It is easier to encourage payment beforehand than to get money afterwards.
That is: don't work without a contract, etc.

Offcourse, the type of problems described in TFA will still occur.

I happen to have some expertise in this area (i.e., I have published some peer-reviewed work on spelling correction).
So, why are spell-checkers wrong?
Basically there are two types of errors (which can be further subdivided later).
1) unknown string.
2) known strings that are wrong by context.

Now spell-checkers have a much easier time with the first type, especially if you defined an error as "not appearing in the dictionary".
However, even than, most systems (e.g., firefox, word, openoffice) only deal somewhat well with typos.
Other unknown string "errors" they deal less well with, think off foreign (but correct!) words, jargon, run-ons, splits, etc.

For the second type you need to have some _really reliable_ model of context in order to catch these types of errors.
Personally I don't believe the way to go is a grammar-based system.
I think a system that, with quite some statistics, can implicitly learn the correct grammar in much simpler models.
(for instance a model of the "typical" context words co-occuring with a specific word).

Anyway: spell checking does not work that way. It still has a LONG long way to go.

If we are talking about my subject (machine learning / NLP) a lot of the successful tools are open source and developed in academia.
Now I admit there aren't many large NLP companies out there (Nuance springs to mind, but they have their own software), but there are quite a few medium-sized companies that do quite well using open source Machine Learning tools. (After all, the machine learning algorithm is not what is unique about a specific solution anyway).

For instance, TiMBL ( http://ilk.uvt.nl/timbl/ ) is widely used in several small companies (mainly for development of solutions as it is extremely easy to use).

No it isn't.

There is a bunch of different schemes going about.
- There are the national health insurance countries (like the uk) where it is all paid by the goverment and you can just walk in. (there is still a healthy market for extra insurance and private clinics)
- There are some which have a mandatory minimum insurance scheme with privatised hospitals (like in the netherlands). You are obligated to have insurance, but the goverment limits the price of that insurance. At the moment it is around 100 euros a month for basic (Everything you really need). Plus offcourse huge amounts of tax money going to the hospitals (However that last bit is not different in the states).
- There are some in-between forms of that. I.e. no insurance, NHS like systems with co-pay, etc.

Wait, you can't return your tickets over there?

It is good that something is being done about the reselling of tickets with a high markup.
This has been a bane of musicians and concert-venues for a long time now.

On the other hand I don't think this is the way to go.
Tickets _should_ be transferable.

The way the Dutch government dealt with this is better in my opinion. It is now illegal over here to resell tickets with a markup higher than X% (I forget how much percent, I think 40).

Way, way back when I was an CS undergrad the networking course used OMNeT++. Even though we hadn't done anything in C++ before it was quite easily usable for our stuff.
(We had to design a simple network protocol for an extremely unreliable short-range wireless network (eyesnodes). Model this in OMNeT++ and then implement it).