There's hints that they rolled some of the core technologies of Wave into Google Docs to enable document collaboration.
They also donated Wave to Apache.
I had great hopes for it as a collaboration application - never mind the social aspects. I'd really like to sit down with it and make something worthwhile, but I think it's beyond the limits of my spare time. Specifically, I think it would be really, really, great for medical records, as long as the access control, encryption, etc, can be sorted out. Especially if it can be done in a native client rather than the browser.
You and I understand it, but the popular image* is that encryption is that something that is trivially broken.
The Allies were very lucky that the state of the art was so primitive at the time of WWII, and that the digital computer had not been invented. Even then, they had to devote significant resources, manpower, and intelligence to the production line of breaking Axis encryption. The advances made then contributed significantly to later advances in Information Technology.
The image that people focus on is that that the encryption was broken. Since then, information technology has improved greatly, so the ability to break encryption must have improved greatly, yes?
They forget that breaking the encryption was a gargantuan task compared to the task of encrypting the messages themselves - the encryption was done by basic troops with a portable hand-operated clockwork lightbox, the decryption took large banks of electromechanical equipment and a fair number of geniuses.
Now many of us carry a computer that makes the combined computing power of Bletchley Park look like a toy abacus.
* I'm not talking about the _popular_, popular image, foisted on us by movies like Swordfish. Believe me, if simultaneously having a gun held to your head and receiving a blowjob improved your programming ability to the point where you could break 128-bit encryption in less than a minute, there would be a HELL of a lot of employment opportunities in the thug / fluffer department at most successful software firms.
I've stayed in hotels where the in-room AV is provided by an iMac, running VLC. They stream everything from a central server, including the TV (much easier in a country where all the broadcasts are now DVB-T).
I appreciated the technical coolness of this solution, as well as the very welcome extra features of having a fully functional computer in the room. I wish more hotels would do it.
Part of the problem the UK has with hospital cleanliness is that the cleaning has been outsourced.
They used to be direct employees of the hospital. They were paid reasonably, and they had *pride* in their work.
In order to cut costs, it was outsourced. The only reason you do this for on-site labour (where you can't benefit from the cost of living in a foreign country) is to wash your hands clean (how ironic) of the screwing your workers are about to get. And because you are imposing another layer of management and overheads (the cleaning company), the only way you CAN make a cost saving is to compromise quality and screw your workers.
Workers who know their employer is out to screw them for every penny, who are driven to complete tasks by time, not by quality, do not have pride in their work and do not do a quality job. Hence the very apt comparison to supermarket cleaning.
It's much more of a leap. Antibiotics mess with specific molecules in the cell wall of bacteria. Alcohol just ruins them all by not being water and thus not having the same solvent characteristics, making the proteins fold up wrong and stop working.
Obligatory car analogy : It's like the difference between securing your car by changing the locks.
The guy who has a key can no longer get in.
The guy who has a sledgehammer still has no trouble.
It's actually more likely to build resistance - because USians pay for their medicine, they are much less likely to complete a course of antibiotics.
The article misrepresents the position - antibiotics don't "encourage bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them", they just leave behind bacteria that have more resistance. It's therefore very important to go Darth Sidious on their ass and "wipe them out. All of them.", or the few that remain will multiply, unobstructed by their cream-puff peers who are all dead now.
Paying for your medicine gives you an incentive to stop taking it as soon as you feel well, rather then comply with the advice of your doctor and finish the course. A lot of people save the remainder of the course for future illnesses.
The doctor has no incentive to refuse you antibiotics, as pointed out by siblings. Because your perception of his care matters to his paycheck, he's far more likely to prescribe them. Even in a socialised healthcare system, doctors will prescribe antibiotics just to get the patient out of their office so they can see the next one.
This doesn't take into account that the other thing that USians do / did with antibiotics (do they still do this?) is feed them to their livestock. If the animal isn't funding the growth of bacteria with it's nutrients, it will grow more itself. Alas, this also promotes resistance.
The pharma companies have no incentive to fix this either, because they can sell newer (often less effective) antibiotics that have less communal resistance. They are ecstatic that the old antibiotics no longer work, because they are out of patent and anyone could make them for a few pennies a dose. Instead they can sell "last line" drugs that cost upwards of $100 a day.
Windows 8 does not require secure boot - but getting a "designed for Windows 8" sticker requires that the feature is present, and switched on, in your system as shipped.
