And additionally, public figures have much less protection than "normal people" at least here in the UK.
You and I can call Blair a liar all we want and it won't do much to affect his reputation. Almost by definition, in order to defame someone what you say must have an effect, and British judges are quick to take the fact that there are differences in what effect different people and different forms of media will have when considering a defamantion lawsuit.
Besides, if Tony Blair sued, there's always the possibility that the judge would write a very pointed judgement that would be extremely politically embarassing.
I guess that, if anything, is what makes British politicans careful about suing - they know perfectly well that a significant faction in the judiciary here considers it their duty to kick politicans in the groin as hard as possible metaphorically speaking whenever politicians try to use lawsuits to do their dirty deeds.
Vidar
It may stop US companies and individuals from distributing it to Cuba, but the rest of the world couldn't care less about the US trade embargo, which hardly makes it hard for them to get hold off more or less whatever they want. Notice how they apparently haven't had too much of a problem getting hold of Windows, for instance.
I find it bizarre that people still think of Linux in terms of a dictatorship.
How many vendors ship Linus unmodified kernel?
How many alternative trees are there?
Linus kernel is a common baseline for most people because he does his job well. If this potential exploits matters to people and Linus decides to be an asshole and refuses every patch people tries to throw at him, patches will go into a variety of vendor kernels and alternative trees and people will have plenty of choice.
You can hardly call it a dictatorship when people just ignore the leaders decisions if/when he does something they don't agree with.
Cash isn't the issue, but whether or not regulators would cause problems and whether or not shareholders would actually be willing to sell to Microsoft.
Yeah, well, they're not very happy at UK airports if they find you're trying to sneak a pair of tweezers on either. And then they proceed to hand you plastic cutlery that is at least as sharp.
Silliest experience so far though: Munich airport. Not only were their metal detectors the most sensitive I've gone through (the only place, including the US, where my partly metal belt buckle have triggered anything), but we also had to take off our shoes and pass them through the x-ray machine, we were ordered to take our laptops out of our bags and pass them through x-ray separately, and almost everyone got a full pat down...
(Of course, seeing as they were doing all of that with usual German efficiency, it was still easier/quicker to get through security than what I'm used to elsewhere)
I'll only comment on one point, as I want to focus on it, though I disagree with most of what you wrote.
The "huge taxation" bit is pure bullshit. I pay about as much tax here in the UK as I would have done most places in the US. When you add in the additional private health insurance I would have needed in the US to get similar level medical and dental services I would have actually paid more. And yes, I have done the calculations.
It seems that most people tend to "forget" about local taxation and also look only at the top rates of tax whenever they compares [some countries tax system] to the US.
For the UK, for instance, I frequently see the 40% top rate given, ignoring that this is only paid on any earnings above a threshold that is far above average (currently the 40% kicks in on earnings above approximately. 70.000 USD). Last time I did the numbers, someone earning the median UK salary (around USD 52.500 for men, compared to around USD 41k in the US as of 2003) would have an effective direct taxation rate (including local taxes/council tax and national insurance in the UK) of around 22% in the UK, compared to on average 28.5% in the US (this will obviously wary a lot between states and counties depending on state/local taxation).
Now, adding in VAT/sales tax will slant that back in the favour of the US again, but not as much as people think. While the standard VAT rate is 17.5% in the UK vs. 3-4% typical sales tax in the US, however you pay "only" 5% UK VAT on fuel and some other products, and many categories of food, clothing, medical products and other essentials are except from VAT completely. As a result the net tax burden from VAT for the average family is significantly below the standard rate.
Add in the difference in healthcare AND the cost of additional private insurance and the relatively small difference becomes completely insignificant. While the NHS (the UK National Health Service) does have it's problems, it is good enough - particularly for things like emergency care - that vast majority of private health care in the UK is provided as "add ons" because there simply isn't a mass demand for private care for basic services. Which means I can get extensive private coverage for a few hundred (300-500 depending on my needs) US dollars a year.
Yes, if you foresee never having a medical problem, your total tax + health insurance bill may end up a bit lower on the average in the US and the UK. If you want a reasonable coverage, it's going to end up depending on where in either country you want to live.
