Posts by Chris Cooke 38 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2007
Payment Handling Fee - Per passenger/ Per One Way Flight - £4.75
Airport Check-In Fee - Per passenger/ Per One Way Flight - £4.75 or £9.50
Hold Bag – Per bag/ Per One Way Flight - £9.50 or £19
Second or third bags, each - £19
Excess Baggage Fee - Per Kilo £14
Flight Change Fees - Per Passenger/ Per One Way Flight - £24 or £52
Name Change Fee - Per Passenger - £95 or £142.50
etc...
Two of the "big three" already make outstandingly fuel-efficient, stylish, best-selling ranges of cars already. It's just that they do it in Europe, not in the USA. All the USA has to do is make slightly cleaner diesel available and Bob's their uncle, the big three can sell Americans outstandingly powerful turbo-charged beasts that do twice the MPG.
... of not going shopping often enough in Tesco or Asda, obviously; I'd forgotten that they'd resurrected self service scanners in a new form. Thanks to several people for pointing that out. Doesn't change the fact that the Embra library scanners are more hassle and more slow than the Audience Development Officers though.
I'm a regular user of the Edinburgh libraries, I'm a computer industry professional, and I have trouble using those damn self-service machines :-) so I dread to think how others get on with them. One can manage them with persistence but really it's a lot easier to get the librarian to do it for you. Just as with those self-scanners the supermarkets tried a few years ago - nobody could be bothered with the extra hassle so they died a death. Same here.
The electronic counting of votes was considered necessary because of the complexity of the vote counting mechanisms: the Scottish government election votes were counted both by first past the post and by the D'Hondt system and the council votes were counted by single transferable vote. It was felt by the Scotland Office that results could take days to appear if counted manually.
One big problem though, at least the one reported at the time, seems to have been that the vote counting machines could not cope with ballot papers of more than a certain size - and so many candidates were registered in some regions that there wasn't room on the ballot paper for both the candidates and the instructions on how to fill in the ballot paper correctly. Instead of falling back to manual counting at this point, Douglas Alexander's Scotland Office decided at the last minute to remove the voting instructions from the ballot paper where necessary to make room for the candidates. So in some regions the instructions were left off, or severely curtailed. Those were the regions that had the highest number of spoiled ballots.
Another problem was the bizarre decision, again by Douglas Alexander's Scotland Office, to amalgamate the two separate Scottish government votes on the one piece of paper. Nobody had seen such a ballot paper before and it baffled a lot of people; particularly where the instructions had been removed!
By contrast, the single transferable vote was used in the same election for the very first time for the council ballot, and voters seem to have taken to it like a duck to water; there were almost no spoilt council votes, as I recall. Which is interesting, when one big reason for adopting the bizarre FPTP/D'Hondt system in the first place was that voters were said to be incapable of coping with STV - or so I remember from the late 90s, anyway...
Simon, Doctor Who jumped the shark several decades ago! But we don't really mind, as that's part of its charm.
Personally I thought Catherine Tate was rather good in her Christmas episode, and certainly not one dimensional. If the scripts are good (hint, more Steven Moffat please) she'll be excellent.
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