The two times I've had in-store card referrals (high value transactions: the first time was buying a P3 laptop, which was quite high end in those days; the second was furnishing a new apartment after moving to Houston), I'm pretty sure it was the issuing bank ultimately handling the call - I can't imagine the bank would have transferred the personal information they were asking for as a security check to the merchant services provider: past unlisted contact details, previous transactions etc. I suspect the call may have been transferred to them, though, rather than called directly.

I had a similar issue this year with British Telecom working on a broadband fault. The service manager wanted to speak directly to the field engineer working on the fault (different divisions: the engineer's BT Openreach, the manager was BT Wholesale) - but the Openreach guy said he couldn't call the Wholesale one directly. So, the Wholesale one called my number and asked to speak to him ...

it is the retailer who is supposed to make the call to the financial institution on the retailer's own phone line

To be fair, the Apple Store staff tried phoning on their own iPhones first, but none of them could figure out how to hold it to get a signal, so they had to borrow the customer's phone instead...

Why? It's a temporary promotion that expires 31th July. After that they're most likely going to ask money for it again. Their game, their rules.

The promotion also ends 31st July, from what I read. After that they'll charge money again, I must presume.

Look to play it, you must run Windows, to run Windows means that you almost certainly have malware already. To me that makes it a non issue. Want to game? Have a Windows partition for that specifically and consider it "nukable-from-orbit". Do important stuff on sane platforms. That's how I see it, and as such, SecuROM is no big deal, even with the rather overblown claims of it being malware. It might be, and if it is, it's still no big deal as you isolate it from important things. At least slashdotters should, and normal people have malware regardless.

Lol, no i did not forget Microsoft Kin. Actually an excellent example of how Microsoft manages to mismanage anything it touches into oblivion. Microsoft kin was not that bad, just sacrificed on the Microsoft inbreed management alter.

Yes, I don't get this. They give a game away for free and instead of saying "Fun! Thank you EA" many people are complaining about the DRM. Yes, there is DRM, but you're running Windows to play it, so that really is the least of your problems. I grabbed it. I don't even have Windows in active use, but should I ever have tons of free spare time and want to play a game, I can now install it on a Games-Dedicated-Windows partition.

I say "Thank you EA".

As long as your Karma is "Excellent", you're ok.

I wonder if in some future code, those with >50 karma will have rollover errors. :)

I think I opted out of moderation a long time ago, but no amount of digging turns up such an option in my settings now. I wonder if it was a one way road? Anyhow, I guess it saved me from some of the new UI confusion.

Same experiences here, the error rate is far to high to be used in an office setting where incorrect numbers can mean millions in losses. Even an incorrect wording can be lethal.

I am just as amazed as you are. That many of us at Slashdot could predict exactly how it would play out was a nice discovery. I also fail to grasp how it is possible to so blatantly dismantle and kill a competitor by a mole without so much as a single lawsuit. And considering this is not the first company Microsoft killed and maimed killing one as large and successful as Nokia without repercussions makes you think dirty money must have changed hands. Either the board was full of drunken Finns oblivious of what was happening or they got paid to shut up and kick the share holders in the groin.

Windows mobile phone forays are dead, done, finito, kaputt and out of steam.

Windows Phone 7 has been out for almost 4 years and still barely holds 3% market share. Thats pretty awful by any measure, especially since the platform before it had much larger market share. They lost customers with current platform without gaining any new ones.

Windows Mobile was out 7 years and failed, and before that Microsoft failed with Pocket PC.

I am amazed they still happily beat the dead horse instead of putting effort into supporting the winning platforms. Android will be succeeded by something in the long run and until then i fail to see the business perspective of dragging a dead horse round the racetrack with a lawn mower trying to catch up with a Jumbojet. Why not just book a seat in the Jumbojet instead?

Personally im sure Nadella would like nothing better than to put a fork in Windows Phone, but entrenched forces inside Microsoft makes this very hard. It has to fail on its own dying a long agonizing death instead.

Seriously, the GCC is a prestige project just like the kernel. You have to have the basics of your particular software development field down, otherwise you have no business whatsoever lost in these projects. I don't know the details and I certainly can't judge them, but from the broad perspective it seems like somebody did something akin to not avalidating and filtering your input or pushing windows-1252 but presenting it as UTF-8 or something in webdevelopment and it passed all the way through evaluation, testing, merging, release management, etc. right into the final GCC release. Which does reflect on to the entire team and project.

Bottom line: When Linus has released rants like these in the past he usually was spot on and dead right. The GCC has gotten some flak for it's shittyness lately, and it looks like they haven't improved their process much yet.