The interesting thing is that I originally come from a real "high tax" country - namely Norway. However when I did the maths it turns out that even though I earn well above average, the net difference didn't amount to much there either. It would if I had earned 2-3 times what I am earning, but that means it affects only a couple of percent of the total population.
And as for the UK, once I started comparing the cost of obtaining similar services (insurance to match the unemployment benefits / social security etc.) in the private market as I was getting through my tax bill, I would have to take quite a bit more risk to end up spending less for basic services in the UK compared to Norway.
I used to think that I was paying a lot, but it was acceptable because I could afford it and it would cover care for those worse off, but after actually crunching the numbers I've realised that I was actually NOT paying a lot at all.
Add to that the fact that I'm saved the hassle of continuously chasing better deals or wondering whether or not something will be covered by my insurance, and I have no problems with my tax burden. In fact, I'd have no problems supporting a tax increase for people in my salary range if it got clearly targetted at extending benefits/healthcare/education.
Writing tests for undocumented code serves a very important purpose: The tests will act as documentation for what behaviour you expect of the code. Those test can then serve as a guide to writing documentation in the knowledge that they document the actual behaviour of the code (since otherwise the tests would fail).
Documenting legacy code that doesn't have test cases without at the same time building a test suite is a nightmare.
And guess what, unit tests are very much a part of a good regression test suite... So writing unit tests are most certainly not a waste of time even if the software is "working". Besides I've lost count of the number of times I've found serious errors in "working" code when adding unit tests.
Do they also teach that any other subject "might not be completely correct"? If so, I agree with you. If not, then the only thing achieved by singling out evolution for special treatment is to give the indication that it is somehow a more suspect theory than all the other theories that are taught more or less as established fact in school.
By giving in to the idea of presenting "alternatives" you are falling in the trap of looking at this isolated instead of taking a step back and looking at how they are trying to make evolution to stick out as a sore thumb.
By all means, teach children to be sceptical of what they learn, but if so it needs to be across the board. If so, I'm confident it will do much more damage to organized religion than teaching evolution will ever do.
Network booting is an old concept. A lot of ethernet cards will come with a slot for a boot prom, or with built in support for network booting. Once you've loaded the kernel you already have all the support you need (provided you compile in the right drivers) for loading everything else via the net (via NFS for instance, as mentioned by someone else). And the "cache" you're talking about is already there - you get it for free. Applications will be paged in via the filesystem (which means over the network if you use NFS) and can remain available until the memory is needed for something else.
People have been doing more or less this for decades with assorted OS's.
How do you think people make disk less workstations boot? It's around 10 years ago since I used my first diskless Linux workstation, and it certainly wasn't something new then.
You look upon it from the wrong angle. Consider an almost limitless number of possibilities, only a single one of which will lead to this specific world. If any one of the possibilities causing a significantly different world had come true, we wouldn't be having this disussion.
So the odds of you observing this exact world is exactly 1:1, because you are inside a specific instance of the system you are observing, not looking at a choice of instances "from the outside" - it doesn't matter how unlikely the existence of this very world was in the first place.
That is perhaps the most important realisations to hit back at the intelligent design idea: How improbably events would have been looking forwards isn't relevant, any more than it makes sense to assume that a lotto winner must have cheated just because winning the lotto is incredibly unlikely - when you are looking at an event after the fact, the odds of them having happened are 1:1.
What this means is that arguing improbability is a strawman to avoid having to try an attack on the actual probability of the correctness of the scientific theories on natural history.
It's even worse because introducing a "creator" wouldn't really alter the forwards probabilities either - you'd have the problem of who created the creator, and would either have to accept that something complex can arise from something complex, in which case the entire premise of intelligent design fails, or you'd increasing the problem for each iteration back you take.
I can tell you one thing it won't survive: Government agencies mandating something else for electronic document exchanges.
Governments likes standards. If anything has an ISO stamp on it, and implementing the ISO standard can actually save them money in licensing, chances are they will at least very seriously consider it.
