Whether the term is enforceable or not is debatable and almost certain to be rendered moot. Unlike US Republicans, UK Conservatives do actually believe in the rule of law and honest business practices (sort of). There isn't any party who believes that screwing the consumer is a constitutional right. There will be a bill passed.

A rather more direct question is whether the hotelier was entitled to collect the charge under the credit card agreement. And that is unambiguous, he isn't. A credit card merchant cannot use a charge card to recover a disputed charge. It does not matter what the purported contract term was or if it is enforceable. The credit card agreements are designed to prevent cardholders from dishonest merchants. So the consumer will get their refund and the hotelier will find themselves facing a 30 quid chargeback fee.

The only option for the hotelier to recover would be to take the matter to court. The most he could win is the hundred pounds, if he lost he would likely be out the legal costs which could be a couple of thousand. Small claims courts don't usually award costs but they might well do so in this case. Judges tend to detest bullies.

Its more than that, without regulation you end up with a lemon-law market.

Lots of times the difference between an honest product and a dishonest one only becomes apparent years later. If the product is safety equipment you only find out if the hard hat works when someone drops the brick on your head.

The libertarian theory that self interest will drive people to make honest products has turned out to be utterly false. In fact it turns out to be quite difficult for a company that intends to do the right thing to do so. I once had to get a guy fired after I found he had goosed his response rates for customer support calls by deliberately setting the phone tree up as a maze.

People do all sorts of idiotic short sighted stuff. This hotelier for example got his pants in a twist over a bad review and now he has probably sunk his business completely.

Rational choice is not an empirical fact of human behavior. It is a modelling assumption that tends to give good results in certain cases. But it does not hold for corporations because the interests of the corporation are not identical to those of the employees. All those banks who go belly up because the traders get big rewards for raking in profits and face no consequences for a loss. I don't gamble with my own money but if you want to give me $100,000 to gamble with I am happy to take it to Vegas, find a roulette wheel and let you take 100% of any losses and 90% of any gains.

... still use Sybase, and not some Johnny-come-lately like Oracle. Even for compliance stuff.

Your signature is profoundly disturbing. Citation, please?

Don't know much about Hungary (*), but if you really think that Merkel is "in bed with the Russians" you have bigger problems than worrying about your fuel security.

Anyway, oil dependence is essentially transport based; more specifically, private car use. So cut or reduce your dependence on that. You live in a multi-storey building of which you control only part - some kind of apartment block - so probably a fairly densely populated area. That makes it simple: If you currently drive a car to work, stop doing that. If you're really lazy, you could get a motorbike or scooter, drastically reducing your dependence; if you're not that lazy start cycling. With a bit of practice, a 20-30K commute on a bike is really not hard, and you'll save money on gym fees. That's oil dependance sorted.

Natural gas is trickier if you don't own the building (or at least apartment). If you can, you should probably install solar panels on the roof - not for your own use, as such, but to take advantage of the feed-in tariffs. And then buy an electric convection heater so you can heat your apartment if the gas gets cut off. And maybe buy a good sleeping bag or extra duvet. That won't save you from a catastrophic meltdown - you'd need a wood burning stove, a cabin in the woods, and a seriously unhealthy dose of paranoia(**) for that, but it will make short outages of gas a lot more comfortable.

(*) Feel free to sing this comment to the tune of Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World" :)
(**) You seem to already have 1 of those three.

I think the big elephant in the room is more to be found further upstream, in the area of manufacturing. Worrying about software hacks is one thing - not having the faintest absolute clue exactly *what* is inside the chip package is something else entirely. Think its an accumulator bank? Oh sorry, maybe we forgot to mention the harmonic bundles associated with wave guidance within the interstitial distances of the rapidly blinking transistors .. yeah, those can be read from space. With a satellite (or 12).

The game is over folks, or rather .. the game is on, depending on how you look at it. Until you are capable of investigating and participating, directly, in the sub-assemblies, you will always have a weak back door. Either we, ultimately, become able to assemble our own chips on the desktop, or there will always be a power class: those who can build such devices, and those who can only be ruled by them.

It appears that CurrentC moves liability exposure almost entirely onto the consumer, whereas Visa limits consumer exposure to $50 that most banks waive in actual fraud. Add full access to your bank account to make the worst-case liability exposure whatever you have in your account, and privacy terms that allow them to use health related data that could have been protected under HIPPA. Tell me again why I would want to use this?

It also makes sense to raise the issue with downstreams such as Debian, OpenSuse, or Fedora (assuming they exist for the project). Or if it is in one of the enterprise GNU/Linux distributions, approach those vendors.

A shift in taxation towards consumption is blatantly self-serving as the ultra-rich consume a disproportionate small fraction of their income and (especially) wealth.

Strangely, I have the impression that income taxes are comparatively low in the US whereas the corporate taxes are exceptionally high. Anyone who can comment meaningfully on this?

--
virve

We need to evolve to adapt to this new threat to the species, and instead of seriously *resisting* its effects on our being, we - the true power - direct the feature to our favour. If, out of the NSA catastrophe, we gain a "New Internet" wherein *everything, everywhere* for 15 years, was available to everyone, then we'd have indeed a new era in the human species. A truly evolutionary step, made by mistake - perhaps.

We can't change the fact that we work with machines. However, we can change the fact that we work alone. Make programming more social by adding pair programming at all levels, including academia, and you'll get more women willing to join and stay. You'll also get the rest of the benefits which come along with pair programming such as fewer bugs and higher quality code.

Indeed. I find it more than coincidence that the majority of women stay away from fields where they need to work alone with machines. IT, auto mechanics, construction, and engineering are all male-dominated fields. Why? Sexism? Yes, some fields are more sexist than others. However, medicine and law were also extremely sexist in the recent past. And yet, we have tons of women doctors and lawyers. The main difference I see with those fields is that doctors and lawyers actually work with other people. The work is often group work. Frankly, it appears that most women simply don't like IT work once they get a chance to perform it in the industry. If they truly loved the work, I'm sure we'd see many more women rushing to come into tech and stick around.

This brings to mind an interesting solution. You want to see more women in tech? Then make tech work more social. We already have an answer to that: Pair programming.

Why are companies pushing women into IT? Simple. Follow the money. If companies could find a way to make IT interesting for women, then they could double their workforce. Doubling the supply of workers for the same number of jobs means that companies could cut salaries in half. Cutting salaries means increasing profits and bonuses for executives. That's the real motivation, not some altruistic concern over womens' rights or equality.

Exactly. Why are auto mechanics overwhelmingly male? It's the same damn reason. Most women aren't interested in working alone with machines. If women were interested in this work, then they'd already be doing this work.

Whenever I see articles like this, I keep getting the feeling that we're trying to hammer square pegs into round holes. Then we sit and wonder why we see a problem.

Sorry, if end goal is to turn out engineers, then I don't see the logic in pushing uninterested girls to become interested when we're turning away boys who are already interested. From my experience, the kids that do best in any field are the ones most interested in that field. If you really want to see all those technological marvels, then we should be focusing effort on the kids with the interest, motivation, and drive to learn the topic. Let's focus on the kids who are interested regardless of their gender.