- I mean, you're supposed to call the police or Network Rail: there are placards on the (remains of the) bridge with the telephone number. But yes, it's not uncommon to have to send a train to examine the line (at slow speed, able to stop within line-of-sight) after extreme weather.
- There is technology that could detect rail breaks, in the form of track circuits: feed a current into a rail, detect whether it gets to the other end (or bridge the two rails at the other end of the circuit and see if it gets back to the start of the other rail). A variation of this is commonly used in signalling systems to verify that the track is clear: if a pair of wheels is in the track section then the signal will short across the rails and make the circuit show 'occupied'.
Ultimately, though, this kind of stuff is expensive (semi-bespoke safety-critical equipment every few miles across an enormous network) and doesn't reduce all risks. Landslides don't necessarily break rails (but can cause derailments), embankments and bridges can get washed out but the track remains hanging, and lots of other failure modes.
There are definitely also systems to confirm that the power lines aren't down, but unfortunately the wires can stay up and the track be damaged or vice versa, so proving one doesn't prove the other. CCTV is probably a better bet, but that's still a truly enormous number of cameras, plus running power supplies all along the railway and ensuring a data link, plus monitoring.
- His personal philosophy was very Catholic. My reading of LotR is that it is consistent with that, valorising faithfulness, the personal in place of the modern, and avoiding the temptation to sin for power. I agree it's centre-right (though idiosyncratically) but not about military capability: the orcs are the most modern military capability and they are decidedly not valorised. The central heros are a member of the rural gentry and his gardener, who barely fight. The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.
- When there are multiple simultaneous elections happening in the UK you get multiple ballot papers - one per race. You then put them into separate ballot boxes. This obviously doesn't scale elegantly to the kind of ballots that go from President to dog-catcher, but you could certainly separate them into pink, blue, yellow, and white ballots and count in parallel.
- Carlisle is small (and not currently licensed for public use) - not an ideal place to drop a 737 if there's a choice. It's also not that far from Prestwick so may have had similar weather. Newcastle and Teesside are both on the East coast and likely to be affected by similar weather to Edinburgh given the storm coming in from the North East. The next closest will be Manchester or Leeds/Bradford, with Manchester being larger, closer to where passengers want to go (Glasgow) and further away from the storm.
There's precedent for this kind of situation to generate quite extensive investigations. An incident in 2017 where a flight from the Isle of Man to Belfast was unable to land in a storm, diverted back to the IOM, then landed in unsafe weather conditions because of insufficient fuel to divert again got a 48 page report[0], safety recommendations, and the airline being banned from the UK.
[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82ede440f0b...
- Common until a hundred years or so ago. We also don't have the jail/prison distinction that the US has, and they're all officially called "His Majesty's Prison X" so it's not a common word in British English anymore, except in US import. So "jail" is now standard if used.
- People absolutely used to buy (paper) newspapers for the crosswords: they were incredibly sticky and not expensive to make. I don't know whether that still works in an era with tons of free online puzzles, but if the NYT crossword is particularly competent/unusual/good for some reason then I'd not be surprised at all if the crossword sub drove news reading rather than the other way around.
(My experience is more with the British-style cryptic crossword, where every pseudonymous setter has a different 'flavour' and fans have passionate favourite days of the week in a given publication, let alone preferring the Times to the Guardian or whatever. I don't think the American style generates quite such obsessive fandom, but people do love their games...)
- Some of it is probably about the scope of UK judicial review. Acts of Parliament are absolutely exempt from being struck down. The closest you can get is a "declaration of incompatibility" that a bill is incapable of being read in such a way as complying with the European Convention on Human Rights. If at all possible the courts will gloss and/or interpret hard to come up with a compliant reading. And an incompatibility declaration just suggests Parliament looks again: it doesn't invalidate a law by itself.
Executive acts, on the other hand, can be annulled or overturned reasonably straightforwardly, and this includes the regulations that flesh out the details of Acts of Parliament (which are executive instruments even when they need Parliamentary approval).
In short, judicial review is a practical remedy for a particular decision. "These regulations may unreasonably burden my speech" is potentially justiciable. "This Act could be used to do grave evil" isn't. If an act can be implemented in a Convention compatible way then the courts will assume it will until shown otherwise.