The day your local tax authorities expect to get documents sent using this new format, or any other government agency that can defacto force you to by requiring you to file documents with them but refusing to accept any other format,.doc is dead, or at the very least in decline.
The thing that can make this happen?
Many governments already worry about using proprietary formats. Concerned citizens complaining about why they use a proprietary format instead of an international standard could very well have an effect.
Governments are important targets because they both have cost concerns and the concern of being accessible and inclusive.
Many governments agencies throughout the world that used to use.doc files have already moved to PDF's, or at least offer PDF's to a large extent because of such arguments.
Unlike America, I wasn't arrested or under threat of arrest and the authorities cooperated with the protest and its organizers. In Britain, the right to protest is not considered something to be stamped upon. Riots are rare because the tactics designed to provoke them are rarely if ever used by British law enforcement. You don't, for example, as is common in the US, herd protesters into a closed area, surround them, and then order them to disperse or be arrested.
Perhaps not, but they certainly do herd protesters into closed areas and refuse to let them leave for hours - a May day a couple of years ago they for instance applied that tactic on Oxford street, including sealing off Oxford Circus for hours on end and let nobody leave until the evening. I'm not so sure I consider that much better.
I find the criticism of Billie Piper's English quite amazing... Personally I react extremely strongly to dialects I don't like. I find many English dialects extremely painful to listen to, but I haven't even noticed hers. Perhaps it's the fact that I live in London, and it's more common than not for me to hear young people talk like that on a daily basis - including in the upmarket parts.
As for language understanding when travelling time, it's a moot point as someone else has pointed out, as the second episode made a big point of how the Tardis would translate for them.
And in most of Europe any license clause denying you the right to reverse engineer a project for the purpose of interoperability would explicitly be null and void.
Naming constants with ALL CAPS is good practice too, but I don't know of a single language which forces you to do so. Yet somehow everybody does it.
AmigaE is a language that had all sorts of restrictions on the casing of various syntactic elements. I liked the syntax, but I didn't like the restrictions, because while they worked for me it's the kind of thing (like Python's whitespace abuse) that will put groups of people off a language because they happen to hate the syntactic restrictions.
In Amiga E's case, some of the justification was that it simplified the parser a lot (and seeing as the compiler was entirely written in M68000 assembly that might have been a good thing...)
If you have blocks of code spanning more than a page, then you have a much bigger problem to sort out than whitespace vs. culy braces. I hate significant whitespace and much prefer braces, but if I see blocks of code spanning page boundaries I'll start wondering what kind of idiot wrote the code...
The fact that formatting in C is such a big debating point only serves to underline that the freedom to choose the style to program in MATTERS to people, which is why you see so many people balking at Python over syntax (and over LISP and Scheme as well). You'll notice that all the different camps of people advocating different C styles still use C. If C mandated one of the styles, I'm sure you'd see a lot of C programmers picking other languages. THAT is how important syntax is to people.
It isn't a trivial issue. Look at how the whole paranthesis thing has coloured peoples perceptions of LISP and Scheme over the years, for instance. The reason is that syntax matters. Syntax has a profound effect on how people work with a language. Programming isn't only about the structure of the code but also about the visual presentation of the code - many of us are strong visual thinkers.
I know from experience that syntax I don't like slows me down. I'd rather write more lines in a syntax I'm comfortable with than fewer in a syntax I find painful and annoying to work with.
You're coloured by a particular way of thinking - so whitespace is "trivial" for you. Good for you. It's not for me - or more precisely, the lack of explicit non-whitespace block markers is not trivial for me.
Unconventional semantics doesn't bother me. A syntax I don't like will make me stay far away from a language regarding of semantic properties.
The thing is you DO have to bother with style. You just have to bother with a style you don't have any say in. If you are happy with that, then you could just use any editor that allows you to enforce a specific style instead of picking a language that forces a specific style on you. I find Python syntactically disgusting. It keeps me from considering it as a language I'd like to work in because I consider the syntax ugly and painful.