The chilling effect that this will have on alternate operating system use (because it now requires more steps than just inserting a LiveCD / LiveUSB) is quite aside from the security implications of defeating the Windows 8 or UEFI bootloader though.
BDB is an in-process key-value store. It's limited to being accessed by a single process, and has much more limited replication ability.
This is a server based product ; your client communicates with servers using a driver. It's "eventually consistent", meaning that changes take time to propagate across the replication axis, so not all clients see the same picture (although with this one, you can influence the ACID-ity of atoms of data by grouping them on "major" keys).
The advantage is mostly scalability. You can throw more servers at it to provide more capacity, and the software will do a lot of the work to ensure that this works. If you want more capacity on BDB, you need to throw a bigger chunk of iron at it.
The other major difference ; the open-source license (Sleepycat) for BerkeleyDB is copyleft. Despite the name, it's not released under a Berkely Software Distribution style license - Oracle dual license it and you have to pay a commercial license fee to distribute products based on it without releasing your own sources.
The Community Editor license file for Oracle NoSQL from the distribution lists a number of licenses, all of them BSD-style - new BSD and Apache 2.0 ; in certain quarters this will be greeted with a great deal more enthusiasm. The only difference between the Community and paid editions is the support.
They do have more capacity - this isn't the traditional carbon electrode, this is a graphene-stabilised silicon anode, and silicon holds more charge.
They also have more power, as well as more capacity. If the internal resistance is low enough to charge it in 15 minutes, it's low enough to discharge it that fast as well.
Alas, the missing bit is similar innovations in cathode technology.
Application of intelligence is a natural biological process too, since the mind is running in a biochemical substrate (until the AI is working..)
You're arguably more responsible for the AI than you are for the baby - it's possible to produce a baby without understanding what you are doing. You don't make an AI accidentally on a drunken prom date.
The baby isn't even sentient until it reaches a certain level of development.
So why do we value the child over the computer? Because we are biased towards humans? I'm not saying this is wrong, just saying it's not defensible from the purely intellectual point of view - if they are both sentient and have an imperative to survive, defending the destruction of the artificial sentience because it's easy and free of consequence is in the same ball park as shooting indigenous tribesmen because "they're only darkies".
But voted out of office in exchange for what? Another one of the same.
Ultimately, yes, the problem is the voters. But it's rather like complaining that if the sheep don't like the pen they are herded into, they should get a new sheepdog, when we all know the shepherd is calling the shots.
We had that too ; we could get a copy of Office for a similar small cost, on the back of the licenses we had for the office.
Then we cancelled our licensing deal, legally we have to remove the copies we bought for home use.
It's a pretty transparent ploy to prevent people from trying out other "productivity" suites. The only reasons that they don't give it away for free under these circumstances are that they have to defer some of the costs of administering the scheme - but it's mostly about perception. If you start getting Office for free, you'll start to perceive it as worthless.
That said, I find LibreOffice just as clunky and frustrating as Office, and the extra problem it has of not being entirely compatible with the more popular Office is a real issue. I'm not the typical audience though - I use these programs less than 5% of my working time (like many of us on Slashdot, I think).
The only part of Office I use daily is Outlook, and that's only because our Exchange server is hidden behind some XML-RPC-over-HTTP obfuscation layer that other clients don't know how to use. We used to have a public IMAP server, but we changed to Exchange, and you dare not expose unshielded Exchange services to the internet because they'll be pwned, rapidly.
It's going to take a lot of time in the lab to match the nutrition and efficiency of muscle meat produced from 3.5 billion years of evolution.
The production of meat is not what the animal evolved for ; the meat serves the needs of the animal, rather than the animal serving the needs of the meat. There's a lot of room for efficiency in it's production.
Whether vatmeat is the same kind of delicious is another matter ; it may be that the natural processes that make meat tasty cannot be engineered out of the process of making vatmeat, which may reduce the efficiency somewhat, but I'm willing to bet it would still come out ahead.
If that's like "Dragon's Den" in the UK, I've seen them turn away perfectly viable products because they didn't like the attitude of the owner ; mostly because he had a environmental product and preferred it to be made by workers in his own town rather than mass-produced in China.
The next guy had a plastic block puzzle that he'd costed out for Chinese production at £2 a piece and was intending to sell retail at £15 - over 700% markup. They nearly had a fist-fight over who got to invest in his product.
This was not my experience recently (Ubuntu 11.10) ; I bought an album for my wife, and Banshee just queued the download of all the tracks, and told me when it was finished.