The consequences can look something like the report of this judgement. Yes, it looks like the regulations could harm Wikipedia in ways that might not be Convention compatible. But because interpretation and enforcement is in the hands of Ofcom, it's not yet clear. If they are, Wikipedia have been (essentially) invited to come back. But the regulations are not void ab inito.
- > People say that, but is it true? Any examples?
MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, doesn't have a covert action arm. Which is not to say that our government hasn't done any fuckery with other countries' politics (we're also a former imperial power) but it does lessen the temptation and the capability.
- We (the UK) have a very extensive set of double taxation treaties too. The point of non-dom status is that it doesn't even matter if your earnings were taxed elsewhere: they're still not liable in the UK.
- Depending on how transformative the effects are (and the price drop possible upon genericisation) then there could be a compulsory licensing trade to do here.
The drug companies are presumably pricing optimally for profit (but not for maximum public benefit, for which the optimum price is ~0). You could calculate the net present value of the drug companies' total profits attributable to the patent, add on 10% as a bonus, and pay them off. If the welfare gains of having cheap drugs are genuinely greater than the value of the patent to the holder, this would be win/win.
- The traditional response to that was violence against scabs, for better or for worse: it keeps people from breaking picket lines even when otherwise willing.
This photo in particular captures something of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Strikers_Riot
- You'll have collectively said "do fidem". The rest is read by the official at the table, not the graduands.
The question as to whether this constitutes swearing an oath or making a simple promise was an interesting one for me as Quakers traditionally refuse to do the former.
- Yes - to a surprising extent. The best diagram I've seen overlays them[0]. The British gauges are the smaller ones starting with W - with W6 being available essentially everywhere and the higher numbers on specially cleared routes to make it easier to move larger freight containers. GA and GB are standard Western European gauges: both taller and wider.
There's a surprising amount of global variation as much of this stuff wasn't standardised until after most railways were built. AIUI that's even true in the US, where the routes in the West can often take double-stacked containers and Amtrak's Superliners, and further East they often can't.
[0]: https://rfg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Loading-Gauge....
- Because of the tight loading gauge in Britain, trying to cram two decks in would make it very small. It's been tried (once[0]) and they weren't able to make it fully double-decker, quick to load/unload, or especially comfortable.
I agree that they're fine in countries with larger bridges and tunnels -- Amtrak's Superliners are palatial in size -- but not for us. (Except probably for the Channel Tunnel rail link, which is built to French gauge).
- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were also US citizens spying for a US ally, at least in theory. Though the Soviet Union had stopped being an ally before they were convicted, of course.
- Some of it is formatting, some of it is just field dependent. SSRN is commercial and "good enough" for many people. It (at least used to) advertise itself as a social network for social science academics. There's also SocArXiv[0] and others, which are purer extensions of the arxiv model.
Part of the issue is that the arxiv doesn't want every discipline in science, so a certain amount of duplication is necessary.
- Switches are not compulsory, they're just conventional. MK, for example, will happily sell you unswitched sockets (and without the "not to standard in the UK" warning for some of their other products).
Also not sure what you mean by "exactly the same". You can get single/double/triple in a variety of designs and colours. It's a socket - how much variation do you need?
- It's a theoretical benefit even with radial wiring, I think, for some smaller devices. A lamp that's designed to draw an amp will have a small, low-current flex which will fail before the main circuit breaker trips (while a 3A fuse would have protected it).
In reality I don't think it matters, and even on a ring main the MCBs often trip before the device fuses blow these days.
Musk had bugger all to do with the rape gangs scandal, which broke literally years ago, and has been brought up with regularity by the newspapers here since. (For what it's worth there have also been plenty of non-Pakistani groups doing similar things and getting away with it. The main problem seems to be that no one in authority misses, or listens to, dropout teenage girls who have fallen off the radar - which makes them easy pickings for nonces.)
I don't know about the others. The sign holder was likely within the 150m buffer zone put around abortion clinics last year, though. Given the content of the sign (which just steps over the letter of the statutory prohibition not to influence patients' decisions while being entirely morally unobjectionable) I suspect it was a deliberate setup for arrest for outrage, just like the Palestine Action people. But I could be wrong.
It's perhaps also worth noting that Britain's traditions of free speech have never been as absolutist as the US (the last successful prosecution for blasphemous libel was as recent as the 70s and it's still technically a crime to advocate for a republic) but that raucous objections to government have very rarely been the target in recent centuries. The major difference in practice is that being grossly offensive isn't constitutionally protected. You're still not likely to get done for it, though.