Syntax is one of the important factors in choosing a programming language. It DOES affect how you work with the language more than many people realise. A syntax that looks pleasing to me makes me focus on the problem. A syntax I don't like frustrates me and slows me down.
When a language has a syntax that is flexible enough for me to be able to adapt it to what I find estetically pleasing, I am more likely to enjoy working with it.
The whitespace issue will keep on keeping a lot of people away from Python.
Banning propritery software at all cost, yes. However there's more to a government than the cost of the software itself.
For instance, if the money is spent locally instead of sent out of the country to a foreign company the government can easily be better off even if more resources need to be spent to support that software.
And one of the elements of the freedom of open source is that you can hire someone to make improvements if the gap to properitary alternatives are small enough.
Also, a good government needs to be open and transparent, and it's much easier to be so if you're not beholden to a company who may end support for the software you use and leave you with large amounts of files in formats you'll have increasing problems accessing. Archival is a bad enough problem without having applications default to proprietary and regularly changing file formats.
So any discussion about the merits of open source alternatives without proprietary alternatives needs to take into account whether any deficiencies of current open source alternatives could be fixed and still bring the project in at a competitive price compared to the proprietary software, where "competitive" doesn't necessarily mean "less than" depending on the weight you add to other qualities of the open source solution (such as no "forced" upgrades to keep getting support and no problem with proprietary data formats, etc.)
There is too much focus on TCO - TCO is only comparable if the products you are comparing offer you the same advantages, and many such advantages may not be easy to set a price on.
Seeing as I've worked almost exclusively with card processing for the last couple of years I think I know that process a bit better than you, and I can guarantee that what you're describing is generally wrong.
SOME merchants may only submit RECEIPTS in batches, but any merchant that does online processing of payments - which is most these days (how often do you see them pulling out the old style card rollers?) - will immediately submit the full details to their payment service processor.
Now, some PSP's MAY submit only limited information in realtime to the aquirers, and some aquirers may pass on only limited information in realtime to the issuers, but in practice most submit full details these days.
I've personally had my bank call me within 5-10 minutes of a transaction for a fraud check (if I've made large purchases that doesn't fit my normal purchase patterns for instance) and had them rattle of the full days worth of charges with exact detail to me for me to verify.
What you describe may still hold some places with banks that still haven't upgraded their systems, but it's very much a thing of the past for most credit card users.
What I find shocking though, is how often I get calls f from my bank or card companies (from numbers I don't know) and they expect ME to authenticate to THEM by giving out personal details. I find it amazing that they actually want to train their customers to consider such calls "normal". I'm always very skeptical about them, and tend to prefer calling back on a number known to me, but I bet lots of customers aren't.
Keep in mind that if you charge back charges on your credit card it's ultimately the merchant that has to pay, not the card company. So if these guys where paying by card it's in the hotels interest as well to get it sorted out before they run up significant charges.
Where did you get the impression that the card companies didn't take responsibility? (btw. it's "liable" not "libel"). This guy specifically pointed out that both Discover and Visa called him to check the transactions, and unless he was clearly at fault (doesn't sound like it) the card companies generally do take responsibility (or rather they pass it on to the merchant).
They are American, but their European subsidiary offer services at least in the UK, Ireland and Spain. Don't know about the rest of Europe, and don't know if they offer the disposable card number stuff in Europe.
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You and I can call Blair a liar all we want and it won't do much to affect his reputation. Almost by definition, in order to defame someone what you say must have an effect, and British judges are quick to take the fact that there are differences in what effect different people and different forms of media will have when considering a defamantion lawsuit.
Besides, if Tony Blair sued, there's always the possibility that the judge would write a very pointed judgement that would be extremely politically embarassing. I guess that, if anything, is what makes British politicans careful about suing - they know perfectly well that a significant faction in the judiciary here considers it their duty to kick politicans in the groin as hard as possible metaphorically speaking whenever politicians try to use lawsuits to do their dirty deeds. Vidar
It may stop US companies and individuals from distributing it to Cuba, but the rest of the world couldn't care less about the US trade embargo, which hardly makes it hard for them to get hold off more or less whatever they want. Notice how they apparently haven't had too much of a problem getting hold of Windows, for instance.