9.10 installs Rhythmbox by default IIRC. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to claim that a client is 2 years out of date, when it's part of a 2 year old operating system with a policy of tying major functional changes to the distribution as a whole, and only releasing bug fixes for older versions.
MS are trying to charge for patent licenses that cover a fraction of the features in their mobile OS, a fee that is more than that for their entire mobile OS.
That is extortion. They are trying to punish vendors who select a non-MS OS for their device, because it raises the popularity of those non-MS platforms by demonstrating that devices without MS software are possible, functional, and even desirable. To serve as an example to the others, they make damn sure that people know they are receiving more in patent license royalties for Android devices than they are in sales for their own product.
I think it rather backfires on them though ; it just illustrates that Android is the more desirable platform, to the degree that manufacturers are *willing* to pay MS their protection money.
And given that MS had a very strong history of trying to conceal the list of patents involved, refusing an NDA would have been a viable delaying tactic for anyone. Other manufacturers, as you rightly point out, had an alternate, lower-risk approach, which was brandishing their own patent portfolio in a threatening manner. But it would still have been a viable tactic for any of them.
Since the MS patents are indeed public documents, it does seem that the only reason that there would be any kind of commercial advantage worth protecting with an NDA, in a list of those documents, would be that MS are not confident that these patents would stand up to wider scrutiny. The other reason would be that other manufacturers might be able to produce a product that avoids infringement, instead of committing to a product, releasing it, then being retrospectively attacked by MS.
MS have no interest in permitting either of those things
Ubuntu has used OpenJDK by default for quite some time.. the Oracle / Sun JDK has been relegated to the partner repository for that time, and only recently dropped.
Despite dire warnings about compatibility, the only issues I've had with using OpenJDK over the Sun JDK have been due to bad programming on the project I'm working on (things like serializing Swing components, which you're specifically told not to do).
Indeed, and the laptop screens seem to be going backwards because of the consumer display revolution. I remember having a 1600x1200 laptop display 10 years ago and being glad of it.
These days my laptop has a 1440x900 screen, my desktop panels at work are 1280x1024 (more to do with my employer being cheap... but the new widescreen panels they are buying are 1440x900 as well, I think).
As someone who wants as many vertical pixels as possible, I'm not happy....
It's what happens when government is in concert with corporation - in China, many of the top corporations are, as you point out, effectively state owned.
Here in the West, it's the other way around ; the government is in large part, owned in influence by the corporations. Happily, some part of it remains in public hands.
I don't think your expressed desire for less government is unreasonable from the idealistic point of view, but this is not tenable in real life. Really, I suspect the majority of powerful people who express a wish for less government really mean - "less of the kind of government that gets in my way". I suspect they are not opposed to more of the kind of government that supports them by bailing out their banks, spending tax money on war materiel, and passing laws that continuously erode the original spirit of collective bargains like copyright and patents. Even the Tea Party doesn't put its money where its mouth is, and keeps its cash in a bailed-out bank.
Much of the the West is currently governed by the right wing ; well, China is the furthest end of right wing and has probably always been so - one mighty corporation in all but name. They have much less government than the West, and the common man is much worse off.
I actually think something similar to this would be great for all legislation.
Currently, legislation is constantly revised - by adding additional clauses to the bottom of the law. This makes it very difficult to read.
Instead, keep it clear by keeping your legislation in a git repo, branching it, and just editing the law to read as you think it should. Propose your "patch" to whatever legislative assembly you use currently, and if they approve, your patch is merged at the designated date.
The first exercise would be to check in all the current legislation, then progressively edit each law such that the amendments are removed, and combined with the body. Use the same process - write a patch that removes the amendment, and when people agree with the body, merge it.
Once you have that, the law is much simplified and you can proceed from there.
I'm sure Wal-Mart are happy to cash checks because it means they have less cash to bank.
The UK pioneered this approach when Tesco invented debit card cashback ; because debit card transactions are a fixed fee, it doesn't cost the retailer any more to process a larger transaction, but it does mean that they don't have to bank the cash, which costs them 56 pence per £100.
Wal-Mart probably pay less to bank cheques than they pay to bank cash. With cash banking fees at about 0.5% and cheque processing rates fixed per-cheque at about £0.65 , it's more economical for a business in the UK to bank cheques larger than £130 than it is to bank cash. If you're charging for the service, that's probably all gravy.
Slashdot Mirror
Ant-Roach reminds me of a tachikoma
There's hints that they rolled some of the core technologies of Wave into Google Docs to enable document collaboration.
They also donated Wave to Apache.
