tomarr

There's many differences to consider before calling it 'waste', however that's capital expenditure and not operational which is completely different.

400 MW not 400 MWh. The power generated by the wind farm is enough to power 400,000 homes at peak. The link you provided talks about energy generated.

> I'm pretty sure unassigned seating has been proven to be the fastest way to load an aircraft in practice.

I would disagree with this. My experience is of low-cost operators in Europe (Ryanair, Easyjet, Wizz etc.), and I believe their experiences have been the opposite. Whilst most of the carriers used to operate on an unassigned seating basis, with fees for reserved seating, now seating is 'randomly' assigned at online check-in (although if possible groups are sat together). You can still pay for reserved seating but the benefit is obviously a lot less now.

My anecdotal evidence is that this has massively quickened the boarding process. Before, there would be delays waiting for people to sort out their seating and luggage arrangements (families especially), now it is much less of an issue and turnaround times are quicker.

It's also possible that the massive increase in people taking only hand-luggage in recent years has been a factor, but I'm not sure.

The obvious caveat in this is that they could only estimate an average salary. You could state that your salary progresed rapidly during your previous employment, although they may not buy it.

Possible parallel reconstruction?

I think the Olympics is slightly different, the IOC normally requires host countries to enact laws giving them special privileges for the event.

"Since the Sydney Games in 2000, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has required bidding governments to commit to introducing bespoke legislation to offer a further layer of legal sanction." http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/apr/13/olympics-2012-b...

"Expressions likely to be considered a breach of the rules would include any two of the following list: "Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, Twenty-Twelve". Using one of those words with London, medals, sponsors, summer, gold, silver or bronze is another likely breach."

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I was wondering where you get the National Rail train data from. Is it based on the open data from ATOC/RSP or do you have your own agreement from them?

I ask as I was thinking about writing a lib to parse and use the ATOC 'fares data', and just wanted to know if anyone has had any success with it. The format is well documented but a bit massive (80 page specification), before getting started would be nice to know if the data is actually useful. Their site says it is updated infrequently which made me a bit hesitant, and I don't think I've seen any projects where it's been used. Love your app by the way!

Routes aren't infallible though, diversions occur because of predicable (planned maintenance) and unpredictable (crashes or weather incidents), and diversion routes may vary significantly.

Not an insurmountable problem - may even just be able to park the vehicle where a diversion route is unknown and wait for it to clear, but still an issue to deal with.

Even agricultural jobs you can't consistently (as in year round) do that. Seasonal variations, set-up times and travelling all factor into this.

That isn't a reality due to the massive cost of either options (basically, pick one). Successful mass transit using the roads (eg bus rapid transit) require taking capacity out of the highways and therefore aren't mutually compatible.

Nice!

What caused the 10-yearly spikes for 1900, 1910 & 1920 - was it some kind of construction census?

I've always opted for Ghost.py rather than selenium as I've found it uses less memory and pretty capable. Admittedly my scrapes are normally pretty targeted and not over 10k+ sites.

One query I had from your piece: "When I've found myself in the unfortunate place of getting my proxies banned before on certain sites, they have been more the happy to switch them out for new IP's for me."

If you're getting banned from sites, is it not time to leave them alone? If they don't want your traffic (which the admin/system has judged as too much), should you really be circumventing it? With that and the robots.txt bit (which admittedly you justified), you've got to be careful not to slip into a bit of a grey area with scraping, which people regard suspiciously in the first place.

Really? So you could cut open whatever's holding it, throw all the powder in the toilet (1 kg will be more than 1 flush also), dispose of the bag, clean the knife/scissors and there be no trace?

I'm sceptical. The police don't need to find 1 kg of cocaine, to find a bag with powder in and powder around the toilet should be sufficient.

I wonder if the audio data from television programmes combined with subtitles would make a good training set. Here in the UK many of the subtitles are very good quality (presumably human transcribed), and would be easy to strip out non-language noises such as laughter (normally transcribed in brackets).

I'm a great fan of the going from first principles - but I think it and your post ignores one big part of the reason for design by analogy.

A lot of error/bug fixing is evolutional and this knowledge is built up over time through the userbase and design team. You see this in software projects where there's always the temptation to start from scratch, but once in this process there's inherently a lot more bugs and quality control becomes an issue (even though the old clunky system feels low quality, functionally it can be expected to be reasonably error free).

BT's has different IP/wireless network for the owner and the public users piggybacking off it. Public is also restricted to I think 512kb/s

I don't agree, because when you start dealing with regulations you see that 'loophole' as a term is often bandied around for minor things. Some may even be the intention of the regulation.

What I don't understand is how they don't run out of talent?

If you assume students are at school for 10 years (always), teachers for 30 (some dropout), this puts the staff:student ratio to 1:36, or 6% of the top graduates (if as stated, top 10%) a year. This is pretty much the lower bound of staff:student in a stable population, it can only get worse with factors such as college drop-outs and top graduates choosing other career paths.

So either the demographics are rapidly changing , the numbers or fudged or the majority of top graduates in Finland choose teaching.

We shouldn't forget how much $80 billion actually is.

For that amount, they should be saving in the order of 40,000 people's lives from terrorism a year to justify the spending.

(I've plucked the intervention per life-year saved from here: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/inter...

and assumed each life-save has 50 potential years of their life left)

There is a diversionary slip road for overheights (OHT) on the approach to Blackwall after the first pic and before the second. If you've made it to the second (having ignored a good few red lights), expect to be prosecuted.

I know a project manager tasked with moving one of the retired concordes from Heathrow to somewhere along the Thames for transport up to a museum in Scotland. This required removal of several traffic islands and signals temporarily (overnight), and was quite the logistical challenge, made for some cool pictures though!

The hashing is not for security though, so why not keep a store of your hash + key. Again, added overhead but you wouldn't have to hash twice and you could just use the mapping table for debugging, rather than in operational code at the expense of resources.