How many vendors ship Linus unmodified kernel?
How many alternative trees are there?
Linus kernel is a common baseline for most people because he does his job well. If this potential exploits matters to people and Linus decides to be an asshole and refuses every patch people tries to throw at him, patches will go into a variety of vendor kernels and alternative trees and people will have plenty of choice.
You can hardly call it a dictatorship when people just ignore the leaders decisions if/when he does something they don't agree with.
Cash isn't the issue, but whether or not regulators would cause problems and whether or not shareholders would actually be willing to sell to Microsoft.
Silliest experience so far though: Munich airport. Not only were their metal detectors the most sensitive I've gone through (the only place, including the US, where my partly metal belt buckle have triggered anything), but we also had to take off our shoes and pass them through the x-ray machine, we were ordered to take our laptops out of our bags and pass them through x-ray separately, and almost everyone got a full pat down...
(Of course, seeing as they were doing all of that with usual German efficiency, it was still easier/quicker to get through security than what I'm used to elsewhere)
The "huge taxation" bit is pure bullshit. I pay about as much tax here in the UK as I would have done most places in the US. When you add in the additional private health insurance I would have needed in the US to get similar level medical and dental services I would have actually paid more. And yes, I have done the calculations.
It seems that most people tend to "forget" about local taxation and also look only at the top rates of tax whenever they compares [some countries tax system] to the US.
For the UK, for instance, I frequently see the 40% top rate given, ignoring that this is only paid on any earnings above a threshold that is far above average (currently the 40% kicks in on earnings above approximately. 70.000 USD). Last time I did the numbers, someone earning the median UK salary (around USD 52.500 for men, compared to around USD 41k in the US as of 2003) would have an effective direct taxation rate (including local taxes/council tax and national insurance in the UK) of around 22% in the UK, compared to on average 28.5% in the US (this will obviously wary a lot between states and counties depending on state/local taxation).
Now, adding in VAT/sales tax will slant that back in the favour of the US again, but not as much as people think. While the standard VAT rate is 17.5% in the UK vs. 3-4% typical sales tax in the US, however you pay "only" 5% UK VAT on fuel and some other products, and many categories of food, clothing, medical products and other essentials are except from VAT completely. As a result the net tax burden from VAT for the average family is significantly below the standard rate.
Add in the difference in healthcare AND the cost of additional private insurance and the relatively small difference becomes completely insignificant. While the NHS (the UK National Health Service) does have it's problems, it is good enough - particularly for things like emergency care - that vast majority of private health care in the UK is provided as "add ons" because there simply isn't a mass demand for private care for basic services. Which means I can get extensive private coverage for a few hundred (300-500 depending on my needs) US dollars a year.
Yes, if you foresee never having a medical problem, your total tax + health insurance bill may end up a bit lower on the average in the US and the UK. If you want a reasonable coverage, it's going to end up depending on where in either country you want to live.
The interesting thing is that I originally come from a real "high tax" country - namely Norway. However when I did the maths it turns out that even though I earn well above average, the net difference didn't amount to much there either. It would if I had earned 2-3 times what I am earning, but that means it affects only a couple of percent of the total population.
And as for the UK, once I started comparing the cost of obtaining similar services (insurance to match the unemployment benefits / social security etc.) in the private market as I was getting through my tax bill, I would have to take quite a bit more risk to end up spending less for basic services in the UK compared to Norway.
I used to think that I was paying a lot, but it was acceptable because I could afford it and it would cover care for those worse off, but after actually crunching the numbers I've realised that I was actually NOT paying a lot at all.
Add to that the fact that I'm saved the hassle of continuously chasing better deals or wondering whether or not something will be covered by my insurance, and I have no problems with my tax burden. In fact, I'd have no problems supporting a tax increase for people in my salary range if it got clearly targetted at extending benefits/healthcare/education.
Documenting legacy code that doesn't have test cases without at the same time building a test suite is a nightmare.
And guess what, unit tests are very much a part of a good regression test suite... So writing unit tests are most certainly not a waste of time even if the software is "working". Besides I've lost count of the number of times I've found serious errors in "working" code when adding unit tests.