I had great hopes for it as a collaboration application - never mind the social aspects. I'd really like to sit down with it and make something worthwhile, but I think it's beyond the limits of my spare time. Specifically, I think it would be really, really, great for medical records, as long as the access control, encryption, etc, can be sorted out. Especially if it can be done in a native client rather than the browser.
Yeah, I quite like their geranium and cherry cupcake. You can even get it in their lunch deal, as I recall.
You and I understand it, but the popular image* is that encryption is that something that is trivially broken.
The Allies were very lucky that the state of the art was so primitive at the time of WWII, and that the digital computer had not been invented. Even then, they had to devote significant resources, manpower, and intelligence to the production line of breaking Axis encryption. The advances made then contributed significantly to later advances in Information Technology.
The image that people focus on is that that the encryption was broken. Since then, information technology has improved greatly, so the ability to break encryption must have improved greatly, yes?
They forget that breaking the encryption was a gargantuan task compared to the task of encrypting the messages themselves - the encryption was done by basic troops with a portable hand-operated clockwork lightbox, the decryption took large banks of electromechanical equipment and a fair number of geniuses.
Now many of us carry a computer that makes the combined computing power of Bletchley Park look like a toy abacus.
* I'm not talking about the _popular_, popular image, foisted on us by movies like Swordfish. Believe me, if simultaneously having a gun held to your head and receiving a blowjob improved your programming ability to the point where you could break 128-bit encryption in less than a minute, there would be a HELL of a lot of employment opportunities in the thug / fluffer department at most successful software firms.
I've stayed in hotels where the in-room AV is provided by an iMac, running VLC. They stream everything from a central server, including the TV (much easier in a country where all the broadcasts are now DVB-T).
I appreciated the technical coolness of this solution, as well as the very welcome extra features of having a fully functional computer in the room. I wish more hotels would do it.
Part of the problem the UK has with hospital cleanliness is that the cleaning has been outsourced.
They used to be direct employees of the hospital. They were paid reasonably, and they had *pride* in their work.
In order to cut costs, it was outsourced. The only reason you do this for on-site labour (where you can't benefit from the cost of living in a foreign country) is to wash your hands clean (how ironic) of the screwing your workers are about to get. And because you are imposing another layer of management and overheads (the cleaning company), the only way you CAN make a cost saving is to compromise quality and screw your workers.
Workers who know their employer is out to screw them for every penny, who are driven to complete tasks by time, not by quality, do not have pride in their work and do not do a quality job. Hence the very apt comparison to supermarket cleaning.
It's much more of a leap. Antibiotics mess with specific molecules in the cell wall of bacteria. Alcohol just ruins them all by not being water and thus not having the same solvent characteristics, making the proteins fold up wrong and stop working.
Obligatory car analogy : It's like the difference between securing your car by changing the locks.
The guy who has a key can no longer get in.
The guy who has a sledgehammer still has no trouble.
It's actually more likely to build resistance - because USians pay for their medicine, they are much less likely to complete a course of antibiotics.
The article misrepresents the position - antibiotics don't "encourage bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them", they just leave behind bacteria that have more resistance. It's therefore very important to go Darth Sidious on their ass and "wipe them out. All of them.", or the few that remain will multiply, unobstructed by their cream-puff peers who are all dead now.
Paying for your medicine gives you an incentive to stop taking it as soon as you feel well, rather then comply with the advice of your doctor and finish the course. A lot of people save the remainder of the course for future illnesses.
The doctor has no incentive to refuse you antibiotics, as pointed out by siblings. Because your perception of his care matters to his paycheck, he's far more likely to prescribe them. Even in a socialised healthcare system, doctors will prescribe antibiotics just to get the patient out of their office so they can see the next one.
This doesn't take into account that the other thing that USians do / did with antibiotics (do they still do this?) is feed them to their livestock. If the animal isn't funding the growth of bacteria with it's nutrients, it will grow more itself. Alas, this also promotes resistance.
The pharma companies have no incentive to fix this either, because they can sell newer (often less effective) antibiotics that have less communal resistance. They are ecstatic that the old antibiotics no longer work, because they are out of patent and anyone could make them for a few pennies a dose. Instead they can sell "last line" drugs that cost upwards of $100 a day.
Windows 8 does not require secure boot - but getting a "designed for Windows 8" sticker requires that the feature is present, and switched on, in your system as shipped.
The chilling effect that this will have on alternate operating system use (because it now requires more steps than just inserting a LiveCD / LiveUSB) is quite aside from the security implications of defeating the Windows 8 or UEFI bootloader though.
