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.

Yes, we certainly have been over this. All the windmills in the world amount to 4% of worldwide electricity output. How much more can we get? Not every place with people has year-round wind. So you need serious investment in transmission and storage, areas which are currently already strained under existing load. Can it be done? Unproven.

If you don't care to 'win' the fight w/ comcast, then go get a budget ($1/month) VPS running CentOS like from somewhere cheap like Crissic or Ramnode and use it to route your outbound email. It'll cost you less in actual dollars than your time investment in fighting comcast to date at minimum wage or that you'll spend reading the comments on this 'ask me anything' I figure :)

Just an option!

Large is obviously to be taken in the context of global warming (how much more obvious can the context be?). Individual machinery is not large on this scale.

We've been over this. Cordemais produces at most 22.8 TWh per year assuming year-round 100% production with zero downtime. The 2006 report, page 9, exact same table, lists 60.5 TWh of coal-based production for the year 2006. Do I need to belabor the obvious and point out that 22.8 is less than 60.5? Cordemais alone does not produce more power than what the report claims for coal power stations. Give it up already, you're just flat-out wrong.

I think you vastly overestimate how many x86 apps can be rebuilt. Even Intel itself has to go to absurd lengths to engineer bug-for-bug binary compatibility into successive generations of x86 chips, precisely because it's so hard to get the industry to recompile. People always complain about Linux because it lacks Photoshop ... well, where is Photoshop for ARM? You speak of servers; where is Oracle's database software for ARM?

It's also not clear if Intel can succeed in making x86 chips save power. At least they're really trying now, which is more than they were doing before. But all that x86 instruction set baggage really bites them. It's something they can ignore in the server arena, but low-power is a different beast. Now I'm not saying they can't do it; Intel has great people and they do great things when they really try. But it will be hard.

I don't know what you're talking about but in the USA many public school districts are strapped for cash and the educational discount does not quite go all the way in making the Surface Pro price-competitive with Chromebooks (how can it?).

The Surface Pro 3 requires compromising on price. It's much more expensive than any of the alternatives under discussion, especially if you want basic functionality such as a keyboard.

The only problem is that Windows RT is doomed. Windows is far too dependent on x86 compatibility. If it can't run existing legacy Windows programs, then for most people there's no point. Without backward compatibility, you'll have to switch over to completely new software anyway, and by that point for the vast majority of people an iPad is a more attractive proposition.

I'll go one further. The real cost is not licensing, and it is not CALs. Everyone knows the real cost is LIABILITY. Horror stories abound of BSA licensing audits gone amok. Funny how Microsoft's Total Cost of Ownership studies always ignore the cost of license compliance, and always ignore the risk of multi-million dollar BSA penalties for even the most minor infractions.

I avoid all non-free software from BSA member organizations. If the BSA comes knocking, they get the door slammed on them until they come back with a court-issued warrant.

Worthless? Blatant lie. Where did I say wind was worthless? Quote me please.

You will fail. I never said wind was worthless. Even a computer could do this. Hint: Ctrl-F.

I never even said anything that could be interpreted as equivalent to saying wind was worthless. Again, if you think otherwise, quote me. Go ahead.

Wind power today is 4% of global electricity production. This amount is worthwhile, but NOT A COMPLETE SOLUTION, and whether or not wind can go much beyond present production remains unproven. What part of this complex sentence do you not understand?

The 2006 report says exactly what I said it says, and you know full well that it does.

Since you can read French, I direct your attention to page 9 from the 2006 report.

Production totale brute d’électricité (2006): 450.2 TWh (Nucléaire)
Total: 574.5 TWh

In percentage terms: 78.4%

Stop it with the outright falsehoods. I am right.

"ongoing investigations" becomes a catchphrase to cover a lot of potentially shady things.

I think that's a bigger concern if the result of declaring an investigation ongoing is to make it easier to discard evidence rather than to retain it. It's always possible to discard or seal evidence that's being kept, but it's not generally possible to recover evidence that's been discarded. Therefore, the general position should be to discard only recordings that can easily be categorized as not evidence and keep any that might possibly be evidence.

Wow, more accusations. If you want to get all accusatory, let's take you to task for YOUR lies:

1. I can read French very well, thank you very much. Lie.

2. I have no idea what Party you keep referring to. I do not live in Russia. I do not live in the USA. I do not live in Europe. I cannot debate straw men. Identify "The Party" to which you refer if you want me to comment intelligently on this bogeyman.

3. I am no longer committing any deceptions, yet you still have not rebutted in any way the fundamental argument that nuclear power has a far higher output ceiling than wind, all the meanwhile accusing me of lying. Stop grasping at past straw men.

4. "As for the name calling, you've been doing either all of it or pretty damned close to all of it." Direct quote from you. Blatant lie, and you got called out on it hard. Note: arguing that your name-calling was justified does not mean your name-calling never happened.

5. "I very much doubt 75% is the case apart from a absolute yearly maximum" Direct quote from you, which you have still not yet unambiguously repudiated.

Stop attacking me and give me a good reason why we should not pursue nuclear power more than wind power. All I hear is crickets so far.