Do they also teach that any other subject "might not be completely correct"? If so, I agree with you. If not, then the only thing achieved by singling out evolution for special treatment is to give the indication that it is somehow a more suspect theory than all the other theories that are taught more or less as established fact in school. By giving in to the idea of presenting "alternatives" you are falling in the trap of looking at this isolated instead of taking a step back and looking at how they are trying to make evolution to stick out as a sore thumb. By all means, teach children to be sceptical of what they learn, but if so it needs to be across the board. If so, I'm confident it will do much more damage to organized religion than teaching evolution will ever do.
Network booting is an old concept. A lot of ethernet cards will come with a slot for a boot prom, or with built in support for network booting. Once you've loaded the kernel you already have all the support you need (provided you compile in the right drivers) for loading everything else via the net (via NFS for instance, as mentioned by someone else). And the "cache" you're talking about is already there - you get it for free. Applications will be paged in via the filesystem (which means over the network if you use NFS) and can remain available until the memory is needed for something else. People have been doing more or less this for decades with assorted OS's. How do you think people make disk less workstations boot? It's around 10 years ago since I used my first diskless Linux workstation, and it certainly wasn't something new then.
So the odds of you observing this exact world is exactly 1:1, because you are inside a specific instance of the system you are observing, not looking at a choice of instances "from the outside" - it doesn't matter how unlikely the existence of this very world was in the first place.
That is perhaps the most important realisations to hit back at the intelligent design idea: How improbably events would have been looking forwards isn't relevant, any more than it makes sense to assume that a lotto winner must have cheated just because winning the lotto is incredibly unlikely - when you are looking at an event after the fact, the odds of them having happened are 1:1.
What this means is that arguing improbability is a strawman to avoid having to try an attack on the actual probability of the correctness of the scientific theories on natural history.
It's even worse because introducing a "creator" wouldn't really alter the forwards probabilities either - you'd have the problem of who created the creator, and would either have to accept that something complex can arise from something complex, in which case the entire premise of intelligent design fails, or you'd increasing the problem for each iteration back you take.
Governments likes standards. If anything has an ISO stamp on it, and implementing the ISO standard can actually save them money in licensing, chances are they will at least very seriously consider it.
The day your local tax authorities expect to get documents sent using this new format, or any other government agency that can defacto force you to by requiring you to file documents with them but refusing to accept any other format, .doc is dead, or at the very least in decline.
The thing that can make this happen?
Many governments already worry about using proprietary formats. Concerned citizens complaining about why they use a proprietary format instead of an international standard could very well have an effect.
Governments are important targets because they both have cost concerns and the concern of being accessible and inclusive.
Many governments agencies throughout the world that used to use .doc files have already moved to PDF's, or at least offer PDF's to a large extent because of such arguments.
Unlike America, I wasn't arrested or under threat of arrest and the authorities cooperated with the protest and its organizers. In Britain, the right to protest is not considered something to be stamped upon. Riots are rare because the tactics designed to provoke them are rarely if ever used by British law enforcement. You don't, for example, as is common in the US, herd protesters into a closed area, surround them, and then order them to disperse or be arrested. Perhaps not, but they certainly do herd protesters into closed areas and refuse to let them leave for hours - a May day a couple of years ago they for instance applied that tactic on Oxford street, including sealing off Oxford Circus for hours on end and let nobody leave until the evening. I'm not so sure I consider that much better.
I find the criticism of Billie Piper's English quite amazing... Personally I react extremely strongly to dialects I don't like. I find many English dialects extremely painful to listen to, but I haven't even noticed hers. Perhaps it's the fact that I live in London, and it's more common than not for me to hear young people talk like that on a daily basis - including in the upmarket parts. As for language understanding when travelling time, it's a moot point as someone else has pointed out, as the second episode made a big point of how the Tardis would translate for them.
And in most of Europe any license clause denying you the right to reverse engineer a project for the purpose of interoperability would explicitly be null and void.