BDB is an in-process key-value store. It's limited to being accessed by a single process, and has much more limited replication ability.
This is a server based product ; your client communicates with servers using a driver. It's "eventually consistent", meaning that changes take time to propagate across the replication axis, so not all clients see the same picture (although with this one, you can influence the ACID-ity of atoms of data by grouping them on "major" keys).
The advantage is mostly scalability. You can throw more servers at it to provide more capacity, and the software will do a lot of the work to ensure that this works. If you want more capacity on BDB, you need to throw a bigger chunk of iron at it.
The other major difference ; the open-source license (Sleepycat) for BerkeleyDB is copyleft. Despite the name, it's not released under a Berkely Software Distribution style license - Oracle dual license it and you have to pay a commercial license fee to distribute products based on it without releasing your own sources.
The Community Editor license file for Oracle NoSQL from the distribution lists a number of licenses, all of them BSD-style - new BSD and Apache 2.0 ; in certain quarters this will be greeted with a great deal more enthusiasm. The only difference between the Community and paid editions is the support.
They also have a planet that elects a government of alien lizards, who they hate.
"Why do they vote for the lizards, then?"
"Well, if they didn't the wrong lizard might get into power..."
They do have more capacity - this isn't the traditional carbon electrode, this is a graphene-stabilised silicon anode, and silicon holds more charge.
They also have more power, as well as more capacity. If the internal resistance is low enough to charge it in 15 minutes, it's low enough to discharge it that fast as well.
Alas, the missing bit is similar innovations in cathode technology.
Application of intelligence is a natural biological process too, since the mind is running in a biochemical substrate (until the AI is working..)
You're arguably more responsible for the AI than you are for the baby - it's possible to produce a baby without understanding what you are doing. You don't make an AI accidentally on a drunken prom date.
The baby isn't even sentient until it reaches a certain level of development.
So why do we value the child over the computer? Because we are biased towards humans? I'm not saying this is wrong, just saying it's not defensible from the purely intellectual point of view - if they are both sentient and have an imperative to survive, defending the destruction of the artificial sentience because it's easy and free of consequence is in the same ball park as shooting indigenous tribesmen because "they're only darkies".
But voted out of office in exchange for what? Another one of the same.
Ultimately, yes, the problem is the voters. But it's rather like complaining that if the sheep don't like the pen they are herded into, they should get a new sheepdog, when we all know the shepherd is calling the shots.
We had that too ; we could get a copy of Office for a similar small cost, on the back of the licenses we had for the office.
Then we cancelled our licensing deal, legally we have to remove the copies we bought for home use.
It's a pretty transparent ploy to prevent people from trying out other "productivity" suites. The only reasons that they don't give it away for free under these circumstances are that they have to defer some of the costs of administering the scheme - but it's mostly about perception. If you start getting Office for free, you'll start to perceive it as worthless.
That said, I find LibreOffice just as clunky and frustrating as Office, and the extra problem it has of not being entirely compatible with the more popular Office is a real issue. I'm not the typical audience though - I use these programs less than 5% of my working time (like many of us on Slashdot, I think).
The only part of Office I use daily is Outlook, and that's only because our Exchange server is hidden behind some XML-RPC-over-HTTP obfuscation layer that other clients don't know how to use. We used to have a public IMAP server, but we changed to Exchange, and you dare not expose unshielded Exchange services to the internet because they'll be pwned, rapidly.
It's going to take a lot of time in the lab to match the nutrition and efficiency of muscle meat produced from 3.5 billion years of evolution.
The production of meat is not what the animal evolved for ; the meat serves the needs of the animal, rather than the animal serving the needs of the meat. There's a lot of room for efficiency in it's production.
Whether vatmeat is the same kind of delicious is another matter ; it may be that the natural processes that make meat tasty cannot be engineered out of the process of making vatmeat, which may reduce the efficiency somewhat, but I'm willing to bet it would still come out ahead.
If that's like "Dragon's Den" in the UK, I've seen them turn away perfectly viable products because they didn't like the attitude of the owner ; mostly because he had a environmental product and preferred it to be made by workers in his own town rather than mass-produced in China.
The next guy had a plastic block puzzle that he'd costed out for Chinese production at £2 a piece and was intending to sell retail at £15 - over 700% markup. They nearly had a fist-fight over who got to invest in his product.
