jayelbe

As somebody who works in local government IT, consistent scraping of our data like this is the bane of our life. We get hit by thousands of these, many with no rate limiting, making hugely intensive requests, that cause downtime and knock-on effects for actual customers and citizens. We block IPs, add captchas, and yet it persists.

If you really want the data, just FOI it for goodness' sake.

I get the distinct impression that many of these outfits aren't really advocating for impoved transparency but are simply trying to exploit and monetise illicitly obtained government data to make a quick buck.

Waste disposal and planning for quarrying and mineral extraction are different functions, decided at a higher tier of local government, and are not directly comparable to development management/planning.

Cools pics! They should show it behind a pencil for scale.

> On Linux, Firefox uses less memory and no longer requires a forced restart after an update has been applied by a package manager.

Holy cow! A huge change in a single sentence.

I find this so sad. I would gladly pay/donate to support Firefox, far in excess of however much money they would make from data mining and advertising. I am sure that enough people feel the same way to make it a viable model.

Thunderbird raises more than $8mn a year in donations to support their development. Thunderbird's success has proven that this model would work.

I miss my N9 so badly! Without a doubt the best phone I've ever owned.

I bought an N9 in 2011 and it was an incredible phone. The design and UI were gorgeous and it was a joy to use. I still miss the swipe-driven UI - it was clever, intuitive and well thought out. The phone itself had Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Spotify clients, and MS Exchange support for calendaring and email (I believe Nokia developed or ported many of these in-house) and was completely usable day-to-day.

Compared to Nokia's symbian phones and earlier Maemo efforts, it felt revolutionary and I'd agree Nokia had a device which could have paved the way for a post-symbian future. It definitely felt like, with continued investment, it would have been a real iPhone competitor, and in just the nick of time.

Elop's strategy was a disaster.

It was loading a blank white page. Looks like it's back now though!

The Mayor of London doesn't have any power over the City of London Corporation. They are completely separate authorities.

The Corporation is essentially a unitary/borough-tier local authority, overseeing the "square mile" centre of the city, and has a council of elected councilmen. It provides housing, education, social services, street cleaning, markets etc for a small area of central London, and has existed since time immemorial.

The Mayor's remit, which has only existed since the year 2000, covers the whole 600-square mile area of Greater London, and provides strategic services like transport, strategic planning, fire and rescue, and the metropolitan police.

The Mayor of London wouldn't have had any involvement in this at all.

The Post Office is separate from Royal Mail. The two were separated when Royal Mail was privatised in 2013. The Post Office is still in the public sector.