In Amiga E's case, some of the justification was that it simplified the parser a lot (and seeing as the compiler was entirely written in M68000 assembly that might have been a good thing...)
If you have blocks of code spanning more than a page, then you have a much bigger problem to sort out than whitespace vs. culy braces. I hate significant whitespace and much prefer braces, but if I see blocks of code spanning page boundaries I'll start wondering what kind of idiot wrote the code...
And that is why the Python syntax is a problem.
I know from experience that syntax I don't like slows me down. I'd rather write more lines in a syntax I'm comfortable with than fewer in a syntax I find painful and annoying to work with.
You're coloured by a particular way of thinking - so whitespace is "trivial" for you. Good for you. It's not for me - or more precisely, the lack of explicit non-whitespace block markers is not trivial for me.
Unconventional semantics doesn't bother me. A syntax I don't like will make me stay far away from a language regarding of semantic properties.
Syntax is one of the important factors in choosing a programming language. It DOES affect how you work with the language more than many people realise. A syntax that looks pleasing to me makes me focus on the problem. A syntax I don't like frustrates me and slows me down.
When a language has a syntax that is flexible enough for me to be able to adapt it to what I find estetically pleasing, I am more likely to enjoy working with it.
The whitespace issue will keep on keeping a lot of people away from Python.
For instance, if the money is spent locally instead of sent out of the country to a foreign company the government can easily be better off even if more resources need to be spent to support that software.
And one of the elements of the freedom of open source is that you can hire someone to make improvements if the gap to properitary alternatives are small enough.
Also, a good government needs to be open and transparent, and it's much easier to be so if you're not beholden to a company who may end support for the software you use and leave you with large amounts of files in formats you'll have increasing problems accessing. Archival is a bad enough problem without having applications default to proprietary and regularly changing file formats.
So any discussion about the merits of open source alternatives without proprietary alternatives needs to take into account whether any deficiencies of current open source alternatives could be fixed and still bring the project in at a competitive price compared to the proprietary software, where "competitive" doesn't necessarily mean "less than" depending on the weight you add to other qualities of the open source solution (such as no "forced" upgrades to keep getting support and no problem with proprietary data formats, etc.)
There is too much focus on TCO - TCO is only comparable if the products you are comparing offer you the same advantages, and many such advantages may not be easy to set a price on.
Seeing as I've worked almost exclusively with card processing for the last couple of years I think I know that process a bit better than you, and I can guarantee that what you're describing is generally wrong. SOME merchants may only submit RECEIPTS in batches, but any merchant that does online processing of payments - which is most these days (how often do you see them pulling out the old style card rollers?) - will immediately submit the full details to their payment service processor. Now, some PSP's MAY submit only limited information in realtime to the aquirers, and some aquirers may pass on only limited information in realtime to the issuers, but in practice most submit full details these days. I've personally had my bank call me within 5-10 minutes of a transaction for a fraud check (if I've made large purchases that doesn't fit my normal purchase patterns for instance) and had them rattle of the full days worth of charges with exact detail to me for me to verify. What you describe may still hold some places with banks that still haven't upgraded their systems, but it's very much a thing of the past for most credit card users. What I find shocking though, is how often I get calls f from my bank or card companies (from numbers I don't know) and they expect ME to authenticate to THEM by giving out personal details. I find it amazing that they actually want to train their customers to consider such calls "normal". I'm always very skeptical about them, and tend to prefer calling back on a number known to me, but I bet lots of customers aren't.
Keep in mind that if you charge back charges on your credit card it's ultimately the merchant that has to pay, not the card company. So if these guys where paying by card it's in the hotels interest as well to get it sorted out before they run up significant charges.
Where did you get the impression that the card companies didn't take responsibility? (btw. it's "liable" not "libel"). This guy specifically pointed out that both Discover and Visa called him to check the transactions, and unless he was clearly at fault (doesn't sound like it) the card companies generally do take responsibility (or rather they pass it on to the merchant).
They are American, but their European subsidiary offer services at least in the UK, Ireland and Spain. Don't know about the rest of Europe, and don't know if they offer the disposable card number stuff in Europe.