This was not my experience recently (Ubuntu 11.10) ; I bought an album for my wife, and Banshee just queued the download of all the tracks, and told me when it was finished.
9.10 installs Rhythmbox by default IIRC. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to claim that a client is 2 years out of date, when it's part of a 2 year old operating system with a policy of tying major functional changes to the distribution as a whole, and only releasing bug fixes for older versions.
It's probably fibre-to-the-premises.
MS are trying to charge for patent licenses that cover a fraction of the features in their mobile OS, a fee that is more than that for their entire mobile OS.
That is extortion. They are trying to punish vendors who select a non-MS OS for their device, because it raises the popularity of those non-MS platforms by demonstrating that devices without MS software are possible, functional, and even desirable. To serve as an example to the others, they make damn sure that people know they are receiving more in patent license royalties for Android devices than they are in sales for their own product.
I think it rather backfires on them though ; it just illustrates that Android is the more desirable platform, to the degree that manufacturers are *willing* to pay MS their protection money.
And given that MS had a very strong history of trying to conceal the list of patents involved, refusing an NDA would have been a viable delaying tactic for anyone. Other manufacturers, as you rightly point out, had an alternate, lower-risk approach, which was brandishing their own patent portfolio in a threatening manner. But it would still have been a viable tactic for any of them.
Since the MS patents are indeed public documents, it does seem that the only reason that there would be any kind of commercial advantage worth protecting with an NDA, in a list of those documents, would be that MS are not confident that these patents would stand up to wider scrutiny. The other reason would be that other manufacturers might be able to produce a product that avoids infringement, instead of committing to a product, releasing it, then being retrospectively attacked by MS.
MS have no interest in permitting either of those things
Ubuntu has used OpenJDK by default for quite some time .. the Oracle / Sun JDK has been relegated to the partner repository for that time, and only recently dropped.
Despite dire warnings about compatibility, the only issues I've had with using OpenJDK over the Sun JDK have been due to bad programming on the project I'm working on (things like serializing Swing components, which you're specifically told not to do).
Indeed, and the laptop screens seem to be going backwards because of the consumer display revolution. I remember having a 1600x1200 laptop display 10 years ago and being glad of it.
These days my laptop has a 1440x900 screen, my desktop panels at work are 1280x1024 (more to do with my employer being cheap... but the new widescreen panels they are buying are 1440x900 as well, I think).
As someone who wants as many vertical pixels as possible, I'm not happy....
It's what happens when government is in concert with corporation - in China, many of the top corporations are, as you point out, effectively state owned.
Here in the West, it's the other way around ; the government is in large part, owned in influence by the corporations. Happily, some part of it remains in public hands.
I don't think your expressed desire for less government is unreasonable from the idealistic point of view, but this is not tenable in real life. Really, I suspect the majority of powerful people who express a wish for less government really mean - "less of the kind of government that gets in my way". I suspect they are not opposed to more of the kind of government that supports them by bailing out their banks, spending tax money on war materiel, and passing laws that continuously erode the original spirit of collective bargains like copyright and patents. Even the Tea Party doesn't put its money where its mouth is, and keeps its cash in a bailed-out bank.
Much of the the West is currently governed by the right wing ; well, China is the furthest end of right wing and has probably always been so - one mighty corporation in all but name. They have much less government than the West, and the common man is much worse off.
I actually think something similar to this would be great for all legislation.
Currently, legislation is constantly revised - by adding additional clauses to the bottom of the law. This makes it very difficult to read.
Instead, keep it clear by keeping your legislation in a git repo, branching it, and just editing the law to read as you think it should. Propose your "patch" to whatever legislative assembly you use currently, and if they approve, your patch is merged at the designated date.
The first exercise would be to check in all the current legislation, then progressively edit each law such that the amendments are removed, and combined with the body. Use the same process - write a patch that removes the amendment, and when people agree with the body, merge it.
Once you have that, the law is much simplified and you can proceed from there.
I'm sure Wal-Mart are happy to cash checks because it means they have less cash to bank.
The UK pioneered this approach when Tesco invented debit card cashback ; because debit card transactions are a fixed fee, it doesn't cost the retailer any more to process a larger transaction, but it does mean that they don't have to bank the cash, which costs them 56 pence per £100.
Wal-Mart probably pay less to bank cheques than they pay to bank cash. With cash banking fees at about 0.5% and cheque processing rates fixed per-cheque at about £0.65 , it's more economical for a business in the UK to bank cheques larger than £130 than it is to bank cash. If you're charging for the service, that's probably all gravy.