'd expect most people are happy enough. A four-track, 125 mph line, if there are any foot crossing on those - no thanks, I'd rather a considerable detour to find a bridge. Sounds as appealing as dodging traffic on the motorway.

I thought City of Truro was probably the first to exceed it, but that was based on stopwatch timings of the mileposts from someone on board, rather than accurately calibrated measuring equipment installed specifically for that purpose, making it fair to say that City of Truro was probably (to quite a high degree of probably) the first, but Flying Scotsman the first to beyond any reasonable doubt.

Some apologies required from me then, coming shortly after one of my posts I thought you were accusing me of that.

It has some significance due to being the first loco to be officially confirmed to have passed 100 mph but I've never understood the current level of obsession with it. When it comes to LNER locomotives I'm personally more interested in seeing the sole surviving definitely mundane J21 working again some day.

Just who is the troll with no basic understanding? Assuming bad faith and ignorance with people you disagree with is simply being rude.

I suppose I was expecting it to be, since there's quite an element of that in the games but I can see how it might jar if you're not expecting it.

Lack of understanding because people are simply unused to them is one of the more persuasive arguments for me.

Interesting, I've been wondering what people who hadn't played the games would make of it.

That's true for specific issues but the general level of acceptable risk vs responsibility should absolutely reflect society's overall attitude towards it. It's then up to the experts in the relevant areas to set the rules broadly in line with that for their fields. Being uninformed means it's far more likely that someone will misjudge the level of risk (and it could be judging it higher or lower than it really is), but that's not the same issue as deciding at what point do we find living with it preferable to the mitigation, and as I mentioned earlier we've all got a point where we do. And you can't say anyone's point is objectively right or wrong. That's why the only reasonable approach is to aim for the majority's, leaving it to the experts to work out how to apply that to their area. Otherwise you've gone down the path of telling people what they should think and feel.

Not sure if this is really for the game thread but there's an obvious link - anyone else watched the Fallout TV show? Without giving anything away I think they did an absolutely cracking job of it. I've seen some of the criticism and whilst I don't think some of it's entirely invalid personally it didn't really get in the way for me, and overall it deserves the very good reception it seems to have got.

Sorry, by all means disagree but if you can't do it civilly then don't say anything at all. "The nutjob side of the debate" isn't really acceptable, and I don't think the "brigades" and "moral idolence" talk is either. We've all got our lines, beyond which we'll start finding things absurd. They're just in different places. For example, people have died from simply tripping over their shoelaces. Alternatives are available, so why not ban shoelaces? Yet I suspect most people would say that that's absurd, and that arguing against such a ban is not the sign of a nutjob. Is there a fundamental difference between that though and anything else that's been discussed on this thread? The point is that we all have a line somewhere, and when yours is crossed there will still be people who haven't reached it - should they, at that point, accuse you of being on the nutjob side? It all smacks of "the way I want the world to be is the only correct one, thus I can sneer at anyone who thinks differently," and that's never got us anywhere. I hope I've not sneered at anyone I've argued against in this thread (although I confess I sometimes let irritation get the better of me - I apologise if I've done that to anyone, and it's a personal flaw I need to work harder on). The better approach is to go with where society overall decides to draw the line (see earlier post I made about the fact this is a democratic country), live with where that line is, and have polite discussion with those who disagree with it - and that can be either because they think it's gone too far or not far enough. Oh, and ignore the real extremists, whether they seem at first to somewhat agree with you or not.

If the alternative is treating everyone with contempt, assuming they're unable to do anything for themselves, well, I'd prefer to take my chance by assuming most are sensible and having the risk from those that aren't.

Well that's probably 80s at the latest, so the unique pattern of rust patches most likely.

Repeating myself, but that's why I'm not supporting them here. If they had a spotless record for operating safely I'd be rather more sympathetic, but that was bad by the standards of any time, and their reluctance to toe the line (whatever I think of the line) rather suggests that they simply don't have the right attitude. If I was in their position and really wanted to show that I'd fixed the very serious issues I'd be bending backwards to comply, even if muttering under my breath about what I'm complying with in some cases.

That's why we live in a democracy. Without going in to too many details (otherwise it could descend in to politics rapidly) in a democracy the law hopefully reflects the majority opinion on such matters, and so I accept that that's what it is even when I disagree, and it's why I might grumble about it but wouldn't do more than that (well obviously I'm not in any position to do anything other than grumble or agree here, but I hope you get the point). That, in part, explains my not standing with WCRC on this matter even though you might expect me to. edit: removed erroneous confusing extra "not" at the end

That's because they are alas a fact of life. With so many people around even pretty low chance events happen to someone on a fairly regular basis, which is why they won't often be reported (although usually they do seem to crop up in local papers and their online equivalents). We might bemoan that being a fact of life, and of course it's not at all good, but I fear a world where we've done a lot more to prevent these what are actually very low risks far more than I fear the risk. You can, of course, find exceptions. Usual disclaimer that in the more thread-specific situation I'm not supporting WCRC or agreeing with their approach.

Cue the usual defence of "people don't like change" (in which case don't change anything without a very good reason!) Things like this are why people don't like change.

I know what you're getting at but let's take a step back, otherwise we're heading in to one extreme or the other territory, and that's when opinions start getting entrenched and unreasonable. The way some are carrying on you'd think it's an argument about juggling live hand grenades vs zero chance whatsoever of anything bad happening. It's neither, and quite honestly I wouldn't want either of those extremes (the former for obvious reasons, the latter because at some point I find the solutions more obnoxious than the problem and would prefer to live with the risk - a point I personally find we've passed in various areas of modern Britain).

What on earth happens to a tyre to make it do that?

A couple of intermediate points should be doable, but even without the changing conditions it starts getting interesting computationally when the numbers increase (see the Travelling Salesman Problem).