nehalem501

In rural areas it's publicly owned by local authorities (and then opened to the various internet providers). In suburban / medium density areas it's privately owned by one single internet provider (most of these areas where assigned to either Orange or SFR) but they must open access to others. In cities / high density areas each internet provider has it's own fiber.

There are a few places that had cable before mainstream fiber deployment (so FTTC), but the norm in France for new installations for at least the last 10 years has been FTTH (including in the countryside).

I would say that for long distance trains only English and the local language should be enough.

For international trains, we should have all languages of all traversed countries and English. So for example a train from Paris to Frankfurt should have announcements in French, German and English (and it is actually the case for that train, I already rode it).

But for example, the Berlin - Warsaw train has only English announcements besides the local language depending on the country the train is in (so no Polish when it is in Germany, and no German when it is in Poland), I consider this to be wrong. It should have announcements in Polish, German and English for the whole route.

It is mostly an issue in countries with 120V mains (I know that in the US 240V outlets exist though). In France for example it is required that standard plugs must be able to deliver at least 16A on each outlet, at the 230V used here, we get 3600W of power, that’s more than enough.

The ability to read a lower rez version of the images is a feature that is actively used. That way you don’t need to have both a 2K and 4K DCP for movies that have a 4K version, 2K projectors can simply decode the 4K DCP at 2K resolution.

If you can live with cross-compiling from a modern PC (or Mac) you can use https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 which uses a recent version of GCC.

French reactors can adjust their power outputs in 30 minutes between 100% and 20% their nominal power rating. I think we are actually the only country doing this. (EDF: "In France, a nuclear power plant is able to ramp up or down between 100% and 20% of nominal power in half an hour, and again after at least two hours, twice a day.", source https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document bottom of page 4)

Depends on the country, in France you can pay anywhere by card, including at outdoor market stalls...

Night trains won’t be high-speed TGV services, they will use the regular main lines. Track maintenance needs much less energy than building brand new lines. And yes, the carbon emissions per passenger are higher for high-speed trains compared to the regular ones, mostly because of their construction. Of course all of this works when the electricity produced by renewables or nuclear. If these trains are powered by electricity produced from coal, their carbon emissions are equivalent to using diesel trains.

In Europe all the major lines are already electrified, and because all the lines were built a long time ago (generally in the 19th century), the construction carbon emissions are divided between 150 years of transported passengers.