Wow banks gonna give us our money now !

Headline today in the UK-- "banks are to credit accounts on the same day as a cheque is presented"
This is different as to what happens at present whereby banks take the money from the cheque account immediately and then credit the other account with it from 5-7 days later , thus getting LOADS of free dosh.
A major breakthrough.... Unfortunately it isnt going to happen till 2007 - implicitly stating that it will take that long to improve the system.
As an ex programmer I can state that a computer programme [tends- because you can tell it differently] to execute the commands one after the other if the programme would be something like
xaccount:= xaccount- chequeno
yaccount:= yaccount+chequeno
where this would take about 1 billionth of a second and would debit/credit almost immediately.
However the banks built in a delay .
There are 2 levels of difficulty in resolving this.
The first would be to go to a [high level] screen where it would say something like
'what delay for cheques would you like ?' [days]
and typing in zero would do the job
The second and much more difficult would be for a programmer to look for the section of programme which dealt with cheques clearing and hunt for a variable saying something like chequedelay() to find that variable and then search for chequedelay():= 5 and change that to zero.
I personally cannot believe it would be the second variety which could take an hour to do and firmly believe it would be the first [ bearing in mind some banks had already done it some years before].
Thus this delay of 2 years to change a parameter which would take around 2 minutes to do [ being VERY generous] is designed to hoodwink the government.
This change was insisted on by the government [ I seem to remember a few years ago] and so is not *quite* as generous as it first seems.
Whoever in govt is responsible for insisting on this should not be taken in .
*falling on deaf ears* as usual........
I remember a few years ago, the music indusrty being taken to task about the cost of cds. Their breakdown of the costs of a cd was royalty £x, production £4 ? or some such - now you can get free cd in every PC mag and a some newspapers [Sunday Times et al]. If you ask an industry one thing they will reply ,sort of honestly, in their own terms.
Remember the report about supermarkets overcharging ? Lidl has a margin of 2% and Tesco/Sainsbury [at the time] was 4% - and Blair was incensed . It depends on your defintion of margin. there are 2 basic ones: markup ie they bought it for 20p and sold it for 40p, a markup of 100% and : margin [ the ones always quoted by industry] they bought it for 20p sold it for 40p the margin is 20p/40p ie 50%- an instant 50% headline number. If you then add in the cost of selling - warehousing admin, wages etc then for something bought for 20p and sold for 60p [yes why not ? ] the margin could well come down to 4%. Just an example of stats manipulation. In a true market, it dont matter much - but if there is a cartel or complex monopoly then that would be overcharging . I haven't the figures to say one way or t'other but I feel that Tesco et al are ok in that a monopoly is not in force, but it is worrying when you read about them screwing down the prices on suppliers....
Slightly disjointed argument maybe .... but a big subject